The Baseball Codes

by Jason Turbow

  Both Bell and Belle earned skepticism from both fans and the national media for the violent extent of their plays, especially because the infielders at the business ends of the slides were not the men who touched off the bad blood. When a base runner has a chance to take out the offending player directly, things become much easier to reconcile. In 1952, for example, Cleveland’s Al Rosen set his sights on rookie Red Sox shortstop Jimmy Piersall, who had collided with Indians second baseman Bobby Avila on a double play, barrel-rolling him backward several feet. Rosen got the opportunity to avenge his teammate when he was on first base against Boston and a ball was hit sharply up the middle. Forfeiting any pretense of sliding, Rosen crashed into Piersall with as much force as he could muster, sending both players flying toward the outfield grass. When Rosen looked over at his victim, however, he realized that Piersall hadn’t been covering the base at all; he had unwittingly tackled Boston’s second baseman, Ted Lepcio.

  “Lepcio was such a great guy,” said Rosen with regret, “and I was so apologetic.” To make matters worse, Piersall became a full-time outfielder the following season, and Rosen’s revenge never did materialize.

  Belle’s forearm shiver might have earned attention for its theatrics, but as far as infielders are concerned, the most blood-boiling action a runner can take is to go into a base feetfirst with spikes high. It’s a time-tested method for inflicting pain, and has become less tolerated with every passing generation. (Ty Cobb had such a passion for the tactic that he not only would file his spikes down to razor sharpness, but would do so in the dugout before games so that his opponents could see exactly what he had planned for them. “I have dozens of spike scars, from my ankles to my thighs …,” wrote Cobb in his 1925 autobiography, Memoirs of Twenty Years in Baseball. “I also left a few marks of my own around the league. In staking my claim, people were bound to get hurt.”)

  Cobb represented the pinnacle of baseball’s spikers; few of the tactic’s less accomplished practitioners could come close to him in terms of style points. Take Cincinnati infielder Bill Werber, who was once so irate with Dodgers manager (and part-time shortstop) Leo Durocher for leaving starting pitcher Whitlow Wyatt in a game just to knock down Reds hitters that he tried to plant his spikes into Durocher’s midsection in an ensuing play at second base. “The next thing I know,” he said, “all the Reds players were gathered around me, laughing. I asked, ‘What happened?’ I thought maybe Durocher had hit me in the head with the ball. [Cincinnati manager] Bill McKechnie said, ‘Well, you tried to kick him in the belly and your head came down before your feet did.’ I had knocked myself out at second base. I hit my head on the ground and never touched Durocher. He got the ball from [second baseman Pete] Coscarart, stepped on the base and was gone before I got there.”

  Most spiking attempts were more successful, and the guys who carried them out gained notoriety. Before the practice was largely shunned into disuse through the 1970s and into the ’80s, one of the game’s final prominent slashers was Dodgers shortstop Maury Wills, whose victims, he wrote in a bylined article for Scripps Howard News Service in 2001, “had it coming.” The peak of Wills’s practice came during a game in 1964, in which Braves first baseman Joe Torre found that by dropping his knee in front of the bag he could effectively block Wills’s headfirst returns on pickoff throws. “It wasn’t anything illegal,” said Torre, who as his team’s primary catcher spent the bulk of his playing time executing similar moves in front of the plate. “I had the ball. If you block the plate or a base and you don’t have the ball it’s illegal. I had the ball.”

  Wills was dubious, but the umpire allowed it, so he decided to attack the problem in a different way. “I remembered in Cobb’s book, sharpening his spikes,” said the shortstop. “I got off the team bus after the game, about two blocks from the hotel, went to a hardware store and got me a file. I sat on the edge of my bed filing my spikes the way Ty Cobb must have been doing it.” When Wills was finished, his spikes were glinting so brilliantly that he had to coat them with shoe polish to avoid drawing too much attention. Cautious, he wore a different pair to start the next day’s game, but after he reached first on a sixth-inning single, Torre again dropped his knee—and again Wills was picked off. That was all he needed; Wills went straight to the clubhouse to get his honed spikes, which were so sharp they stuck to the clubhouse floor with every step he took. In the eighth inning, Wills again bunted for a single, and again took his lead. When the pitcher, Phil Niekro, threw to first, Wills went back feetfirst. As a measure of warning, he leaped over Torre’s planted leg rather than into it, and his spikes ripped through the canvas of the base, sinking into the sole of the shoe. “I had to hold the bag down while I pulled the spikes out,” Wills said. “Stuffing came out of the bag. Torre looked at me, he looked at the bag and he got the message.”

  At that point it became a guessing game. Wills didn’t want to keep going back feetfirst, which necessitated a shorter lead, but neither did he want Torre to take advantage when he dived. So he mixed it up, diving on some pickoff attempts, leading with his feet on others. As Niekro kept throwing over—six times, then seven, then eight—all Torre had to do was guess what was coming and get his leg out of the way if he saw the bottom of Wills’s shoe.

  It worked well—until he guessed wrong. Unable to move quickly enough, Torre could only watch as Wills’s spikes sank deep into the flesh of his leg. In Wills’s 1992 autobiography, the shortstop likened the process of extracting them to pulling “the cork out of the bottle and blood starts running all over the place.”

  “I was cut pretty good,” said Torre, who received treatment in the dugout. “I just wanted to make sure they taped me up so I wouldn’t give [the Dodgers] the satisfaction of my leaving the game. But I did go to the hospital to get stitched up afterward.”

  As Torre was tended to, Wills figured that he was due for a pummeling. Torre was three inches taller and nearly forty-five pounds heavier, and had every reason to take a swing. Looking around, the startled baserunner realized that his closest line of defense was Los Angeles first-base coach Greg Mulleavy, who was nearly sixty years old and even smaller than Wills. The shortstop then turned toward the Dodgers dugout, on the opposite side of the field, in hopes that his teammates were prepared to rush out and help him. Instead, he said, they were “all sitting back on the bench with their legs crossed, having a cigarette, looking up in the stands. La-de-da-de-da.”

  After being patched up, Torre trotted somberly toward first. Instead of punching Wills, however, he merely patted him on the leg in acknowledgment for winning the game of strategy. Why wasn’t he madder? “Well,” said Torre, years later, “I asked for it.” As if that alone wasn’t enough to prove his sincerity, that winter Torre went so far as to take in Wills’s banjo-playing act at a Las Vegas nightclub. When Wills heard who was in the audience, he stopped his set and told the story to the crowd. Torre didn’t mind a bit.

  As satisfying as taking out a middle infielder might be, it’s usually a piece of the pitcher that players truly want. Unless a hitter is willing to charge the mound, however, his options are limited when it comes to direct response. One tactic at his disposal involves dropping a drag bunt down the first-base line, which either draws the pitcher within reach as he fields the ball, or gets him to cover the bag should the first baseman take the play. Either way, he’s directly in the line of fire for whatever it is the aggrieved hitter chooses to dish out.

  One of the best practitioners of this tactic was Jackie Robinson, who, because few Dodgers pitchers were willing to defend him via retaliatory knockdowns in the early part of his career, made a habit of taking things into his own hands. When Robinson, one of the most feared bunters in the league, added the threat of direct impact to the equation, pitchers took notice. Among his favorite targets was New York Giants hurler Sal Maglie, a longtime antagonist of the Dodgers.

  In Maglie’s biography, The Sal Maglie Story, author Milton Shapiro describes Robinson pushing a bunt down the first-b
ase line, then ramming the pitcher even after the ball went foul and Maglie eased up. Other accounts have Robinson warning Maglie after a knockdown pitch that there would be hell to pay, then beating out a bunt single because the pitcher opted against leaving the mound to field the ball. In 1951, Robinson talked to Sport magazine about this sort of play, admitting that he “did it deliberately, to force the league to step in and stop this beanballing before somebody gets hurt.”

  The best-known and most vicious of Robinson’s bunts against Maglie occurred in April 1955. In response to a series of the pitcher’s knockdowns aimed at several Brooklyn players, Robinson bunted to first baseman Whitey Lockman with the intent of bowling over the pitcher when he went to cover the base. At age thirty-eight, however, Maglie was no longer agile enough to make the play—or perhaps he knew what was coming and chose to pull up short. Robinson “even slowed down,” said Willie Mays, watching from center field, “but Maglie wouldn’t come over.” Giants second baseman Davey Williams had to race to first and take the throw, ending up the unintended recipient of a hit leveled by Robinson—“a crushing shoulder block,” as described in The New York Times—that equaled anything thrown by the future Hall of Famer during his collegiate career as a running back at UCLA. At age twenty-seven, Williams, an All-Star just two years earlier, struggled through the rest of the season, then retired.

  “[Manager Leo Durocher] used to tell us every day, ‘If they throw one at your head, don’t say anything. Push one down and run right up his neck,’” said Robinson in 1951. “Leo’s an expert at it. He was right.”

  Delmon Young drew national condemnation in 2006 when he threw his bat at the plate umpire in response to being ejected following a disputed called third strike in a Triple-A game. Young’s subsequent suspension—fifty games, the longest in the 123-year history of the International League—may have been unprecedented, but the action he took to earn it certainly wasn’t. Guys have been throwing bats since baseball’s genesis, although most direct them at pitchers, not umpires. If a hitter is looking to achieve true equality in his response to being thrown at, after all, there’s only one option: Throw something back. As long ago as 1913, Baseball Magazine published a description of George Van Haltren’s reaction to a knockdown pitch from Silver King in 1890: “Like a streak of murderous slaughter the bat whizzed back at King, and only a tremendous leap saved Silver from death or serious injury.”

  The main downside to the tactic is that bats are considerably more difficult to control than baseballs, and tossed lumber rarely hits its mark. While throwing his bat at Cardinals pitcher Jerry Staley in 1950, for example, Carl Furillo instead came close to hitting his own manager, Charlie Dressen, who was stationed in the third-base coach’s box.

  One player to recognize this shortcoming was Billy Martin, who adopted an alternative bat-throwing strategy. In 1960, the second baseman, wanting to repay Chicago Cubs pitcher Jim Brewer for an earlier knockdown, let fly his bat on a swing. Instead of directly collecting it, however, Martin paused in the middle of the diamond and took the opportunity to cold-cock the pitcher, damaging Brewer’s orbital bone seriously enough to require hospitalization. There is some dispute over whether or not Brewer said anything to provoke Martin; one report had him calling the hitter a “little Dago son of a bitch” and threatening to knock him on his ass if he came closer to the mound.

  A dozen years later, this only added to the intrigue when, during the 1972 American League Championship Series, Oakland’s Bert Campaneris sent his bat spinning toward Detroit Tigers reliever Lerrin LaGrow in response to a pitch that bounced off his ankle. Campaneris’s anger was fueled by his belief that the pitch had been intentionally thrown, and in this he was correct—LaGrow threw it on orders from Tigers manager Billy Martin. Martin saw Oakland’s leadoff hitter, who led the league with fifty-two stolen bases, as the catalyst for a powerful lineup, and felt especially vulnerable with Tigers catcher Bill Freehan unable to throw effectively because of a back injury.

  The shortstop was quiet in the series opener, going 0-for-4 in an A’s victory, but Martin could only cringe as he watched Campaneris single, steal second, steal third, and score on Joe Rudi’s base hit in the first inning of Game 2. When Campaneris singled in the third and fifth innings as well, Martin decided to knock the shortstop out of action. “Billy told Lerrin LaGrow to throw at [Campaneris] and get him out of the game,” said Charlie Silvera, the former Yankees catcher who served as a coach on Martin’s staff. Before the pitch, Campaneris, expecting to be jammed, knew enough to stay loose in the batter’s box. That didn’t keep him from reacting with surprise, however, when LaGrow’s fastball connected with his ankle. The shortstop looked toward the mound for a moment as if considering his options. Then, overhand, he threw his bat at LaGrow. The pitcher, at six-foot-five one of the taller men in the league, ducked and watched the stick helicopter harmlessly over his head.

  Before Campaneris could even consider charging (not that he would have, dwarfed as he was by his opponent), plate umpire Nestor Chylak put him in a bear hug and walked him back to the A’s dugout. Chylak couldn’t stop Martin, however, who flew across the field to challenge the entire A’s bench, only to be intercepted by a tag team of umpires Larry Barnett and John Rice. Martin was close enough for A’s players to hear him, however, and loudly defied Campaneris to come out and fight, then offered the same challenge to the rest of the Oakland ball club. The A’s opted to stay put, and only shook their heads sadly. After the game, first baseman Mike Epstein said, “Of course Martin was throwing at Campy. He’s done it too many times. And coming out to fight, that’s Martin’s way of firing up his club. A lot of guys on his club have confided to me that they’re tired of coming out on the field.”

  For his part, Campaneris was fined five hundred dollars and suspended by AL president Joe Cronin for the remainder of the ALCS and the first seven games of the following season. He was, however, allowed to participate in the World Series. He also brought the tactics of Furillo and Martin into the modern era, kicking off what could be the best decade for bat throwing in baseball history. Three years after Campaneris’s effort, Rod Carew threw his bat at Gaylord Perry. The following season, in 1976, Bill Madlock targeted Giants pitcher Jim Barr. A year after that, Pittsburgh’s Frank Taveras threw his bat at Reds reliever Joe Hoerner. In 1978, Reggie Jackson threw one at Milwaukee’s Mike Caldwell. (Unlike his counterparts, Caldwell escalated things by picking up the bat and trying to break it.) Two years later, Philadelphia’s Dickie Noles was suspended, like Delmon Young twenty-six years later, for throwing his bat not at an opposing player but at an umpire, Joe West.

  The trend tapered off as the decade turned. It would be almost ten years before another such noteworthy incident, which came courtesy of Pedro Guerrero of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who flung his bat at Mets pitcher David Cone in 1988. Not much had changed, however, because, as in every incident above, Guerrero failed to make contact. “I think he had too much pine tar on his hands,” joked Cone after the game. “The bat had good movement on it because it tailed away from me.”

  Ironically, had Albert Belle thrown a bat instead of a forearm, he’d probably have been better off in the eyes of the viewing public. It’s the way of the Code: baseball thuggery (and make no mistake, bat throwing is baseball thuggery) is inevitably tolerated better than general thuggery. (After all, any barroom tough can punch a guy in the face.)

  Just ask Fernando Vina.

  14

  Off the Field

  There’s retaliation from pitcher to hitter, from runner to fielder, from hitter to pitcher, and from fielder to runner. Baseball players of every temperament and position will, if sufficiently goaded, find a way to get back at opponents they feel have done them wrong. But all this sniping and slapping and sliding and tagging pales next to the most dangerous form of retaliation: Should management wish to retaliate against a player, as long as no contracts or laws are broken, there’s not a hell of a lot that player can do about it.

 
In March 1972, Charlie Finley, the notorious A’s owner loathed by many of those who played for him, set his sights on outfielder Tommy Davis. Davis had been one of Oakland’s key reserves the previous season, hitting .324 over seventy-nine games, with a .464 mark as a pinch-hitter. Though Finley appreciated Davis’s bat, he was less fond of the player’s social dexterity; the previous winter, Davis had introduced A’s pitcher Vida Blue, the reigning AL MVP and Cy Young winner, to attorney Bob Gerst, who took to representing Blue in contract negotiations. This was an unusual step in the era before player agents, and Blue’s holdout through spring training sent Finley over the edge. Despite Davis’s .563 Cactus League average, his owner plotted to get even, and as painfully as possible.

  Finley waited until the A’s made the three-hour bus trip from Phoenix to Yuma for a game against the Padres, waiting to inform Davis of his release until the team had pulled into the ballpark lot. Stunned, the player was left to his own devices to secure a trip back to town.

  This sort of retaliation is hardly a one-way street, of course. Ballplayers have their own methods of exacting revenge against management; sometimes they can even be the same ones they use against opponents. In 1975, for example, Frank Robinson was the player-manager of the Indians when Cleveland claimed pitcher Bob Reynolds off waivers. Reynolds performed adequately for the team down the stretch, and the following year had high hopes of making the roster out of spring training. Instead, he was sent to the Triple-A Toledo Mud Hens of the International League.