The Baseball Codes

by Jason Turbow

  Perhaps the best way to deal with this type of situation is to take the Andy Pettitte approach. The Yankees star didn’t just dislike throwing at people—he was known to abhor the practice. (While winning twenty-one games and throwing more than two hundred innings for New York in 2003, Pettitte hit just one batter.) But in 2001, Pettitte’s teammate Bernie Williams was hit in the head by White Sox pitcher Kip Wells, and for a few scary moments it appeared that serious damage had been done. Even though most people on the New York bench didn’t feel the beaning was intentional, and Williams was ultimately okay, there was little doubt that retaliation was in order. Because it was Pettitte on the mound, it was Pettitte who inherited the duty. In the bottom half of the inning, he placed the Code over personal ethics and plunked Sox slugger Maglio Ordonez on the hip, eliciting hardly a peep of protest.

  But it was Pettitte’s reaction after the game that was truly emblematic of the omertà ethic. When the left-hander was asked if his pitch to Ordonez was intentional, he didn’t offer up even the standard platitude that the pitch got away from him. Instead, eyes affixed firmly on his shoes, he said quietly, “I don’t want to talk about that.” Much can be read into the statement, but it’s hardly prosecutable. By not saying anything, Pettitte avoided the necessity of either telling the truth or lying.

  Pitchers are not the only ones to whom this lesson applies. Just ask Mike Scioscia, who at the beginning of this section was hit intentionally by Norm Charlton. Did he deserve what he got? Was he really stealing signs from the Reds? “On the record?” asked Scioscia. “No.”

  Because winning trumps retaliation in every imaginable circumstance, situations often arise in which retribution is tabled despite its merit, simply because the score is close and allowing an extra baserunner is too risky. This can delay the process for the duration of a game, a series, or even a season—which doesn’t mean that it won’t eventually happen.

  “You put it in your memory bank, and you will get the guy, sooner or later,” said one pitcher who spent sixteen years as a major-leaguer. “The situation will arise, and it’s not going to go away. You remember. You remember what happened, and that time will come.”

  That time came for the Royals in 1998, in a game against the Angels that was marred by five beanballs, two all-out brawls, and twelve ejections. The initial fight started when Phil Nevin, playing his first (and only) season with Anaheim, was hit in the neck by a pitch from Jim Pittsley—the second time he’d been hit in the span of two innings. Nevin’s teammates charged the field on his behalf, which spurred a back-and-forth bout of retaliatory strikes that became headline fodder across the country. After the game, Nevin adopted an air of confusion, telling reporters, “I don’t have any bad blood with those guys.”

  But that wasn’t actually the case. As soon as the game ended, the Angels congregated in their clubhouse and tried to figure out what had just happened. It was only then, away from the media, that Nevin came clean to his teammates: “I was with Detroit last year and [the Royals] thought I took out [Mike] Sweeney at home plate too hard one time. So that was for last year, when I was on another team.”

  Nevin had, in fact, flattened Sweeney the previous August, scoring from second on a base hit by Melvin Nieves. The collision was hard enough for Nevin to come away with a bruised shoulder and for Sweeney to emerge with seriously scarred feelings. “When I was about 15 feet from home plate, I saw his eyes widen,” Nevin said at the time. “I knew the ball was coming and I had no choice but to go in the way I did.” A year later, the incident would come back to involve his new teammates in the most vicious game most of them would ever see, and until it was over they had no idea why.

  That the Royals were willing to wait a full season for revenge hardly set precedent. Take the time in 1973 when A’s outfielder Billy North let go of his bat as he swung at an offering from Kansas City rookie Doug Bird, sending it sailing toward shortstop Freddie Patek. North jogged out to retrieve his lumber, but stopped at the mound on the way to ask the startled pitcher, “Do you remember me?” Bird replied that he did not. “I remember you,” said North. “From Quincy.” Then, to the surprise of everybody, he started swinging. “We were all stunned,” said A’s second baseman Phil Garner, watching from the dugout. “Everybody was stunned.”

  “We were on the bench saying, ‘What the hell’s going on?’” said A’s catcher Ray Fosse. “They started fighting, so we as teammates ran out, and so did the Royals. When it was all over, we all asked, ‘What the hell just happened?’”

  What the hell happened was that in 1970, when North was a twenty-two-year-old playing for Quincy, Illinois, of the Single-A Midwest League, he had the misfortune of coming to the plate against Bird, then twenty years old and playing for Waterloo. The two batters ahead of North had connected for home runs, and Bird responded by brushing North back. After the hitter had words with Waterloo’s catcher, Bird’s next pitch drilled him in the helmet. North missed three days.

  That was the last time the two shared a baseball diamond as minor-leaguers. North got called up to Oakland the following season, and two years later, when he saw the transaction wire indicating that Bird had joined the Royals, he began counting down the days until Kansas City came to town. Bird was inserted as a reliever in the first game of the series, and North didn’t waste a moment. “I told [A’s starting pitcher] Ken Holtzman, ‘Watch this,’” said North. “I’m going to do some damage to this guy.” Although North was ejected, his assault wasn’t enough to knock Bird from the game—he finished the inning by striking out North’s replacement, Gonzalo Marquez—but it did earn the outfielder a three-game suspension, which he felt was well worth it.

  Not all his teammates agreed. To many of them, North’s problem was less that he punched an opponent for reasons unrelated to the A’s than that he did it in a game in which his team led only 5–4. Unlike a pitcher issuing a retaliatory beanball, of course, North’s actions didn’t result in extra baserunners for the Royals. Still, said Fosse, “we’re all thinking, ‘We’re trying to win a championship, and this guy’s doing something to redress a problem from the minor leagues. He’s taking a chance that one of his teammates could get hurt helping out.’ We couldn’t believe it.” North’s Code violation wasn’t in the execution but in the timing.

  “Sometimes you get it next week, next month, next year,” said Dusty Baker, who played with North on the 1978 Dodgers. “Sometimes it has to wait for an old-timers’ game.” Baker wasn’t just talking—Bob Gibson once did that very thing. Gibson felt entitled, after giving up a grand slam to Pete LaCock in 1975, to knock the hitter down. The only problem was that Gibson, two months shy of his fortieth birthday, faced exactly one more batter, left the game … and retired. So, fifteen years later, the Hall of Famer did what he had been unable to do as an active player: When he faced LaCock in an old-timers’ game, he hit him in the back with a pitch. (“Bob Feller was throwing when I came up to the plate,” said LaCock. “All of a sudden Gibson comes running out of the dugout. He sends Feller back to the bench and starts warming up and I think, he’s not really going to hit me. Sure enough, first pitch—whammo.”)

  It doesn’t take an angry old man to play the waiting game, however. In 1942, a starstruck fifteen-year-old from Norristown, Pennsylvania, had his autograph request rebuffed by New York Giants outfielder Buster Maynard after a game at Shibe Park. He was crushed, and he didn’t forget. The kid was Tommy Lasorda, who seven years later was himself a promising pitcher in the Single-A South Atlantic League, playing for Brooklyn’s minor-league affiliate in Greenville, North Carolina. One day he found himself facing a fading former big-leaguer who was trying merely to hold his job with the Augusta Yankees: Buster Maynard.

  Lasorda didn’t hesitate. His first pitch sailed well inside, knocking Maynard off his feet. His second pitch did the same. When Maynard came up later in the game, the left-hander buzzed him again. After the game, Lasorda found their earlier roles reversed; this time it was Maynard looking for something fro
m Lasorda—an explanation. “Why me?” he asked. “You don’t even know me.”

  “Know you!” shouted Lasorda. “When I was a kid in the eighth grade, you used to play for the New York Giants. I used to save up for a whole year to get enough money to go to a game. When I got there, I asked you for your autograph and you just pushed me aside and kept walking. I wish I had hit you, you busher!”

  It’s as sweet a tale of retaliation as can be told. Most such strikes, however, especially the sort that inspire willingness to wait for the chance to deliver them, don’t have childhood sensitivity at their core. Mostly it’s just irritated guys looking for outlets for their rage—and nobody was better at waiting than Stan Williams.

  At six-foot-five and 230 pounds, Williams—who pitched for the Dodgers alongside Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax—was fearsome even without his flashes of anger, which flared at the slightest indiscretion against him. What made him truly terrifying to opposing hitters, however, was the List. Kept by Williams in a small notebook that he carried with him everywhere, the List consisted of the names of everyone who had ever offended his baseball sensibilities. Guys who hit him hard were noted next to those who showed him up. By keeping a log, the pitcher ensured that game situations never prevented him from meting out justice, and that he’d never forget a name when the time was finally right to strike. Being inscribed as a member of the List effectively turned a hitter into a dental patient—due for a drilling.

  As Williams neared the end of his career, though, his character mellowed, and he slowly stopped adding names to his notebook, choosing instead to concentrate on crossing them off, one fastball at a time. By the time he pitched in his final big-league game in 1973, the only name left was that of Barry Latman, a pitcher for the Indians who had been added a dozen years earlier, in 1961, and who had himself left the majors in ’72. The initial incident arose during a spring exhibition game in Las Vegas between the Dodgers and Cleveland, when Williams, bleary from a long night in Sin City, inadvertently bounced a pitch off the helmet of Indians third baseman Bubba Phillips. It was thrown so softly, said the pitcher, that “I wouldn’t have hurt him if I’d hit him in the neck.” Still, Phillips’s pitcher stood up for him, and the next time Williams stepped to the plate, he was drilled in the ribs. The man who threw the pitch: Barry Latman.

  “Stan never moved,” said Dodgers first baseman Ron Fairly. “He didn’t even try to get out of the way. The ball hit him and he stood there for about three or four seconds.” Before finally heading toward first base, Williams turned to the mound and said ominously, “Hey, Barry, now it’s my turn.”

  Dodgers manager Walter Alston, wanting to avoid needless escalation during a practice game, promptly pulled Williams. Denied his chance at immediate retaliation, Williams quickly added Latman’s name to the List. But the two played in different leagues, so while Williams methodically cleared out everyone else in his notebook, he was unable to remove Latman.

  Williams closed his career with the minor-league Seattle Angels, where he hoped to play his way back to the big leagues (a goal that never panned out). When he reported to Seattle he found, sitting across the locker room, another guy playing out his own string—Barry Latman. As soon as the big pitcher realized who he was teaming with, he laughed out loud. The two spent time sharing war stories, having become the old men in a clubhouse full of kids. They quickly developed a tight bond.

  One day not long thereafter, Williams was assigned to pitch batting practice and didn’t offer a moment’s hesitation when his old foe stepped in against him, burying a fastball into Latman’s rib cage. “That’s for Vegas!” Williams yelled toward the plate. “If you don’t like it, come on out—otherwise the List is done.” Latman stayed put. Mission finally accomplished twelve years after the fact, Williams threw his notebook away.

  12

  The Wars

  Ideally, retaliation is a straightforward affair: One team violates a statute of the unwritten rules, its opponent responds, the score is even, and each team moves on. As might be expected when tempers flare, however, reality is often quite different. Hotheaded pitchers add volatility to the mix, and cease-fire rules normally enacted after each team has had its shot are thrown out the window. In these cases, retaliation met in kind simply generates new anger and another round of inside fastballs. Hostilities are renewed—and often amplified.

  There’s no better example of this than the game between the Atlanta Braves and San Diego Padres on August 12, 1984, at Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium, which San Diego infielder Kurt Bevacqua later called “the Desert Storm of baseball fights.” Total damage: six brushback pitches, three hit batters, four bench-clearing incidents, two full-on brawls that nearly spiraled out of control when fans rushed the field, nineteen ejections, five arrests, and a nearly unprecedented clearing of the benches by the umpires.

  “It took baseball down 50 years,” said umpiring crew chief John McSherry, who came close to awarding the game to San Diego via forfeit in the ninth inning. “It was the worst thing I have ever seen in my life. It was pathetic, absolutely pathetic.”

  It all started before the game even began, said Padres pitcher Ed Whit-son, when Atlanta starter Pascual Perez looked toward San Diego’s leadoff hitter, Alan Wiggins, standing in the on-deck circle, and promised to hit him with his first pitch. “Everybody on our bench heard it,” said Whitson. Sure enough, Perez sent his initial offering into the small of Wiggins’s back, landing the first blow in what would be a long afternoon of retaliatory strikes, and setting San Diego’s dugout abuzz. Said Whitson: “By the time [manager] Dick Williams looked around at me, just as he started to speak, I said, ‘Don’t worry about it—we’ll get him.’”

  To that point in their fifteen-year history the Padres had lost an average of ninety-four games a season, had never finished higher than fourth in their six-team division, and ended up in last place more often than not. When San Diego sat atop the NL West with roughly six weeks to go in ’84, many members of its closest competitor—Perez’s Braves, which trailed by nine and a half games going into that mid-August meeting—felt that a stand was needed. The best way to do that, they decided, was to drain the upstart Padres of whatever confidence they may have built.

  “They were trying to intimidate us, plain and simple,” said Padres infielder Tim Flannery. “It was the first time we were in a situation to win anything in San Diego, and they probably figured they could get an edge. But what it did was rally our team together. We lost the game, but at the end of the day we came together as a ball club.”

  Perez’s salvo against Wiggins sent Padres manager Dick Williams into attack mode. Whitson’s proclamation of forthcoming justice notwithstanding, Williams wanted to hit back, and hit back hard. “He came from the stock of the old school,” said Braves manager Joe Torre. “He was going to make sure that he got his pound of flesh.” Williams’s rationale was simple: Should his team withstand Atlanta’s scare tactics, there was little to keep it from coasting to a division championship. “We can’t be intimidated,” the Padres skipper later proclaimed, and he set about using Perez to prove it.

  As promised, Whitson quickly put a target on Perez. When Atlanta’s pitcher came to the plate in the second inning, Braves shortstop Rafael Ramirez was on first with one out. Whitson threw his first pitch behind the hitter, with unmistakable intent that quickly emptied the benches. Though no punches were thrown, Whitson drew a warning from plate umpire Steve Rippley. His next pitch skipped away from Padres catcher Terry Kennedy, allowing Ramirez to advance to second. With a rally in the works and the lineup about to turn over, Whitson was compelled to alter his strategy; he struck the pitcher out and escaped the inning unscathed.

  Perez next came to the plate in the fourth, whereupon Whitson again went after him. His first pitch ran inside, belt-high to the right-hander, and the benches again emptied into a parade of punchless shoving. That was twice Whitson missed his mark. His next offering came in higher and farther inside, nearly hitting Perez in t
he shoulder. Although it failed to connect, it was enough to earn ejections for both Whitson and Williams.

  The manager was prepared for this eventuality, and had already prepped his line of succession. “Until Pascual Perez got hit, it wasn’t going be finished,” said Flannery. “Dick said to [coach] Ozzie Virgil, ‘When I get thrown out, you’re going to be the manager, and, [relief pitcher] Greg Booker, you’re going to hit Perez. And if you don’t get it done, Jack Krol, you’ll be the manager because those two will have gotten thrown out, and, Greg Harris, you’re going to be the pitcher.”

  Booker came in as planned but ended up walking Perez, then gave up two runs over the next two innings (one charged to Whitson). In Perez’s next at-bat, leading off the sixth, Booker aimed two more pitches at him, both of which were deftly avoided. “He kept running from us—we couldn’t knock him down,” said Whitson. “Everybody was trying to throw the ugly-finder at him, and we still couldn’t find him.”

  At this point, Booker and Virgil were tossed, and reliever Harris entered the game. But Harris, who had been acquired from the Montreal Expos less than a month earlier, inexplicably didn’t stick to the game plan, throwing a series of breaking balls to Perez, not at him, and getting him to ground out. If watching Perez dance away from pitches through the first five innings was enough to drive the Padres batty, seeing one of their own pitchers refuse to execute what many on the club felt was his primary responsibility was enough to send them into full-fledged combat mode, devoid of logic or reason. Backup infielder Kurt Bevacqua started to berate his own pitcher at top volume from the dugout. Third baseman Graig Nettles approached the mound to ask exactly what it was Harris thought he was doing.