The Baseball Codes

by Jason Turbow

  It took Mesa two months, until July 5, to get his own shot at Rodriguez, at which point he drilled the catcher on the left elbow. Members of the Rangers organization were both surprised and upset. “I thought this was finished in Cleveland,” spat Kennedy after the game. “Ivan took it like a man that time. We won’t forget this.” They sort of did, though. Rodriguez ceased to be a target for the Indians, both teams moved on, and the animosity between the clubs fizzled, just like the Code dictates it should.

  Pitchers who opt for retaliation walk the line between making their intentions obvious enough for the hitter to recognize and vague enough to pass muster with umpires. Should a purpose pitch be too well disguised, the hitter might think it unintentional and thus miss its point; if it’s too blatant, the pitcher risks ejection.

  There are tells, however. Just as hitters can pick up a curveball by its spin, many players feel that a pitcher’s motion helps them discern the intent behind a hit-by-pitch. “When guys are throwing regular pitches, they throw toward the center of the plate,” said seventeen-year veteran Oscar Gamble. “But when they’re throwing at you, their arm comes straight toward you.” Randy Knorr judged intent by the focus of a pitcher’s gaze at his point of release: Staring right at the batter was a clear indication of purpose. “Body language,” said Andy Van Slyke, “will tell you more than anything else.”

  The best way for a hitter to really know whether or not he’s been hit intentionally is to understand whether the game situation even calls for retaliation. Not only will he better identify the moments in which a pitcher has something in mind other than throwing strikes, he’ll be prepared to react accordingly. Because, if the situation calls for retaliation, that means it’s not personal. And if it’s not personal, it becomes just another thing that happens during the course of a baseball game.

  “Whether [your teammates] are right or wrong, you want to keep their respect,” said pitcher Jason Schmidt. “But there are some times when you’re, like, ‘You know what? You have to wise up—this is not the situation. He wasn’t trying to do that.’”

  Take Reggie Sanders, who charged the mound in 1994 after being hit by Pedro Martinez. That the pitcher was trying to protect a 2–0 lead in the eighth inning was one clue it might have been unintentional; that it was an 0-2 count was another. That Martinez was in the middle of throwing a perfect game should have put to rest any lingering doubts. Without a shred of hyperbole, Sanders was the most obviously unintentionally hit batsman in the history of the game.

  Still, it wasn’t enough to keep him in the batter’s box. Martinez had been brushing back Cincinnati batters, including Sanders, all afternoon. After one such pitch in the fifth inning, Sanders gave the pitcher a long, angry glare, which Martinez returned in kind. After he plunked Sanders three innings later, Martinez even went so far as to raise his arms in frustration before realizing that it would be a good idea to defend himself.

  When hitters do pick up on a pitcher’s obvious retaliation, it’s beneficial for them to know into which of three general categories the original infraction falls (discounting personal vendettas that have nothing to do with game situations): them or one of their teammates breaking an unwritten rule, being on a team that’s having a great day at the plate, or having exceptional personal success against a pitcher or team.

  The first of those categories is self-evident, especially considering the topic of this book. Many players know when they have violated a tenet of the Code, even if they realize it only after the fact. Should they somehow overlook their infraction, they have a bench full of teammates to inform them—if not in the moment, then later, in search of an explanation for why pitchers are subsequently attempting to drill them.

  A pitcher aiming at a hitter simply because his team is pounding the ball, however, is driven almost entirely by aggravation: Pitcher gets battered, pitcher gets irritated, pitcher takes it out on whoever’s at the plate. “Venting frustration” is how Giants pitcher Mike McCormick put it. This is generally frowned upon, but there is a gray area that includes a pitcher’s possible attempt to disrupt the other team’s rhythm and force hitters to concentrate on something other than pitch location and break.

  The tactic has long had a place in baseball strategy, but was especially prevalent between the 1920s and ’80s. Slap hitters during this time were often resentful of their power-hitting teammates, not just because, as Ralph Kiner once said, “home-run hitters drive Cadillacs.” The less intimidating guys in a team’s lineup were the ones who ultimately paid the price for the sluggers’ success, getting thrown at frequently after a teammate’s homer. Second baseman Jerry Coleman was a vocal critic of this tactic after following the likes of Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra in the Yankees lineup. “I never liked that crap—the guy in front of me hits a home run and I get knocked down,” he said. “I didn’t do anything to you, for crying out loud. Go after him.”

  This understanding, though, helps mitigate the situation for some hitters. “In 1974, I was playing for the Yankees, and I hit behind Graig Nettles the whole month of April,” said first baseman Mike Hegan. “And Graig hit eleven home runs. And I was on my back eleven times. That’s just the kind of thing that happened. I got up, dusted myself off, and got ready to swing at the next pitch. It’s just what you do.”

  When a player gets drilled because he himself owns a pitcher, however, it’s a bit different. Too much success practically screams for a don’t-get-comfortable message pitch, especially if the hitter’s been having his way with balls on the outer edge of the plate. An inside pitch not only puts him on guard, it backs him up and reduces his reach; should one of those inside pitches happen to hit the guy, so be it. For most players, this is acceptable. Take the 1972 game in which Andy Messersmith hit Don Baylor; in six previous plate appearances against Messersmith, the rookie had four hits, including a double, a home run, and a walk. The pitcher responded by plunking him in the back without so much as looking in for a sign from the catcher. As Baylor staggered toward first base, he looked quizzically toward the mound. “Well,” said Messersmith, “don’t you think it’s about time?”

  A decade earlier, in September 1962, Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood’s bunt single and double made him six-for-his-last-twelve against Don Drysdale, inspiring the pitcher to re-evaluate their relationship. In the fourth inning of a game in which Drysdale had already allowed four runs, Flood stepped to the plate with the bases loaded and one out. Drysdale’s leash was short, but it didn’t matter; the right-hander buried a pitch into the startled hitter’s ribs. It drove in a run but served two purposes: It kept the outfielder from swinging his red-hot bat, and, more important, it put Flood in his place, at least as far as his future positioning in the batter’s box was concerned. When the outfielder complained to teammate Bob Gibson about the pitcher’s tactics, he didn’t get the sympathetic ear for which he had hoped. “I told him, ‘If you had eight hits in a row off me, I’d hit you too,’” said Gibson. “And I laughed.”

  • • •

  On September 3, 1974, Cleveland’s Oscar Gamble lit up the Tigers like he was taking batting practice, clubbing three home runs off two pitchers while going five-for-nine over the course of a doubleheader. When the teams met less than a week later for the opener of their next series, Gamble, the game’s second batter, reasserted himself immediately, swatting a two-run blast that put Tigers starter Lerrin LaGrow into an early hole. As was Gamble’s way, he watched each of his home runs for several moments longer than was appreciated on the opposing bench. He knew the Tigers wouldn’t take it well, but, as was also his way, he didn’t care. The man in possession of the biggest hair in the history of the game was in the business of making sure people watched him.

  When Gamble led off the third inning with a single, igniting a four-run rally that chased LaGrow, he should have known what was in store. With two outs in the bottom of the sixth and the Indians leading 7–0, Gamble came to the plate and was promptly drilled by Tigers reliever Vern Ruhle. “Oscar’s a l
ittle guy, and it hurt him, boy,” said pitcher Dick Bosman, that day’s starter for the Indians. “And nobody said anything.”

  At this point, Bosman was torn—stand up for his teammate, or protect his shutout? Gamble’s success had clearly made him a target, but excessive showmanship was also a factor. And if that was the case, was it Bosman’s duty to stand up for someone who essentially brought the punishment on himself?

  “I’ve had teammates that weren’t exactly the greatest teammates, and they want you to do something [when they get hit],” said pitcher Jim Barr. “And you want to jump back and say, ‘Why? You deserved it!’” You want to say that, but if you’re in the major leagues, you don’t. As catcher Jamie Quirk said, “Teammate bond is stronger than logic.”

  For Bosman, the internal dialogue didn’t last long. “Oscar was Oscar, and I didn’t think Oscar was going to change,” he said. “You have to protect your teammates.” Lending difficulty to the decision was Bosman’s compunction to exact immediate retribution, which put him squarely between the horns of a different dilemma. The next batter was Detroit icon Al Kaline, thirty-nine years old, in his final season and just fourteen hits away from three thousand. There was less than a month left in the schedule; an ill-placed fastball could conceivably end Kaline’s career just shy of the defining milestone. “I’m out there thinking, Where am I going to drill him?” said Bosman. “I don’t want to break his hand or anything like that. If I hit him in the ribs, that might put him out.”

  The pitcher opted for the middle road, dialing down his response and merely brushing the slugger back before eventually striking him out. The message was nonetheless clear, and no less important: Don’t mess with my guys.

  Hard feelings can fester in the space between players who get hit and pitchers who fail to protect them. When Dodgers pitcher Jeff Weaver and Giants outfielder Michael Tucker got into a shouting match in 2004, some on the Giants bench felt retaliation was in order. Tucker had bunted down the first-base line, and Weaver, fielding the feed from first baseman Robin Ventura, stood in the baseline and gave Tucker a hard tag to the face as he approached.

  Pitching that day for the Giants was Jerome Williams, the same guy who later that season looked down the bench after Barry Bonds was drilled by Randy Johnson to find out what his response should be. That he knew to do so was thanks to a lesson he learned from the Tucker-Weaver incident.

  After Weaver’s unnecessarily hard tag, Williams was approached on the bench by Bonds. “I’ll never forget what Barry said,” Williams recalled. “He said, ‘Dodgers players do not disrespect Giants players, no matter what. So you take care of business.’” Williams, however, was only twenty-two and confused, and Bonds’s message carried with it a degree of ambiguity. “I didn’t know what taking care of business was, because I had a good game going on,” said the pitcher, who had allowed just five hits to that point. “So I’m thinking, Okay, take care of business—get people out. What he meant was to take care of what happened. If you want to take care of it, take care of it now. Don’t wait. I didn’t know.”

  Shortly after Bonds’s decree, Giants pitching coach Dave Righetti approached from across the dugout with a similar message—in both point and vagueness—telling Williams to do what he had to. Again he thought, Okay, go out there and pitch—which was likely not what either Bonds or Righetti had in mind.

  The first Dodgers batter of the following inning was Adrian Beltre, who slapped a single on a 2-1 pitch. Williams looked toward the dugout and saw Righetti holding his head in frustration. “That’s when I realized it,” said the right-hander. “I was, like, ‘Dang, I was supposed to hit him.’”

  In the locker room after the game, Bonds chewed Williams out for not protecting his teammate and failing to show the Dodgers that neither he nor his ball club was scared. The pitcher had no idea how to respond. “I was young. It was my second year, and I didn’t know these things,” he said. “Now when that kind of thing happens I know that I have to take care of it right then and there. Then, boom, it’ll be done and over with.”

  Sometimes it doesn’t matter how well a batter or a team hits a particular pitcher, or whether any level of hot-dogging or insolence has taken place; sometimes a pitcher wants to hit a guy for strictly personal reasons. In the early 1970s, for example, Gaylord Perry felt this way about Lou Piniella—and Piniella hadn’t even done anything to him.

  Earlier in the season, Piniella, playing for Kansas City, responded to a brushback from Perry’s brother Jim, a pitcher with Detroit, by charging the mound for the first and only time in his career. He later called it one of the biggest mistakes he ever made on a baseball diamond.

  That’s because not long thereafter the Royals visited Cleveland, where Gaylord Perry was eagerly awaiting their arrival. When Piniella stepped in against him, he shouldn’t have been surprised to see a fastball headed directly at him. “Gaylord put one, I mean he put one under his chin,” said Indians outfielder Oscar Gamble. “You know how you have to throw your bat and throw your arms and get out of the way and the ball is choking you? This ball choked Lou. He went down. Then he looked out to the mound and said, ‘Damn, I didn’t know he had a brother.’”

  Consider it a lesson learned. “If I have any advice,” said Piniella, “it’s don’t charge the mound of a brother who has a pitcher for a brother.”

  Making things personal can become problematic not just for the victim, but for the retaliator as well. If settling a personal score has any chance of affecting a game’s outcome, or if a pitcher’s hotheaded action results in one of his teammates’ being thrown at, there are bound to be angry responses in the locker room. “When a pitcher takes it on himself to hit somebody and the rest of the team doesn’t know, he’s pretty much on his own,” said catcher Randy Knorr. “There’s a sign I would put down for that—the middle finger.”

  Methods exist to avoid suspicion in these cases, so pitchers can pursue their agendas while raising minimal hackles across the diamond. Standard methodology says to throw at least one ball, if not two or three, far outside the strike zone—high, wide, or both—which offers the appearance of wildness. “It’s a mistake a lot of guys make,” said pitcher Al Nipper. “A guy comes up and with his first pitch he drills [the batter], and then he’s out of the game. You can’t do that. You can’t send a flare up. You have to camouflage it, because that hitter knows when he’s been shot.”

  The personal reasons pitchers have for throwing at opponents are myriad. Bert Blyleven hit Baltimore’s Phil Bradley in 1990 because of Bradley’s hard-line stance in labor negotiations that, in Blyleven’s opinion, prolonged settlement of the thirty-two-day lockout that delayed the start of the season. “It infuriated [Blyleven] because he was older and concerned about pension time,” said a source in the Orioles organization, who added, “Fans and media people never understood what the intent was there. But the few players who knew about this did.”

  Sometimes responses can take weeks (Gaylord Perry versus Lou Piniella), or even longer. A story is told by someone with high-level, inside knowledge of the game, about a collegiate pitcher who was tasked by his coach with showing a prized, hot-hitting recruit around campus. The pitcher went all-out, taking him to the hottest spots, ferrying him to parties, and introducing him around. The recruit’s reaction, however, wasn’t equitable: He spent most of the evening off by himself, pantomiming his swing; the rest of the time he spent being rude to nearly everyone he met. In the end, he decided to attend a different school altogether.

  Fast-forward several years. Both pitcher and position player are in the major leagues, and end up facing each other. And whenever the situation allows for it (which, frankly, isn’t that often), the pitcher drills the hitter. When the situation doesn’t allow for it, he merely brushes him back.

  The names in the story have been deleted by request, but other incidents don’t require anonymity. Take Stan Thomas, who set a Seattle Mariners team record on July 10, 1977, when he uncorked four wild pitches in the first two
innings against Minnesota. All four—three in the first inning, one in the second, which allowed a runner to score—were aimed at the head of Minnesota’s Mike Cubbage, in response to a five-year-old tiff over a woman the pair knew when they were minor-league teammates. As was fitting for a pitcher who would make only three more appearances as a major-leaguer, all four pitches missed their mark, the right-hander was knocked out of the game before he could record an out in the second, and the Twins romped, 15–0. “Thomas got his priorities mixed up today,” said Cubbage afterward. “He’s supposed to be trying to win a game instead of throwing at me.”

  Cubbage should have been glad that it wasn’t Don Drysdale’s girlfriend with whom he got involved. In the National League clubhouse prior to the 1968 All-Star Game, Dodgers catcher Tom Haller saw Houston’s Rusty Staub rummaging through Drysdale’s shaving kit, ostensibly to find evidence of the long-whispered rumor that Drysdale doctored the ball. Fifteen days later, Drysdale faced the Astros in Los Angeles. Trailing 1–0 with two outs and nobody on in the eighth inning, Drysdale—tipped off by his teammate—wasted little time in drilling Staub. “That’s for looking through my goddamn shaving kit,” he yelled as the hitter stumbled toward first. Staub might not have been the world’s best sleuth, but he was smart enough not to say a word in response.

  Modern managers infrequently issue direct orders for intimidation tactics, settling instead for complimenting the pitcher who delivers on his own accord. Hitting somebody with a baseball can be a heavy burden to bear, and although most managers appreciate the gesture when it’s called for and handled appropriately, they don’t want the accompanying responsibility. “I never absolutely directed anybody to hit someone,” said Jerry Coleman, who managed the Padres in 1980. “I also didn’t direct them not to hit somebody.”

  In the good old days, managers were more hands-on. Casey Stengel would “come to the mound and say, ‘Mr. Craig, I think that fellow up at the plate there now needs to step back a little bit—he’s kind of crowdin’ you, and you should do something appropriate,’” said former pitcher and longtime Giants manager Roger Craig. “It was just a suggestion that you should be aware of what was going on. You always got the point. He was giving the Casey Stengel hint. Brush ’em back a bit.”