The Baseball Codes

by Jason Turbow

  Some said that it was a clear message and an appropriate response. Clemens, however, was so unperturbed that he appeared to smirk before tipping his cap, literally, to the left-hander after the pitch. Perhaps Estes was shrewd in delivering his point without getting thrown out of the game; he went on to hit a home run off a Clemens splitter in the fifth and shut out the Yankees on five hits over seven innings en route to an 8–0 victory. Still, he didn’t hit the guy. Yankees catcher Jorge Posada admitted to laughing when he saw it. That’s not exactly striking fear into the opposition. Plate umpire Wally Bell issued a warning after Estes’s attempt, precluding any notion of a follow-up.

  “As a pitcher, your preparation and your mechanics all prepare you to throw the ball to a spot, usually to the catcher’s glove, and that’s where your focus is,” said Estes. “Well, it’s tough to take your focus off that and try to hit a moving object, because you know he’s going to try to move…. It’s not as easy as it looks. You only get one shot. I’ve played ten years, so there have been a few situations where I felt that I had to hit somebody, and I’ve been able to do it because they had no clue it was going to happen…. In this particular situation, I think because of the pressure involved, I knew I couldn’t miss Roger. Let’s not mess around, let’s get it over with.”

  Was it unfair to put a pitcher in the middle of a volatile situation that he had no part in creating? Estes was struggling in his first season in New York; he wouldn’t even make it through the year, getting traded to Cincinnati a month later. On this day he needed a good showing much more than he needed to avenge one of his teammates. Unfair is a matter of opinion, just as it’s a matter of opinion whether Estes’s final solution to the problem ultimately proved sufficient.

  After the game, Clemens had no comment. The Rocket had, in at least some sense of the term, gotten his, and for the first time in almost two years the feud seemed to be over. Clemens didn’t start at Shea Stadium in 2003, and by ’04 was a member of the Houston Astros. (He didn’t make another start at Shea until April 2005; at that point, Piazza was the only Met remaining from the 2000 World Series club, and the date passed without incident.)

  But there would be one more chapter of this retaliation story before it ran its course. In the 2004 All-Star Game in Houston, the National League’s starting battery was Clemens and Piazza; despite sharing the home clubhouse, the pair was noteworthy for their avoidance of each other. Not only did a public reconciliation fail to materialize, but the two shared not so much as a handshake, and Clemens spent much of his pregame time on the field warming up in the bullpen with someone other than Piazza.

  Then the fireworks started. Clemens lasted just one inning in his home ballpark, giving up six runs on a single, double, triple, and two home runs. Through it all, Piazza never once visited the mound to calm him. Afterward, the theorists started in: Had Piazza attained a measure of revenge by tipping the hitters to what was coming? The chance to embarrass Clemens in front of his hometown fans had to be appealing. But Piazza’s not talking. Neither are the American League hitters. The plate umpire, Ed Montague, swears that he didn’t hear a thing. And as far as Roger Clemens is concerned, the less he knows the better. Maybe Estes’s miss didn’t matter as much as people thought.

  If retaliation has been established alongside eight-dollar ballpark beer as one of baseball’s necessary evils, there are differing viewpoints on the best way to go about it. After all, said longtime manager Mike Hargrove, “Throwing at somebody is serious. The ball hurts when it hits you. You don’t just do it on a whim.”

  It’s generally a two-step process involving whom to get and how to get him, and there’s little unanimity of opinion about the first part. A small sampling:

  “Eye for an eye,” said slugger Frank Thomas. “If your number-three guy gets hit, then you hit their number-three guy. That’s what I was taught. If they hit your superstar, you don’t hit their leadoff hitter.”

  “You hit my shortstop, I’ll hit your shortstop,” said Doug Mientkiewicz.

  “If someone threw at Willie Mays and the catcher or pitcher was up the next inning, they were just as likely to get the message as anyone else,” said Jim Davenport, who played alongside Mays on the Giants for thirteen years, talking about both the man who threw the pitch and the man who gave the signal for it from behind the plate. “But if Milwaukee threw at Mays, it was probably going to be Henry Aaron who got the special delivery.”

  “Different pitchers, different managers, different teams have different theories,” said infielder Craig Grebeck. “A lot of teams like to get it done the next inning. What they want to do is get two quick outs so it doesn’t affect the game—that way they can hit a guy with two outs and no one on. What they don’t want to do is hit the leadoff guy in a close ballgame and all of a sudden they lose the game because the team gets riled up.”

  “A lot of teams in the big leagues would throw at the next hitter who came up,” said Hall of Famer Billy Williams. “Some teams would wait until the guy that could hurt you, the guy who drove in a hundred or hit thirty home runs, came up and would wait to get him. Other teams would wait until the pitcher was up, and they’d get him. Different ball clubs followed different versions of the rules.”

  “If Jon Lieber hits Craig Biggio, they’re going to hit Jon Lieber because he’s the one who did it,” said Mark Grace. “I personally believe in that. If the pitcher does something [bad], he should take the lump.”

  No matter what language a team chooses to speak, it’s pretty well guaranteed to be understood by the opposition. One game, in fact, demonstrated most of the above tenets and more in just two hours and twenty minutes. It started in the fourth inning of a game between the Yankees and Blue Jays on April 21, 2000, when Toronto first baseman Carlos Delgado, batting cleanup, hit a fourth-inning home run off Ramiro Mendoza. Mendoza responded by drilling the next batter, Brad Fullmer. (It may well have been unintentional; Mendoza’s control was clearly slipping—he also hit Marty Cordova later in the frame. As is the way with baseball retaliation, however, intent often doesn’t matter.)

  In the bottom of the fourth, Toronto’s Chris Carpenter hit Yankees first baseman Tino Martinez, who, like Fullmer, was batting fifth in the lineup.

  In the top of the fifth, Delgado—Martinez’s counterpart at first base—was hit by Yankees reliever Todd Erdos.

  In the bottom of the sixth, Carpenter drilled Derek Jeter, New York’s superstar answer to Delgado.

  In the next day’s papers, the principals all issued standard denials of intent, and since no pitcher threw a ball anywhere near a batter’s head, everybody seemed content with the way things worked out. Which brings into play an even more important factor than whom to get or when: how.

  Aside from a few rogue moundsmen, there’s relative consensus on this subject. Even if a hitter understands that he’s about to be drilled, is fully on board with baseball’s frontier justice, and is prepared to do nothing more than proceed to first base without issue after the fact, everything changes should the baseball arrive at or above shoulder level.

  The beanball is the ultimate weapon in a pitcher’s arsenal, and some of its most fervent practitioners have been among the least-liked men in the game. Yankees right-hander Carl Mays is the only major-league pitcher to kill a batter with a pitch—Cleveland shortstop Ray Chapman, whom he hit in the head in 1920, before helmets were worn. It’s never been suggested that the result was intentional, but Mays had already established his status as a head-hunter, a guy who in the previous three seasons led the American League in hit batsmen once and twice finished second. Among the better pitchers of his generation, Mays is now known primarily for his part in one of the game’s darkest moments. It’s a constant reminder of what’s possible on the wrong side of an errant fastball.

  “I have a rule,” said outfielder Dave Henderson. “You can drill me all you want. But if you throw at my face, it gets personal. I kill you first, then your grandpa, your grandma—I just go on down the list. It gets
personal. Batters should get mad. The guys who get hit on the elbow and all that, I have no sympathy for them. Big deal, you got hit. I got hit in the head twice in my career; the other stuff didn’t count.”

  It certainly does for owners, though, who are unwilling to chance the loss of a multimillion-dollar investment just because a pitcher’s angry about said investment taking too long to get into the batter’s box. As such, modern umpires have taken to systematically warning not just the deliverers of head-high fastballs, but any pitcher who comes too far inside too often. This was reinforced by a 2001 memorandum from MLB that read “Umpires should be mindful that, given the skill level of most major league pitchers, a pitch that is thrown at the head of a hitter more likely than not was thrown there intentionally,” and which issued umpires the authority to eject a pitcher for such action, even without a prior warning.

  The benefits of this policy are undeniable, because it minimized what seemed in the 1990s to be near-daily incidents of hitters charging the mound, as well as frequent occurrences of overt intimidation. Still, many within the game feel that the repercussions from such enforcement are hardly worth the advantages. For one thing, a generation of hitters has acquired a sense of entitlement about its immunity from inside pitches. For another, pitchers are more frightened than ever to work inside, which when they do only increases the indignation of batters not used to seeing that type of pitch.

  “I realize that if you hit somebody in the head they could get hurt,” said Jack McDowell, no stranger to pitching inside during the course of his career. “But show me the last guy who was hit by a pitch in the face and was hurt.” Well, there’s Dickie Thon. “Okay. And before that?” Tony Conigliaro? Mickey Cochrane? “And that’s in the history of the game. It doesn’t happen. It wasn’t a problem where guys were getting hurt and the thing is out of control and we need to deal with it.”

  And there’s the rub. Thon, whose drilling in 1984 left an indelible mark on the game for the next decade, stands as a testament to how baseball has evolved to the point where players no longer learn how to avoid the inside pitch. When the league office more stringently started legislating umpires’ warnings, it inadvertently began to insulate players from the dangers they faced at the wrong end of a fastball. Because pitchers no longer threw inside as often or with the same intent, hitters stopped being so mindful of the practice.

  The pitch that hit Thon ran inside, but instead of turning away, as was second nature to players a generation earlier, Thon drew in his hands, backed up, and spun his torso toward the mound. The ball sailed into the twenty-five-year-old’s forehead after glancing off the ear flap of his batting helmet, shattering bones around his eye and ending his season after just five games. The year prior, Thon’s twenty homers and seventy-nine RBIs won him a National League Silver Slugger Award and spurred Astros general manager Al Rosen to proclaim him a “future Hall of Famer.” And though Thon came back from his injury to play nine more seasons with five teams, he was rarely anything more than an average hitter thereafter.

  Phil Garner was Houston’s second baseman at the time of Thon’s beaning, and saw up close the devastating result when a hitter fails to properly handle a high inside pitch. As manager of the Astros two decades later, Garner noticed scant change in the way players reacted to similar situations.

  “Hitters have gotten accustomed to not seeing pitches thrown up and in, and now they don’t know how to get out of the way,” he said in 2006. “You see it all the time. My guys [on the Astros] are bad at it. They take pitches like this [clinches fists into chest and leans backward] and they get hit on the hands. If they’d gotten used to getting out of the way of the ball, they’d do this [rotates torso so his back is to the mound], and they’ll protect themselves. But they don’t do it in the minor leagues, they don’t do it up here. You don’t get pitches thrown up and in here, so players don’t learn how to get out of the way.”

  Many people cite the body armor that started to gain widespread use in the late 1990s as a contributing factor, but the problem started long before that. Some hard-line old-timers such as Les Moss, who had a thirteen-year career as a catcher in the 1940s and ’50s, felt that the introduction of the batting helmet was what first started softening ballplayers. “It was better when we didn’t have helmets,” he said in 1988. “Guys were going down all the time, and I’m not talking about beanballs at the head, but just around the hands or the chest. Without that helmet you had to be ready to get out of the way…. Nowadays hitters go up there with those helmets and defy the pitchers to throw inside. It’s like they don’t think the pitcher is allowed to pitch inside of the corner, and when he does they freeze. They’re just not prepared to hit the deck.”

  Take Houston’s Jeff Bagwell. The four-time All-Star had his hand broken by pitches in 1993, 1994, and 1995 (Garner was not managing the team then), but instead of altering his stance or improving his pitch-avoidance technique, he took to wearing a protective covering to prevent any other such injuries.

  Another downside of the warning system—in which an umpire sensing trouble issues a cease-and-desist order to both dugouts, with immediate ejection for both player and manager should any violation occur—is that it negates the time-tested practice of checks and balances. Once a warning is issued, retaliation is essentially legislated out of the game. This increases the risk of lingering bad feelings without an appropriate way to channel them. Some managers even go so far as to instruct their pitchers to take the first shot in a bad-blood situation quickly, which basically gives their team a free pass before warnings are issued and the business of tit-for-tat is shut down for the night.

  “It was a lot better [under the old rules],” said longtime Braves manager Bobby Cox. “It was over with and done. Guys knew to expect it, and it was done right. We still do it, but you’ve really got to pick your spots.”

  On September 9, 1991, Cincinnati reliever Norm Charlton ignored a Code staple. It wasn’t that he intentionally hit Dodgers catcher Mike Scioscia (which he did), or that he acted on suspicions that Scioscia, while as a baserunner at second, had been relaying signs to Los Angeles hitters (which he had been). Where Charlton went wrong was admitting his deed in front of the media. “I threw at him,” the next day’s Cincinnati Post quoted the pitcher as saying. “I hit him on the arm, but I didn’t mean to hit him on the arm. He’ll be lucky if I don’t rip his head off the next time.”

  The unwritten rule broken by Charlton mandates that players, especially pitchers, refrain from confessing to anything improper in any forum beyond closed clubhouse doors. Charlton’s comments took things a step further, in that he threatened the possibility of throwing at Scioscia’s head. The reaction from National League president Bill White was predictable: Charlton was fined heavily and suspended for a week. The hanging judge had little choice—the defendant had already confessed to his crime.

  The reaction from the Los Angeles clubhouse set an unusual tone. The Dodgers tore into Charlton with a voraciousness rarely recorded in the press. Had the pitcher omitted the line about ripping off Scioscia’s head, it’s likely that nobody in Chavez Ravine would even have noticed his comments, let alone addressed them. Instead, the Dodgers verbally unloaded, with manager Tommy Lasorda calling for Charlton’s suspension and saying, “What he said was a disgrace to baseball. Who does he think he is, saying something like that? He talks about taking a guy’s head off? He could have killed Scioscia. He could have taken out his eye. Just what kind of person is this guy?”

  Dodgers pitcher Kevin Gross called Charlton’s remarks “stupid,” “dumb,” and “idiotic.” Even Charlton’s own manager, Lou Piniella, distanced himself, saying the left-hander made a “foolish statement.” “If I were a pitcher and I hit somebody for whatever reason, I think I’d have about eight reasons why I wasn’t throwing at somebody,” he said. “Being truthful is one thing. Being smart is another.”

  In baseball, being smart counts for a lot. When a pitcher confesses to hitting a batter intentionall
y, even if he goes about it more tactfully than Charlton, it’s an admission that, at best, strikes an odd note with the viewing public. People inside baseball understand appropriate doses of retaliation, but the practice represents a level of brutality that simply doesn’t translate in most people’s lives.

  This is the reason that such admissions leave the commissioner’s office little choice but to levy punishment. It’s why Frank Robinson—one of the most thrown-at players of his generation and in possession of a deep understanding of baseball’s retaliatory code—was so heavy-handed when he served as Major League Baseball’s director of discipline, long after his playing career had ended. It’s why Jose Mesa was suspended for four games in response to hitting Omar Vizquel after saying he would do precisely that, even though he wasn’t even thrown out of the game in which it happened. It’s why normally outspoken White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen responded with nothing more than a knowing smile when asked whether he’d ordered one of his pitchers to throw at his former outfielder Carlos Lee during a 2006 spring-training game. It’s why, after Dock Ellis famously and intentionally hit three batters in a row to open that game in 1974, Pirates catcher Manny Sanguillen proclaimed to the media that he had never seen anybody so wild, despite having been briefed by Ellis about his plan prior to the game. It’s why, when Mickey Lolich of the Tigers and Dave Boswell of the Twins exchanged beanballs in a 1969 contest, each said afterward that his ball had “slipped.”