The Baseball Codes

by Jason Turbow

  “It got nutty,” said Flannery. “I volunteered to pinch-hit because nobody else was getting [Perez]. I told [Williams], ‘If I ground out or fly out, I’ll blindside him and hook him on the mound.’ We became crazy. We became nuts.”

  Fortunately for Atlanta, Perez was pitching a great game, which ultimately earned him his eleventh win against only four losses. Unfortunately for Perez, he was pitching a great game, which meant that another at-bat was in the offing. Atlanta held a 5–1 lead in the eighth inning when the right-hander next came to the plate, this time to face San Diego’s fourth pitcher of the day, Craig Lefferts.

  Finally, mercifully, Lefferts managed to hit him with a fastball—which served to draw the Braves into San Diego’s crazed mind-set. Players streamed from both dugouts, and the first real fight of the afternoon broke out on the field, erupting in clusters across the diamond. Atlanta’s Gerald Perry charged Lefferts and landed several blows. Padres outfielder Champ Summers tried to hunt down Perez, who was lying low in the Braves dugout. The highlight came when Braves third baseman Bob Horner, watching the game with the broadcast crew while on the disabled list, sensed trouble, predicted the fracas on the air, raced to the clubhouse to pull on his uniform, and rushed out—cast on his arm—to intercept Summers near the top of the dugout steps. (He was later suspended for fighting while on the DL.) “It was the wildest thing I had ever seen …,” Horner said. “It seemed like it never stopped. It was like a nine-inning brawl.” When this round ended, Lefferts and Krol, San Diego’s replacement replacement manager, were tossed, as were Perry and Braves relievers Rick Mahler and Steve Bedrosian.

  It wasn’t finished. When the Padres came to bat in the ninth, Torre went so far as to specifically instruct his new pitcher, Donnie Moore—on the mound in relief of Perez—to avoid further escalation. “I said, ‘Let’s not continue this bullshit, let’s just win this game,’” said Torre. “Then I looked him in the eye and I said to myself, ‘I have no chance. I’m talking to a deaf man here.’ I walked back to the dugout and he hit Graig Nettles. You can talk until you’re blue in the face, but it’s guys defending each other. That’s what it’s about.”

  As soon as Moore’s fastball touched Nettles’s ribs, it was as if the previous fight had never ended. Nettles charged the mound. Reliever Goose Gossage sprinted in from the bullpen and tried to get to Moore, but ended up fighting with Atlanta’s Bob Watson (who, incidentally, later served as Major League Baseball’s vice president in charge of discipline). Five fans ran onto the field to join the fray, one of whom was tackled near third base by Atlanta players Chris Chambliss and Jerry Royster. Long-since ejected Gerald Perry, accompanied by the similarly tossed Bedrosian and Mahler, raced from the clubhouse to participate.

  During the fight, Flannery, one of the smallest men on the field, was caught in a bear hug by Braves coach Bob Gibson, and pleaded desperately for his release so he could go after Gerald Perry, with whom he had already fought twice that afternoon. When Gibson finally complied, Perry quickly split Flannery’s lip open. As a coda to the entire event, when things finally appeared to be settling down and the Padres were returning to their dugout, a fan hit Bevacqua in the head with a plastic cup of beer, spurring the player to jump atop the dugout and go after him.

  “The donnybrook … was the best, most intense baseball fight I’ve ever seen or been involved with,” wrote Gossage in his autobiography, The Goose Is Loose. “I realize it was the Sabbath, but guys were taking the Lord’s name in vain. Fists flew and skulls rattled. Unlike most baseball fights, which are more like hugging contests than real fisticuffs, guys on both teams got pasted. Ed Whitson came running out from the clubhouse completely deranged. He and Kurt Bevacqua went into the stands and duked it out with some hecklers. Stadium officials had to send out for the riot squad to settle things down.”

  “Whitson was icing his elbow in the clubhouse without a shirt on, watching it on TV,” said Flannery. “Later, Dick [Williams] says, ‘The next thing I see, Whitson’s on TV, no shirt, he’s got a bat and screaming at the season-ticket holders, and Bevacqua was in the stands beating on them.”

  When round two was over, new ejections included Gossage and Bobby Brown from the Padres, and Atlanta’s Moore, Watson, and Torre. To stem further damage, McSherry cleared the benches, sending all nonparticipating players into their respective clubhouses to await the game’s final outs. (“They locked us in there with big wooden beams before they would finish the game,” said Flannery.)

  After Atlanta finally closed out the 5–3 victory, a disgusted Torre took the unusual baseball tack of comparing Dick Williams to Hitler, then called him an idiot—“with a capital ‘I’ and small ‘w.’” Padres catcher Terry Kennedy was a bit more clear-headed. “It would’ve been a lot simpler,” he said, “if we’d hit Perez his first time up.”

  The sustained intensity of that Padres-Braves game was too much to be contained in just nine innings, spilling outside the field of play and all the way to the clubhouses. An equal concentration of malevolence featured prominently in a feud between the Red Sox and Devil Rays, but instead of a single game it was maintained over the better part of a decade. It seemed that nearly every time Boston and Tampa Bay got together between 2000 and 2008 they added another chapter to their collective book of spite.

  It started in late August 2000, when Boston’s Pedro Martinez hit Gerald Williams on the hand with his fourth pitch of the game. Martinez might have already been a bit testy, considering that, despite a 14-4 record and 1.77 ERA going into the contest, he was winless in his last three starts (two losses and a no-decision) against the moribund Devil Rays, dating back to 1999. Williams didn’t take kindly to the pitcher’s gesture and charged the mound, shoving the much smaller Martinez to the ground and landing a glancing blow to his face. There was no way to know it at the time, but this set the tone for the next eight years. Benches emptied into the middle of the field, the game was delayed for twelve minutes, and Williams was ejected. In the process, Boston’s Brian Daubach dived into the scrum, where Tampa players accused him of taking cheap shots. After reviewing a tape of the fight, the commissioner’s office ruled that Daubach had acted within the boundaries of acceptable behavior, but this decision came far too late to assist the first baseman. By the time the game ended, Daubach had been thrown at by a succession of Devil Rays pitchers, starting with Dave Eiland, who wanted to hit him so badly that, with two on and nobody out in the third inning, he sent his first pitch spinning toward Daubach’s head. The hitter managed to avoid that one, but couldn’t get out of the way of Eiland’s next pitch, which drilled him in the body. After Carl Everett’s two-run double scored the lead runners and sent Daubach to third, Eiland hit Nomar Garciaparra and was tossed from the game.

  In the seventh inning, Eiland’s replacement, Cory Lidle, was himself ejected after throwing a pitch behind Daubach. (“The only problem,” said Tampa Bay manager Larry Rothschild, “was that our pitchers kept missing the guy.”) Lidle’s replacement, Tony Fiore, lasted all of two pitches before finishing the job, drilling Daubach with his third offering and spurring another confrontation between the teams in the middle of the field before being ejected himself. If Williams’s first-inning mound charge set the tone for the game, Martinez followed it up with both actions (he took a no-hitter into the ninth inning) and words (saying ominously, “There will be another day”). Afterward, he sneaked out a rear exit to avoid the phalanx of Devil Rays waiting for him by the clubhouse’s main door.

  The day of Martinez’s prediction wasn’t far off. A quick rundown of events:

  September 29, 2000: Tampa Bay eliminates the Red Sox from the AL East race with an 8–6 victory. From the mound, Rays closer Roberto Hernandez waves a sarcastic bye-bye to the Tropicana Field visitors’ dugout. The following day, when Hernandez gives up the game-winning homer in the ninth, Martinez stands on the top step of the Boston dugout and does some waving of his own.

  2001: Over the course of the season, Devil Rays pitchers hit eleve
n Boston batters; Red Sox pitchers tag nine Tampa hitters.

  May 5, 2002: Devil Rays pitcher Ryan Rupe hits both Garciaparra and Shea Hillenbrand in the first inning of a game, a day after each was instrumental in helping Boston overcome a 5–2, ninth-inning deficit to beat Tampa in a 7–5 victory. (The key blow was Hillenbrand’s game-winning, pinch-hit grand slam.) Rumors fly of stolen signs, which both Garciaparra and Hillenbrand deny. Boston’s Trot Nixon responds by letting go of his bat on a second-inning swing, sending it flying toward the mound. (In classic fashion, he later denies intent.) Red Sox pitcher Frank Castillo responds further by hitting Tampa’s Randy Winn. Both Castillo and Nixon are later suspended.

  July 18, 2002: The day after Manny Ramirez scorches the Devil Rays with a home run and a double, he’s hit in the second inning by Tampa starter Tanyon Sturtze. Boston’s Frank Castillo responds by hitting second baseman Brent Abernathy in the third, and reliever Tim Wakefield hits him again in the fifth. In the ninth inning, Devil Rays reliever Esteban Yan just misses Ramirez’s head as the slugger ducks, and the ball glances off his shoulder. “You can’t act like what happened never happened,” says Derek Lowe in the Boston Herald. He also says, “Every year, why is it always this team?”

  September 9, 2002: Lowe keeps wondering after being ejected for hitting Devil Rays shortstop Felix Escalona with a pitch. The following night, Tampa Bay reliever Lee Gardner, pitching in the eighth inning of an 11–1 Boston runaway, is ejected for hitting second baseman Lou Merloni.

  September 27, 2004: Red Sox starter Bronson Arroyo keeps relations testy by hitting both Aubrey Huff and Tino Martinez in the third inning. Devil Rays pitcher Scott Kazmir retaliates by hitting Manny Ramirez and Kevin Millar in consecutive at-bats an inning later, emptying the benches. Kazmir is ejected.

  April 22–24, 2005: Five batters are hit in the first two games of a three-game series between the teams. In the sixth inning of the third game, Boston’s Arroyo hits Huff—7-for-10 lifetime against him—with a pitch for the second time in as many seasons. An inning later, Devil Rays reliever Lance Carter throws a pitch behind Manny Ramirez’s head, eliciting warnings for both benches. One pitch later, Ramirez belts a home run. Carter then throws at the head of the next hitter, David Ortiz, who has to be restrained by catcher Toby Hall. Both dugouts empty, and Carter, Trot Nixon, Tampa Bay manager Lou Piniella, and pitcher Dewon Brazelton are ejected. In the seventh, Arroyo hits leadoff batter Chris Singleton on the thigh with his second pitch, earning his own ejection. In a radio interview on WEEI after the game, Boston pitcher Curt Schilling blames Piniella: “Players on that team are saying, ‘This is why we lose a hundred games a year, because this idiot makes us do stuff like this.’” A day later, also on the radio, Piniella says, “I have forgot more baseball than this guy knows.”

  March 27, 2006: After tagging out Tampa’s Joey Gathright at the plate during a spring-training game, Boston reliever Julian Tavarez stands on the baserunner’s arm, he says, so that Gathright couldn’t “throw a punch at me right away.” Tavarez then hits Gathright in the jaw while the outfielder is down on one knee, and sparks a benches-clearing dustup Gathright later says that Tavarez “hits like a woman.” Devil Rays outfielder Carl Crawford subsequently challenges the pitcher to a post-game fight in the parking lot.

  June 5, 2008: The highlight of five hit batters on the night is Boston outfielder Coco Crisp’s charge of the mound after being drilled by right-hander James Shields of the Rays, who by this time have dropped the “Devil” from their name if not their attitude. Shields is responding to Crisp’s hard slide into second baseman Akinori Iwamura the previous night, which was itself a response to Tampa Bay shortstop Jason Bartlett using his leg to block Crisp’s headfirst slide into second. Shields misses with a roundhouse right, and Crisp—with seventeen knockouts to his credit in seventeen amateur boxing matches as a youth—is able to land one shot of his own before being overwhelmed by a scrum of Rays, primary among them Crawford and Johnny Gomes, who shower blows upon him. (After the game, Crisp echoes Tavarez, saying the Rays were like “little girls, trying to scratch out my eyes.” Shields had already hit Dustin Pedroia in the first inning, and Boston’s Jon Lester responds by hitting Crawford, then Iwamura. Tampa Bay reliever Al Reyes closes the festivities by drilling Kevin Youkilis in Boston’s final at-bat.

  October 10, 2008: In Game 1 of the ALCS, Rays reliever Grant Bal-four sends a fastball toward the face of Boston outfielder J. D. Drew, which catches the slugger’s shoulder as he spins to avoid it. Little more than barking ensues, and the seven-game series is so tight that even four more hit batters (two from each team) over the remaining games do little to raise the tension.

  By the time Tavarez hit Gathright like a woman—let alone by the time the Rays tried to scratch out Crisp’s eyes—the principals from the original skirmish in 2000 were long gone. That it didn’t seem to matter was what gave legs to this rivalry. Boston’s competition with the Yankees is driven primarily by fan involvement; the team’s animosity toward Tampa Bay, however, begins with the players themselves. Some of this ill will is firsthand, but there’s no denying the tension that permeates each clubhouse when it comes to the other team, developed over years and lingering regardless of who’s been involved or for how long. “With the way we hate them and the way they hate us,” said Tampa Bay’s Cliff Floyd, “this could be a great rivalry for a long time.”

  13

  Hitters

  Albert Belle is remembered for a lot of things: eight thirty-homer seasons; five All-Star games; his perpetually dour attitude; a habit of throwing baseballs at fans and photographers; his unprovoked verbal assault on Hannah Storm during the 1995 World Series; chasing egg-throwing teenagers in his pickup truck one Halloween.

  The single event for which he’s best remembered, however, is probably running over Fernando Vina as a member of the Cleveland Indians. The story was discussed for weeks afterward, and each player bore the details like an albatross for the rest of his career: In the eighth inning of a game against the Brewers in 1996, Belle—at six-foot-two and 210 pounds, towering above the five-foot-nine Vina—ran into and through the Milwaukee second baseman in an effort to break up a double play. With a well-placed forearm, he also broke up Vina’s nose.

  Belle took significant heat for his aggression, largely because it was so easy to believe the act to be another link in a chain of outrageous behavior—but that wasn’t the case. Quite to the contrary, the outfielder had been chewed out by coaches earlier in that very game for being too passive, and was more or less under orders to wreak some havoc.

  The scolding had come after the third inning, when Belle had been at first base, and Carlos Baerga on third. With one out, slugger Jim Thome topped a ball toward second; anything short of a double play would have allowed a run to score. Belle, though, slowed down and allowed Vina to make an easy tag, then throw to first for the inning-ending twin killing, which kept the run off the board. As Belle waited near second for delivery of his outfielder’s glove, Cleveland coach Dave Nelson ran out to meet him, unable to wait through the end of the inning to deliver a piece of his mind. “Albert, dammit, what have I taught you?” he snapped at the young superstar. “You don’t just stop and let the guy tag you—you either slide into him, you stop and back up … and if you can’t avoid the tag you run over him! You know better than that!”

  Nelson’s words were ringing in Belle’s ears when, five innings later, he again found himself on first base. Belle actually had double motivation to cut loose, having just been hit by Milwaukee reliever Marshall Boze. So when another ball was hit to Vina, nearly identical to the one in the third inning, Belle took off with intent. Vina naïvely positioned himself squarely in the base path to apply a gentle tag, just as he had done earlier in the game, but this time he was flattened. The play was, contrary to the subsequent charge of unmitigated brutality, for the most part, clean. “It was a violent hit,” said Nelson, “but it was legal.”

  “The first time I could have cru
shed him,” said Belle. “The second time he was open game. It was hard, clean baseball. You should be ready to get knocked down. It’s an easy play to throw to the shortstop, and then I’ll slide hard, okay?” There wasn’t much excuse for the forearm to the nose, but even that fell within the boundaries of acceptable limits. First-base umpire Joe Brinkman went so far as to label the move a matter of “professional courtesy.” It was enough, of course, for Milwaukee reliever Terry Burrows to drill Belle in his next at-bat, an inning later.

  The situation certainly wasn’t without precedent. Pitchers may control the vast majority of baseball’s retaliatory strikes, but hitters aren’t exactly powerless in that capacity; seeking revenge on infielders is their most common means for voicing displeasure. “You come in a little high with a forearm,” said Dave Henderson, addressing not Belle’s situation but retribution in general. “Those are what the unwritten rules say. The middle infielders should be very wary if a guy gets drilled and he’s on first base.”

  “I’ve gotten on first base when I’ve been hit by a pitch and told the first baseman, ‘If there’s a ground ball hit I’m going to fuck up one of your middle infielders, and [pointing to the mound] you can tell him that it was his fault,’” said Bob Brenly. “That’s a way you can get them to police themselves. A pitcher drills somebody just because he feels like it, and if one of the middle infielders gets flipped out there he’s going to tell the pitcher to knock it off. Ultimately, that’s all we want anyway—just play the game the right way.”

  Usually, such plays take the shape of clean slides augmented by an extra degree of vigor. Some, however, are so clearly intended to injure that the opposing team has no choice but to answer. Take White Sox slugger George Bell, who in 1992 responded to being hit by Brewers starter Chris Bosio by veering well out of the baseline to take out shortstop Pat Listach on a double-play grounder, roughly grabbing the infielder as he slid by—a play so blatant that umpire Darryl Cousins called the hitter, Robin Ventura, out at first for Bell’s interference.