The Baseball Codes

by Jason Turbow

  It’s difficult to believe Ryan capable of passivity, but even he admits that, for the stretch in question, despite pitching effectively, he lost his edge. What he needed to get it back was a direct confrontation with his fears. He got that chance about six weeks after Griffin returned to Boston’s lineup, when the Red Sox traveled to Anaheim. If Griffin thought the ensuing showdown was traumatic, he should have talked to Ryan, who found himself with a nearly unprecedented case of nerves. The right-hander pitched Griffin tentatively, consistently keeping his pitches on the outside part of the plate through the infielder’s first two at-bats. Any residual fear Griffin held over Ryan’s inside heat was beside the point, because he wasn’t getting any.

  Griffin appreciated the diet of outside fastballs, slapping two ground-ball singles in his first three at-bats. It was after the second hit that Ryan began to understand that he was effectively beating himself. “I had to block out what had happened from my mind,” he said. “I had no choice but to block it out or I’d become a defensive pitcher instead of an aggressive one.” The next time Griffin came to the plate he was greeted by a series of inside fastballs, and could only tap a ground ball to shortstop Bobby Valentine.

  Ryan summed it up when he said, “Baseball is a business, and you have to do what’s necessary to win.” Don Drysdale’s assessment of that type of situation was even more succinct: “Show me a guy who doesn’t want to pitch inside,” he said, “and I’ll show you a loser.”

  5

  On Being Intimidated

  The catcher warns the rookie batsman, “Look out for this fellow. He’s got a mean bean ball, and he hasn’t any influence over it.” … Then the catcher signs for the pitcher to throw one at the young batter’s head. If he pulls away, an unpardonable sin in baseball, the dose is repeated.

  —Christy Mathewson, Pitching in a Pinch, 1912

  When it comes to dealing with schoolyard bullies, the inevitable lesson we teach our kids is to stand up for themselves, because bullies don’t possess the fortitude to fight back. It’s a basic tutorial on the concept of fear, illustrating how quickly the intimidator can become the intimidated. Whether or not it’s true on a playground, the concept holds some merit on a baseball diamond.

  In 1984, the Giants found themselves in an ongoing feud with St. Louis pitcher Joaquin Andujar, who frequently tried to establish his menacing mound presence through early-innings use of brushback and knockdown pitches. That appeared to be his strategy on July 17, when he hit San Francisco’s second batter of the game, Manny Trillo. In retrospect, it wasn’t his best decision.

  “Manny was a teammate of mine on three teams and a very good friend, and a guy you should not hit when I was the pitcher,” said Mike Krukow, on the mound for the Giants that day. “And when Andujar got him I said, ‘Okay, boys, wear your batting gloves on the bench because we’re going to fight when this asshole steps up to the plate.’”

  When Andujar came up, two innings later, Krukow didn’t hesitate, putting everything he had into a fastball aimed directly at his nemesis … and missed. The ball ran inside and backed Andujar up, but didn’t come close to damaging its intended target. This only made Krukow angrier. The pitcher snapped the return throw from catcher Bob Brenly, stalked across the mound, and glared at the hitter. Again he fired his best fastball at Andujar … and again he missed. At that point, home plate umpire Billy Williams interceded, levying a hundred-dollar fine and telling Krukow, “I gave you two, and that’s enough.”

  The pitcher knew he was beaten. He hadn’t been able to hit Andujar when he had the chance, and now he was out of chances. So he seized his only remaining opportunity, dropped his glove and rushed the plate in a rare instance of the reverse mound-charge. Krukow was able to throw a quick punch at his counterpart before the two were separated.

  Inexplicably, once the fight was broken up, neither pitcher was ejected. “Now, how about that?” said Krukow, still amazed, decades after the fact. “Billy Williams says to me, ‘Now, that’s it, I’m going to leave you in the game. You’re not going to throw at him anymore?’ I said, ‘No, no. I’m all right. Everything’s cool. I got him.’”

  The umpire allowed Krukow to return to the mound, still in the middle of Andujar’s at-bat. At that point, said Krukow, the first thought that flashed through his mind was “Son of a bitch—I have another chance to get him!” It didn’t take long, however, for the right-hander to realize the ultimate futility of the situation; in addition to Williams’s warning was Krukow’s own fear of missing Andujar a third straight time. Instead, he bore down and struck his antagonist out.

  Although Krukow did no immediate damage at the plate, his tactics certainly had an effect. When Andujar got back to the mound, his 13-7 record and 2.88 ERA were rendered meaningless; the would-be intimidator quickly unraveled, giving up four runs to the Giants in his next inning of work, and seven runs overall in just over four frames. It was his worst start of the season, almost certainly a result of the confrontation a half-inning earlier. “We exposed his macho,” said Krukow. “It was great.”

  If Andujar is to be given any sort of a pass, it’s that his ability to absorb intimidation should be judged primarily from the mound, not the plate. Should a position player let similar intimidation tactics affect him—even something as slight as a cringe at an inside fastball—the opposition will notice, and word travels fast.

  “Most of the time, you figure out a player’s reputation early—guys you could throw at, guys you could knock down,” said fourteen-year big-leaguer Dave Henderson. “Guys who if you knock them down it makes them better players, and guys who if you knock them down you can make them cower.”

  “The idea is to see how you react to being knocked down,” said longtime Dodger Ron Fairly. “And if it doesn’t bother you, they’ll turn around and say, ‘Well, if it doesn’t bother him, we’re not going to do that. We’ve got to figure out a different way to get him out.’”

  Examples abound of batters who reacted poorly to tactics of intimidation. After six-time All-Star Joe Medwick was hit in the head by Cardinals pitcher Bob Bowman in 1940, he never recovered from his ensuing plate-shyness. Though still able to play at a high level for the next nine seasons, Medwick never again reached the astounding numbers he put up previously, which led to the 1937 NL MVP and five consecutive top-eleven finishes in the award’s balloting. And Medwick was hardly alone. Hall of Famer Frank Chance had a tendency to freeze on pitches aimed at his head, and suffered so many beanings that he went deaf in one ear and reportedly suffered from a lisp and double vision. A half-century later, Don Zimmer had such a reputation for freezing in the batter’s box whenever a fastball sailed high and tight—the probable result of two ferocious beanings early in his career—that he actually had an inverse effect on pitchers, many of whom feared throwing inside for fear they might do serious damage when he failed to get out of the way. Don Drysdale went so far as to identify Zimmer as the only batter he steadfastly refused to throw at intentionally.

  “I kind of enjoy the competition with a guy who’s not afraid to throw the ball inside and make his pitches,” said seven-time All-Star Tim Raines. “Roger Clemens threw at me a couple times, but I still swung the bat well against him, and he decided not to do it anymore. It’s all about intimidation. If you let guys intimidate you, they’ll continue to do it.”

  When Ted Williams was a twenty-year-old rookie with the Red Sox in 1939, Browns manager Fred Haney, who knew Williams from their days in the Pacific Coast League, had his pitchers test him immediately. The teams met in St. Louis, and the first pitch Williams saw knocked him to the ground. It didn’t have the effect for which Haney had hoped, however: Williams knocked the next offering off the wall in right-center field for a double. In his next at-bat, Williams was again thrown at and again hit the dirt. Again he responded, blasting a home run to right field soon thereafter. It wasn’t long before word circulated around the league that such tactics only made the slugger better, and pitchers quickly abandoned the st
rategy.

  Thirty years later, Drysdale’s continuous knockdowns of Willie Mays became legendary, partly because of their relentless nature and partly because Mays never let it affect him. He hit .324 with eleven home runs and twenty-seven RBIs against Drysdale, and was never bothered, he said, “because my head ain’t gonna be here when the ball is.”

  By the 1970s, however, baseball was a different game, played by men with different attitudes. Brushbacks and knockdowns were no longer taken for granted as part of a pitcher’s repertoire, and as such became things to which batters reacted with anger. Take an incident in which Jim Colborn tried to intimidate Jim Rice—himself one of the most intimidating sluggers of his time. “He threw a pitch close to Jim’s chin, and Jim trotted out to the mound to have some words with him,” wrote Bill Lee in The Wrong Stuff. “I thought Colborn was going to commit suicide. Rice told him, ‘If you come that close to me with one more pitch, I’m going to tear your head off.’ When the other pitchers around the league heard about this, the brushback pitches became fewer in number. A pitcher doesn’t like to give up the inside of the plate, but he also values his life and limbs.”

  Hitters have their own methods for countering intimidation offered up by pitchers. Frank Robinson would move closer to the plate in response to a brushback pitch, but Robinson was far tougher than the average major-leaguer. A more common intimidation deterrent is for a hit batsman to avoid rubbing the spot where the baseball drilled him.

  “You learn that early—don’t rub it,” said Dave Roberts, an outfielder for the Indians, Dodgers, Red Sox, Padres, and Giants. “Whether it’s giving the pitcher satisfaction or showing weakness or whatever, it’s just something you don’t do.”

  “If you were down at first base rubbing it, I promise, your teammates would let you know something about it,” said Will Clark. (Exceptions are made for someone who comes from the Hal McRae school, and rubs the spot to apply a coat of tobacco that he’s just spit into the palm of his hand. “That,” said McRae, “was part of the intimidation factor too.”)

  Pete Rose made a point of not just refusing to rub, but sprinting to first base immediately after being hit, doing everything he could to show that the pitcher had been unable to hurt him. (When Dock Ellis tried to hit every batter in the Reds lineup in 1974, he seriously considered skipping Rose, because he knew the lengths to which Rose went to prove he hadn’t been wounded. He drilled him anyway. True to form, Rose responded by picking up the baseball, tossing it gently back to the mound, and sprinting to first.)

  Thurman Munson took things a step further in 1975, when, after being hit by a fastball from White Sox pitcher Goose Gossage, he sent a note to the Chicago clubhouse. “I took your best shot right on the elbow, you big donkey, and I’m still playing,” he wrote, signing it, “The White Gorilla.”

  How far will a player go? Sandy Koufax once fractured Lou Brock’s shoulder with a pitch, knocking him out of action for three days and wrecking him physically for a month. “You could hear the thud all over the stadium,” said Don Drysdale, watching from the Los Angeles bench. “Brock went down like a deer who’d been shot.” The outfielder was pulled from the game as soon as he staggered to first base, but never once did he massage the injury.

  It’s basically a hitter’s answer to any pitcher with the temerity to drill him: I’m tougher than you. Intimidation flows in two directions, after all, and the ability to withstand somebody’s best shot without so much as a grimace can itself be intimidating. “It’s a statement,” said McRae: “‘I’m not hurt. You can’t hurt me.’”

  6

  Slide into Bases Properly

  In the 1970s, Don Baylor was the most feared baserunner in the American League, a guy who roared into second base with unmatched intensity, ready to level any middle infielder who had designs on turning him into the lead out of a double play. Players put up with it, though, for two reasons: Baylor was both clean and consistent. Although middle infielders didn’t like it, they knew exactly what to expect when Baylor was at first, and were therefore rarely angry when they ended up upended. (“Shortstops and second basemen did not want to be around when Donny Baylor was coming into second base,” said Mike Hegan, “but most of them dealt with it pretty well when they were.”) This isn’t necessarily true for the guys who came in hard only on occasion, a tactic that keeps infielders from being able to accurately anticipate any given play. Phil Garner once felt this way about Cubs first baseman Bill Buckner.

  “I was playing second base in Pittsburgh and we were running for the pennant,” he said. “Buckner absolutely smoked me on a double play—damn near broke both my legs.” Garner wasn’t ticked off at the play itself, which was clean and not unlike the treatment he regularly received from players like Baylor and Hal McRae (who was so consistently ferocious on the base paths that the 1978 rule disallowing the hindrance of a fielder who has just made a play is known informally as the “Hal McRae Rule”). Garner was angry because he’d never seen it before from Buckner. “This sumbitch slides thirty feet short for 160 ballgames, and now, in the 161st he’s going to slide in hard?” said Garner. “Fuck that. Play the game hard in Game 1 just like you did that day.” Buckner hadn’t violated any of baseball’s written rules—his play wasn’t dirty, just devious—but in Garner’s mind he’d clearly violated the Code. The next time Garner had the chance to turn Buckner into the lead out of a double play, he aimed his relay throw directly between the baserunner’s eyes. Buckner threw up a hand in self-defense; he deflected the ball but broke a finger in the process. Message sent.

  Or take Carlos Delgado, who, while on base as a member of the Toronto Blue Jays in 2004, took out Red Sox first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz with a forearm shiver. One problem with the play, at least to Mientkiewicz, was that he wasn’t playing first base at the time but had volunteered to man second after Boston experienced an unforeseen shortage of players at the position. The infielder had, at that point, played all of one inning there in his seven-year major-league career and was by no means comfortable.

  Also, in Mientkiewicz’s opinion, such takeouts weren’t a regular part of Delgado’s repertoire. “I’d seen him veer off on double plays for five years and not even slide into second,” he said. “Yet he sees somebody playing second who’s never played there before and he takes full advantage of it. If Aaron Rowand had knocked me on my ass I don’t think I’d have been that mad, because Aaron goes full tilt from the word ‘go.’ … If I were to always see Carlos taking guys out at shortstop, I never would have said a word.”

  When Mientkiewicz got up screaming, the pair had to be separated. Red Sox pitcher Derek Lowe drilled the Toronto All-Star during his next at-bat, and Delgado was forced to avoid several other pitches during the course of the three-game series. (“Curt Schilling missed him once and came to me and apologized,” said Mientkiewicz.)

  At least the play was clean. That’s not always the case, and few things cause tempers to skyrocket on a ballfield like a dirty takeout.

  “There are unwritten rules about how to slide at second base,” said Krukow, now a broadcaster for the Giants. “It’s sort of taken on a new definition. Before, you basically couldn’t go in standing up to take a guy out. Then there were cheap barrel rolls over the bag—if they were high barrel rolls they were unacceptable, but low barrel rolls were acceptable. When A-Rod took out Jeff Kent and sprained Kent’s right knee in 1998, he [low] barrel-rolled him. On TV that night, Kuip [Krukow’s broadcast partner, Duane Kuiper, a twelve-year major-league second baseman] and I said, That’s a legit play. After the game, Kent was pissed about it. He said that was a horseshit slide. No, it’s not. Basically, a low barrel roll—anything within arm’s distance of the bag—is acceptable. A high barrel roll or going in high is unacceptable. It’s unwritten.” (Acceptable or not, the following night, Giants pitcher Orel Hershiser drilled Rodriguez in the shoulder.)

  Craig Biggio found out the hard way about the changing attitudes toward barrel rolls after he went into Cardinals seco
nd baseman Tommy Herr with such a slide. “He just looked at me as I ran off the field,” Biggio said. “Next time I went up to hit, I got drilled in the middle of the back. Then I did it to Ron Oester in Cincinnati. He just looked at me, and the next time up I got drilled in the middle of the back. Right then and there I said, ‘I guess you don’t roll-block anymore.’ Painful way, message sent, you live and learn.”

  In the realm of clean plays, the capper for infielders is the unnecessary takeout slide, like the one that comes after the relay throw has been released—meaning there’s nothing to gain through the action. The most extreme example of this happened in 1985, when Oakland baserunner Dave Kingman plowed into Yankees shortstop Dale Berra. Not only did Berra have no relay to deliver, but the game had ended before Kingman left his feet. With a tie score in the bottom of the ninth inning, the A’s had the bases loaded, Kingman the runner at first. When Oakland outfielder Steve Henderson drew a base on balls to force home the winning run, Kingman simply spun and started trotting toward the home clubhouse along the third-base line. As he neared the pitcher’s mound, however, the slugger was startled to hear teammates—worried about a repeat of “Merkle’s Boner” seventy-seven years earlier, in which the Giants lost a decisive game when baserunner Fred Merkle failed to advance fully on what would have been the game-winning hit—screaming for him to turn around and touch second. (Third-base coach Clete Boyer said that he was “about to tackle” Kingman before he left the field.)

  In reality, baseball rules stipulate only that the runner on third and the batter must touch their respective bases in such a situation (Merkle had been ruled out for failing to touch second base on a hit, not a walk), but there was enough confusion on the field that New York catcher Ron Hassey fired the ball to Berra in hopes that the runner might be called out and the game extended. At that point, Kingman didn’t hesitate, spinning toward second and roaring in with a vicious slide, even though the game had officially ended. Umpire Rick Reed went so far as to call the runner safe. “I don’t know what I was doing,” said Kingman. “I just short-circuited.” (New York manager Billy Martin protested that Kingman had run outside the baseline, but crew-chief umpire Rich Garcia clarified that the complaint would have been valid only had Kingman been trying to avoid a tag.)