The Baseball Codes

by Jason Turbow

  From that point on, said A’s manager Jackie Moore, “I think we’ll make sure all our players know to touch the next base.”

  7

  Don’t Show Players Up

  It was a simple question. From the batter’s box at Candlestick Park, Willie Mays looked at Yankees pitcher Whitey Ford and, pointing toward Mickey Mantle in center field, asked, “What’s that crazy bastard clapping about?”

  What that crazy bastard was clapping about only tangentially concerned Mays, but the Giants superstar didn’t know that at the time. It was the 1961 All-Star Game, and Ford had just struck Mays out, looking, to end the first inning. The question was posed when Ford passed by Mays as the American League defense returned to the dugout—most notably among them Mantle, hopping and applauding every step of the way, as if his team had just won the World Series. There was a good story behind it, but that didn’t much matter in the moment. Willie Mays was being shown up in front of a national baseball audience.

  Under ordinary circumstances there is no acceptable reason for a player to embarrass one of his colleagues on the field. It’s the concept at the core of the unwritten rules, helping dictate when it is and isn’t appropriate to steal a base, how one should act in the batter’s box after hitting a home run, and what a player should or shouldn’t say to the media. Nobody likes to be shown up, and baseball’s Code identifies the notion in virtually all its permutations. Mantle’s display should never have happened, and Mays knew it.

  Mantle had been joyous for a number of reasons. There was the strikeout itself, which was impressive because to that point Mays had hit Ford like he was playing slow-pitch softball—6-for-6 lifetime, with two homers, a triple, and an astounding 2.167 slugging percentage, all in All-Star competition. Also, Ford and Mantle had spent the previous night painting the town in San Francisco in their own inimitable way, and Ford, still feeling the effects of overindulgence, was hoping simply to survive the confrontation. Realizing that he had no idea how to approach a Mays at-bat, the left-hander opened with a curveball; Mays responded by pummeling the pitch well over four hundred feet, just foul. Ford, bleary and already half beaten, didn’t see a downside to more of the same, and went back to the curve. This time Mays hit it nearly five hundred feet, but again foul. It became clear to the pitcher that he couldn’t win this battle straight up—so he dipped into his bag of tricks.

  Though Ford has admitted to doctoring baseballs in later years, at that point in his career he wasn’t well practiced in the art. Still, he was ahead in the count, it was an exhibition game, and Mays was entitled to at least one more pitch. Without much to lose, Ford spat on his throwing hand, then pretended to wipe it off on his shirt. When he released the ball, it slid rotation-free from between his fingers and sailed directly at Mays’s head, before dropping, said Ford, “from his chin to his knees” through the strike zone. Mays could do nothing but gape and wait for umpire Stan Landes to shoot up his right hand and call strike three.

  To this point in the story, nobody has been shown up at all. Ford may have violated baseball’s actual rules by loading up a spitter, but cheating is fairly well tolerated within the Code. Mays’s reaction to the extreme break of the pitch may have made him look bad, but that was hardly Ford’s fault. But then came Mantle, jumping and clapping like a kid who’d just been handed tickets to the circus. It didn’t much matter that the spectacle was directed not at Mays but at Giants owner Horace Stoneham, who immediately understood the motivation behind Mantle’s antics.

  Stoneham had gone out of his way to make Mantle and Ford feel at home upon their arrival in town a day earlier, using his connections at the exclusive Olympic Club to arrange a round of golf for the duo, and went so far as to enlist his son Peter as their chauffeur. Because the pair of Yankees had failed to bring golf equipment, their first stop was the pro shop, for shoes, gloves, sweaters, and rental clubs. The total came to four hundred dollars, but the club didn’t accept cash. Instead, they charged everything to Stoneham, intending to pay him back at the ballpark the following day.

  That night, however, the three met at a party at the chic Mark Hopkins Hotel. Ford attempted to settle his tab on the spot, but Stoneham’s response wasn’t quite what he anticipated: The owner told him to keep his money … for the moment. Stoneham then proposed a wager: If Ford retired Mays the first time they faced each other the following afternoon, he owed nothing. Should the center fielder hit safely, however, Ford and Mantle would owe Stoneham eight hundred dollars, double their original debt. Ordinarily, this sort of bet would be weighted heavily in favor of the pitcher, since even the best hitters connect only three times out of ten, but Ford was aware of his track record against Mays. Nonetheless, the lefty loved a challenge even more than he loved a drink, and quickly accepted Stoneham’s terms.

  Mantle, however, wasn’t so cavalier, telling Ford frankly just how bad a deal it was. “I hated to lose a sucker bet,” he said later, “and this was one of them.”

  That didn’t keep Ford from sweet-talking him into accepting Stoneham’s terms. In center field the next day, Mantle found himself significantly more concerned about the potential four-hundred-dollar hole in his pocket than he was about the baseball ramifications of the Ford-Mays showdown. So, when the Giants’ star was called out on the decisive spitter, it was all Mantle could do to keep from pirouetting across the field. Said Ford, “Here it was only the end of the first inning in the All-Star Game, and he was going crazy all the way into the dugout.”

  “It didn’t dawn on me right away how it must have looked to Willie and the crowd,” said Mantle. “It looked as if I was all tickled about Mays striking out because of the big rivalry [over who was the game’s pre-eminent center fielder], and in the dugout when Whitey mentioned my reaction I slapped my forehead and sputtered, ‘Aw, no … I didn’t … how could I … what a dumb thing.’”

  That Mantle got away with it was largely due to the fact that Ford later explained the entire affair to Mays, much to May’s amusement. In this regard, Mantle was luckier than most players, who usually learn of their indiscretions from well-placed fastballs, not from conversation. For example, stepping out of the batter’s box once a pitcher comes set isn’t something that inspires retribution in most pitchers, but it did for Goose Gossage—in a spring-training game, no less. And Randy Johnson drilled a player in a B-squad game for swinging too hard. New York Mets closer Billy Wagner considered hitting a spring-scrimmage opponent from the University of Michigan who had the nerve to bunt on him. (“Play to win against Villanova,” the pitcher said afterward.) Nolan Ryan felt similarly when major-leaguers laid down bunts against him, and Don Drysdale and Bob Gibson were likely to knock down any opponent who dug in. All these pitchers felt justified in meting out justice for infractions that the majority of their colleagues barely noticed.

  Several code violations, however, are universally abhorred. At or near the top of any pitcher’s peeves is the home-run pimp, a hitter who lingers in the batter’s box as the ball soars over the wall. The first great player to fit this bill was Minnesota’s Hall of Fame slugger Harmon Killebrew, by nature a quiet man who happened to take delight throughout the 1960s in watching his big flies leave the yard. “Killebrew was the first one I saw (do it),” said Frank Robinson. “He would stand there and watch them. But heck, he hit the ball so high, he could watch them.” Reggie Jackson, widely credited with bringing the practice to prominence in the 1970s, credits Killebrew with providing inspiration.

  Jackson, of course, added panache and self-absorption to the act, combined with a thirst for attention that Killebrew never knew. During Jackson’s days with the Yankees, he went so far as to claim the final slot in batting practice because it afforded him the largest audience before which to perform. This became known as “Reggie Time,” and the slugger saw fit to bestow it upon some lucky teammate if he was unable to take that slot on a particular day.

  Barry Bonds eventually became the torchbearer for home-run pimping, not only watching but twirl
ing in the batter’s box as a matter of follow-through. David Halberstam wrote of Bonds’s mid-career antics for ESPN.com: “The pause at this moment, as we have all come to learn, is very long, plenty of time for the invisible but zen-like moment of appreciation when Barry Bonds psychically high-fives Barry Bonds and reassures him once again that there’s no one quite like him in baseball.”

  Admiring one’s own longball isn’t all that sets pitchers off. When Phillies rookie Jimmy Rollins flipped his bat after hitting a home run off St. Louis reliever Steve Kline in 2001, the Cardinals pitcher went ballistic, screaming as he followed Rollins around the bases. “I called him every name in the book, tried to get him to fight,” said Kline. The pitcher stopped only upon reaching Philadelphia third baseman Scott Rolen, who was moving into the on-deck circle and alleviated the situation by assuring him that members of the Phillies would take care of it internally.

  “That’s fucking Little League shit,” said Kline after the game. “If you’re going to flip the bat, I’m going to flip your helmet next time. You’re a rookie, you respect this game for a while…. There’s a code. He should know better than that.”

  The primary purpose of batter’s-box theatrics is to gain attention, but showboating at the plate can serve more than one agenda. There are those, for example, who feel that a well-timed piece of showmanship can serve as a highly appropriate retaliatory measure. Pitchers don’t care for it, but it’s certainly safer than being charged.

  It’s St. Louis’s Albert Pujols responding to a homer he hit against Pirates pitcher Oliver Perez by flipping his bat high in the air, a retort to Perez waving his arms enthusiastically at his home crowd after retiring Pujols earlier in the game. It’s Colorado’s Matt Holliday spending extra time contemplating a home run because Giants pitcher Matt Cain had hit him in his previous at-bat. Even a master showboater like Jackson occasionally used his pimping abilities for payback, once responding to a drilling from Cleveland pitcher John Denny by homering off him, watching the ball even longer than usual, pumping his fist at the pitcher, then making his way around the bases at a glacial pace. He topped it all by tipping his cap to the crowd, then after crossing the plate, punctuated the display by charging Denny, which incited a near-riot at Yankee Stadium.

  And that’s just regular-season antics. Giants slugger Jeffrey Leonard turned it up a notch against St. Louis during the 1987 NLCS when he unleashed what he called his “one flap down” home-run trot against the Cardinals. The curious gait, in which Leonard’s left arm dangled limply while he dipped his inside shoulder into the turn at each base, was employed after Giants players noticed their family members stuck in poor seats for the first playoff game in St. Louis. “We all got angry,” said Leonard. “So I said to myself, If I hit a home run I’m just going to clown this fool out there.” Leonard hit four homers over the course of the series, affording him multiple opportunities to clown plenty of fools. Each time, his arm hung low to his side, infuriating Cardinals players and fans, who had no idea there was more to the gesture than sheer showmanship.

  No less subtle was the payback Dave Henderson delivered to Mariners manager Dick Williams. Henderson had spent his entire professional career in the Seattle organization until being traded to Boston in 1986 in a deal orchestrated by Williams. Two years later, Henderson—by then a member of the Oakland A’s—hit an opening-day home run against Seattle and saw it as an opportunity to make a statement.

  “You know how you fade a little bit on a home run?” Henderson asked, referring to the batter’s act of leisurely drifting out of the baseline in the early stages of his home-run trot. “Well, I faded all the way to the dugout. I was so far over I could kick gloves off the top step. I faded so far that I almost went into the camera well before I realized I was going past the base, so I had to take a sharp turn and go straight back toward first. Now, that’s hot-dogging.”

  Watching an opponent showboat is enough to send many players into fits of apoplexy, but as far as indignity goes, few things cut more thoroughly than public statements of disrespect made by members of the opposition. Even something as simple as a guarantee of victory—a player’s ultimate declaration of belief in himself and his teammates—is taken as a slap by those he indirectly promises will lose. When someone comes out with something truly inflammatory, it can prove so provocative to his opponents that it may swing a game, or even a season.

  Take the 1988 National League Championship Series between the Dodgers and Mets. In Game 1, Los Angeles pitcher Orel Hershiser, on his way to winning the Cy Young Award, had shut New York down over eight and a third innings before handing a 2–1 lead to reliever Jay Howell just two outs shy of victory. Hershiser faced thirty-one batters before he gave up a run; Howell faced three, and gave up two. Improbably, the Mets emerged with a 3–2 victory.

  Mets ace David Cone, 20-3 and third in the Cy Young Award voting, was slated to start Game 2. First, however, he had a column to write for the New York Daily News. Technically the column—which Cone was contracted to produce throughout the playoffs—was ghostwritten by News columnist Bob Klapisch under the pitcher’s byline, with Cone offering input after every game. It was a standard arrangement; another Mets pitcher, Ron Darling, had a similar deal with the New York Post.

  If the pen is mightier than the sword, however, Cone may have inadvertently fallen on his own plume. After New York’s stirring comeback, Klapisch found Cone in the giddy Mets locker room, where the two discussed many aspects of the evening—the performance of New York’s starting pitcher, Dwight Gooden; Cone’s excitement about pitching the following night; the game-winning rally.

  Then Klapisch asked Cone what he thought happened to Howell in the ninth. Cone was, in his own words, still “in my bench-jockeying mode,” and responded that Howell kept going back to his best pitch, the curveball, again and again, failing to mix up his repertoire to a degree that would throw Mets hitters off balance. The strategy, Cone said, reminded him of when he was a high school pitcher, throwing curve after curve after curve.

  The sentence that made it to print read slightly differently: “Seeing Howell and his curveball reminded us of a high school pitcher.” Cone has never denied uttering those words, but has long stressed that the context was skewed. One lesson he learned when the paper came out the next day was that context doesn’t count for a hell of a lot in the face of opponents spitting fire over your sentiments. “All of a sudden,” said Cone, “it was me calling Jay Howell a high school pitcher.”

  Just as suddenly, the Dodgers had new life. Manager Tommy Lasorda brought a copy of the Daily News—not so easy to find on the streets of Los Angeles—into the clubhouse and ran it through a copy machine. Before the game, he rallied the team around him and exploded. “When we got to the clubhouse that day, the article was posted all over the place—we couldn’t miss it,” said Dodgers catcher Mike Scioscia. “We had our pre-game meeting, and Tommy used it for all it was worth. He kept saying that [Cone] was calling all of us a bunch of high-schoolers, not just Jay Howell. He kept saying that they thought we were a bunch of high school kids, on and on. He was pretty emotional, of course, as only Tommy can be…. Tommy loved to use whatever he could to motivate his teams, and that was an opportunity he jumped on. He was all fired up, and so were we when we took the field.”

  As soon as Cone heard about the article, he jumped into action, seeking out Howell, Hershiser, and Lasorda to explain his side of things. It didn’t do much good. “They listened,” said the pitcher, “but they were pretty cool about it.” When Cone took the mound, the Dodgers bench, fired up by Lasorda’s speech, started riding him hard, offering up, said the pitcher, “bench-jockey insults that were as bad as I have ever heard.” It was vicious, it was loud, and it was relentless. “Everybody, right down to the trainer, was screaming at me,” said Cone, whose father, Ed, was sitting next to the Dodgers dugout and heard every word.

  It worked. Cone, whose 2.22 ERA during the regular season was second in the National League, lasted just two i
nnings, giving up five runs before being removed for a pinch-hitter in the third. It was the shortest outing he had ever made as a big-league starter. “It was the first time my legs ever got heavy,” he said. “I was so nervous that I was physically affected by it. My legs felt like tree trunks trying to walk out to the mound.” That day, Cone learned one of the great lessons in baseball or any sport: Don’t rile your opponents, especially through the media.

  Cone’s “high school” comment was easy for the Dodgers to pounce upon, but some statements are so innocuous that it’s hard to fathom that they could offend anybody. Still, they sometimes do. In the victorious visitors’ clubhouse after the Indians won the 2007 American League Division Series at Yankee Stadium, for example, Cleveland’s Ryan Garko told the press that celebratory champagne tasted just as good on the road as it did at home. A week later, however, when the Indians raced out to a three-games-to-one lead over the Red Sox in the ALCS, Boston players mistakenly—or perhaps intentionally—advanced the notion that Garko’s statement was not in reference to the Indians’ previous series, but to clinching the pennant at Fenway Park. With the quote posted on the inside of Boston’s clubhouse door as inspiration before Game 6, the Red Sox went on to win en route to the world championship.

  Nearly as innocent were the comments made by A’s third baseman Eric Chavez before his team faced the Yankees in Game 5 of the 2000 ALDS. Responding to a press-conference question about his opponents, who had won the previous two titles, Chavez talked about how great the Yankees had been in recent years, what a terrific job they’d done, and how difficult it was to win as consistently as they had. He also added that they’d “won enough times,” and that it would be okay for somebody else to play in the World Series for a change. Chavez was twenty-two years old, wide-eyed and hopeful. There was nothing malicious in his tone.