The Baseball Codes

by Jason Turbow

  It was another divisive issue in a clubhouse that had already been splintering for months. After initially declining to comment, Vaughn addressed the matter the following day, in the most conspicuous way possible—at high volume, in the middle of the Angels locker room, and within easy earshot of both media and his teammates, Percival included. “I’m sick and fucking tired of this shit!” Vaughn bellowed. “I can give a fuck what somebody else says! I’ve been fighting in brawls all my career, and if I was down on the bench I would have been in that one. But I was in the clubhouse, watching the game on TV and feeling like I was in the fucking Twilight Zone!”

  Percival, playing cards nearby, looked up at the tirade, then nonchalantly returned to his game. “I’ve been telling these assholes the same thing all year—keep that shit out of the papers!” Vaughn continued. “You got a problem with somebody, say it to his face and keep it inside [the clubhouse]!”

  At that point, Vaughn, realizing that the best defense is a good offense, turned the tables and made it personal. “Take your beating like a man,” he said, in comments obviously pointed toward Percival’s defeat a day earlier. “You get your shit wrapped around the pole, don’t throw at the guy—get the next guy out and get out of the inning.” Next, Vaughn tore into the notion of teammate protection, which for Percival meant on-field brawn during a fight, but for Vaughn meant something different. “I’ve been getting drilled all year. Anyone protecting me?” he screamed. “We’ve been getting drilled all year. Ain’t nobody doing shit! Nobody’s been on their backs once, not one time. You call that a fucking team?”

  It was a lot of anger for any player to put on open display, let alone someone who was brought in during the off-season to be a team leader, at a price tag of eighty million dollars. It was the clearest-cut example of a deeply fractured clubhouse, and though the Angels’ problems certainly ran deeper than Vaughn versus Percival, the spat serves to illustrate one of the most universally observed of the unwritten rules: Everybody joins a fight.

  Most of the Code is about respect for the opponent, but this rule is about respecting teammates. It’s the most basic of sacrifices, and the fact that the majority of baseball fights don’t involve much actual fighting is almost incidental; it’s a matter of loyalty that can’t be ignored. Hall of Famer Ernie Banks called a player’s failure to join a fight “the ultimate violation of being a teammate.”

  “The player that didn’t come out would lose a lot of respect from his teammates, not being there to help them out,” said outfielder Dave Collins. “It’s probably not a situation where he could ever work his way back into good graces. It’s one of those things like cheating on your wife—it may be forgiven, but it will never be forgotten.”

  It’s one of the things that ran George Foster out of New York in 1986. Foster’s rapidly declining performance and highest-in-baseball salary also had something to do with it, but on July 22, Foster lost most—if not all—of whatever teammate support he had in one swift display of inaction. It started when Cincinnati’s Eric Davis inadvertently knocked into Mets third baseman Ray Knight during a play at third base. Shoving became punching, the dugouts emptied, and one of the rare baseball fights in which actual blows were thrown was under way. It would be the most brutal brawl in which many of the players ever participated, with violent skirmishes breaking out across the diamond for a sustained period of time. “I have three guys on me, people are trying to kill each other, it’s all-out mayhem,” said Mets outfielder Kevin Mitchell, a rookie that season. “And one guy is on the pine, watching it all happen.”

  That guy was Foster, sitting on the bench, arms folded. He had been there all along.

  “I know what was expected of me,” said Foster shortly thereafter, “but there were two reasons I didn’t run on the field. For one thing, you can easily get hurt. And if there’s a fight, the umpires are supposed to break it up. Another thing, I believe that violence has no place in the game. I’m against the violence factor, and I’m against fighting on the field when it’s not necessary. I’m a Christian man, and I also take serious the idea of being a role model. When there’s a fight, you can just imagine kids saying, ‘Hey, wasn’t that great, all those punches thrown in the game yesterday?’ … I don’t want to be a part of the negative side of baseball if I can help it.” Just over two weeks later, in August, Foster was released. Two months after that, the Mets won the World Series.

  Foster wasn’t the only man in baseball with a low opinion of violence, but the important thing about ballplayers taking to the field in defense of teammates is not that they throw punches, it’s that they simply make an appearance. Many even go out as peacemakers in an effort to keep a fight from escalating. “A guy can walk out there, find somebody he knows, and try to look upset,” said Andy Van Slyke. “I did that. If it didn’t involve me, I’d try to find somebody I knew and just go up and grab him by his shirt collar and say, ‘Hey, how’s the family doing?’ Let the guys who were upset beat each other up.” Derek Jeter once took heat from teammate Chad Curtis for laughing with Seattle’s Alex Rodriguez as the field cleared after a fight between the Yankees and the Mariners in 1999. The pair’s main mistake wasn’t joking around instead of fighting—it was failing to look more serious as they did so.

  “Participants on the outer barrier of these things, guys who are basically just talking to somebody, are acceptable,” said longtime big-leaguer Darrin Jackson. “As long as they aren’t still sitting in the dugout or out in the bullpen.”

  “If you don’t have the respect of your teammates,” said outfielder Dave Roberts of those who fail to participate, “it’s a recipe for disaster.”

  The thrill that accompanies baseball fights can be felt throughout the ballpark, but nowhere more keenly than in the dugouts. For relievers in a bullpen, on the other hand, any simmering animosity that serves as the prelude to a brawl is largely lost. Before a game’s middle innings, relievers are often doing nothing more involved than spitting sunflower seeds and passing time; when called upon to join a fight, they enter cold, usually with little idea about what’s actually going on.

  There’s also the matter of getting there. Should a scrum form in the middle of the diamond, bullpen-bound relievers must traverse the breadth of the field to reach it, often running alongside the men they’ll soon be expected to fight. “That’s the strangest thing about baseball fights,” said Jack McDowell. “Relievers will jump out of the bullpen and run together until they get to the pile, and within two minutes they may be brawling, but it’s not like they stop right there and fight. How stupid is it that you’re running in with these guys?”

  When the Phillies and Padres brawled in 1985, the San Diego bullpen was no exception. As soon as John Denny and Tim Flannery began slugging each other near third base, San Diego’s backup catcher Bruce Bochy and closer Goose Gossage hopped the bullpen fence and ran for the infield, the rest of the relief corps a step behind. The problem in this situation wasn’t lack of desire, or even lack of proximity—it was Bochy’s legs. After ten seasons of professional squatting, seven of them in the big leagues, Bochy’s feet tended to kick out when he walked, an endless source of amusement for his teammates. Unfortunately for the Padres relievers, the combination of having to navigate both the bullpen mound and the catcher’s extremities while keeping their eyes on the fight proved to be too much; pitchers Tim Stoddard and Greg Booker clipped Bochy’s ankles, and all three tumbled to the ground. “I raced toward the infield, but I arrived there alone,” said Gossage. “I looked back toward our bullpen and saw Bochy, Stoddard, and Booker all tangled up, a cloud of dust billowing over them.”

  “I give myself credit because I was the first one out of the bullpen,” said Bochy. “Unfortunately, I couldn’t run very well, so everyone was catching up…. Those two guys who went over me are probably five hundred pounds alone, and then myself, so the guys behind them all went down also. We were all just laying there on the ground, laughing. Meanwhile, Flannery’s getting beat up awhile, so h
e’s wondering where we were.”

  It could have been worse. Had that happened in a place like Milwaukee County Stadium, which featured adjacent bullpens, members of both teams could have tripped over Bochy as they streamed from the same gate in the fence. One time, after the third benches-clearing incident in a mid-1970s game there between the Brewers and Indians, Cleveland reliever Dave LaRoche tried to approach the situation from a practical standpoint as players filtered back from the field. “This is getting to be a joke,” he told the slowly moving mass of ballplayers. “Why don’t we, one time, save some energy and start a fight here, and make them come running all the way out to us?”

  Alas, said LaRoche: “It never happened.”

  In the broadcast booth at Jacobs Field in Cleveland, Angels announcer Rex Hudler watched Troy Percival hit David Justice—spurring the fight that led to Mo Vaughn’s tirade—and got fired up himself. A rookie radio man, he had been a major-leaguer until just the season before. As ballplayers streamed from the dugouts to join the fight, Hudler felt the tug of the contest and started yelling on the air for Angels players to “go ahead and get after it, guys!”

  “I wanted to fight along with them,” he said. “I was looking for the Indians’ broadcaster, Rick Manning. Broadcaster to broadcaster—that was my initial reaction. I couldn’t throw down with the players, and I saw Rick down there a couple of booths over, and you know what? I wanted to throw down with him. I didn’t have a clue on how to broadcast.”

  Hudler’s radio partner, Steve Physioc, offered some timely instruction on appropriate behavior, but the best lesson the broadcaster learned about baseball fights that day was rooted entirely on the field. Watching the drama unfold in the Angels dugout, he came to one primary conclusion: Vaughn’s problem wasn’t that he failed to join his teammates on the field for the fight, it was that he only made it as far as the dugout. “I learned that if you’re in the clubhouse and a fight breaks out, stay there,” Hudler said. Had the slugger done that, his absence might never have been noticed.

  Of course, some clubhouse-bound players refuse to let a little thing like proximity to the field deter them from joining a fight. “In my day, even guys who were inside and out of the game came out in shower shoes with their shirts off,” said Ray Fosse. “Everybody came out—that’s one rule you’d better not violate. I don’t care if you come out five minutes after it started, you had better be there.”

  Yankees pitcher Luis Tiant did precisely that, emerging from the shower to join a fight with the Milwaukee Brewers wearing nothing but a towel, with a cigar clamped firmly in his teeth. Said Brewers outfielder Gorman Thomas: “It wasn’t a pretty sight.”

  “It’s the worst feeling,” said former Astros pitcher Jim Deshaies, about being in the clubhouse when violence erupts. “‘Oh shit, a brawl broke out and I’m up here.’ It was a long run down the hallways in the Dome.”

  All of which undermines Vaughn’s assertion that he was simply unable to reach the field in time. The Angels slugger eventually implicated the ankle that he injured on opening day, nearly five months earlier, saying it slowed him just enough to miss the battle. Vaughn did have a history of standing up for teammates: With the Red Sox in 1992, he stared down the entire New York Yankees bench after teammate Roger Clemens hit Matt Nokes; when White Sox outfielder George Bell charged Aaron Sele, Vaughn was the first one at the scene and knocked Bell to the ground with a vicious forearm before damage could be done to his pitcher; and when Toronto’s Todd Stottlemyre hit Andre Dawson, Vaughn was the first one out of the dugout.

  In the end, though, it didn’t matter. Whatever good standing the first baseman held within the Angels clubhouse evaporated, and the issue further divided the team. Two days after the fight, Angels manager Terry Collins quit. Exactly four weeks later, general manager Bill Bavasi turned in his own resignation. At the end of the season, the team’s farm director, scouting director, twelve senior scouts, and nearly every coach were dismissed.

  Vaughn played two more seasons for Anaheim and was traded to the New York Mets with two years and about thirty-five million dollars left on his contract. He was sixteen years too late to join George Foster on the bench, which is too bad—the two might have had something to talk about.

  23

  The Clubhouse Police

  Maintaining harmony within any sizable assemblage is always a challenge. Camaraderie is a finely tuned mechanism, and keeping people spirited and accountable for their actions—let alone willing to quickly resolve the inevitable litany of ticky-tack disputes—can be a daunting task. When that group consists of twenty-five athletes, many of them Type A personalities who have six months of proximity every year during which to drive each other batty, harmony can take some coercion.

  Not surprisingly, baseball clubhouses are laden with unwritten rules that govern the behavior of their citizenry. There are systems to keep rookies in line, to ensure that veterans are afforded their due perks, and to bring a combination of levity and cohesion to a group that could otherwise be dominated by the intensely focused and mirthless among them.

  Just as regular society operates within a hierarchical system—some people issue orders, some carry them out, and the rest of us are merely affected by it all—so too does a clubhouse. A careful concoction of veteran status and on-field performance helps determine the upper end of any pecking order, and clubhouse culture rewards those at the top of the food chain. It’s the stars who are afforded choice seats on team transportation—“We all knew where Carlton Fisk’s seat was,” said Jack McDowell. “He was third from the back on the left side. You just knew that”—with veterans afforded the next selections, and younger players forced to accept whatever’s left over. (Once, when Tony Gwynn spied Rickey Henderson sitting with the rookies on the team bus, he called him over to the veterans’ section, reminding him that as one of the game’s elder statesmen he had tenure. The future Hall of Famer’s classic response: “Rickey don’t have ten year. Rickey have eighteen year!”) The system dates back to train travel, when a team’s starting lineup was assigned berths in the middle of the sleeper car while the reserves were placed over the wheel wells. “Bobby Brown says that anybody that rode over wheels for his whole career deserves whatever he got,” said Charlie Silvera, who spent virtually all of his ten-year career backing up Yogi Berra on the Yankees and sleeping in the most rattly section of every train car in which he rode.

  The order extends to locker placement, with the team’s biggest stars usually located away from the high-traffic areas of the locker room. In Milwaukee, the visitors’ clubhouse manager organized players in order of experience, so the most seasoned veterans went to the far side of the room, away from the door. “It was kind of neat,” said Bert Blyleven. “Your goal was to get near the toilet, because that was near the shower. So you always felt like, if you got closer to the toilet, then you were really something. It’s not often that people want to get real close to a toilet.”

  When Dusty Baker first came to the Braves as a nineteen-year-old September call-up in 1968, he learned a quick and important lesson in big-league hierarchy. The Braves were in San Francisco, staying at the Jack Tar Hotel, and manager Lum Harris had implemented a midnight curfew. Baker was at a nearby bar with teammates Hank Aaron, Joe Torre, and Felipe Alou, who at ten minutes to midnight instructed him to return to the hotel. “I said, ‘What about you guys?’” recalled Baker. “They said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get there in time.’”

  Baker made it back with two minutes to spare, and immediately ran into Braves coach Jim Busby, who was checking off players’ names as they arrived. When Baker scanned the list, he saw that Aaron, Torre, and Alou had already been checked in. “I’m being a dumb rookie and asked the guys the next day, ‘Damn, how’d you get back so quick?’” Baker said. “It didn’t take me long to figure out that there’s certain things you have to earn. They knew those guys were going to be ready and would come prepared to play.”

  Ascending the clubhouse hierarchy is not s
o different from climbing the corporate ladder at a Fortune 500 company. The more that people in power see demonstrations of competence and responsibility in a person, the more trust they feel and the more leeway they grant. It’s why thirty-nine-year-old Jack Morris, eighteen years and 244 wins into his major-league career, was openly allowed to return to his Montana farm to tend to his wheat crop between starts with the Cleveland Indians in 1994, though no similar privileges were extended to others on the staff. (The tactic ended up backfiring on the Indians when Morris decided that he cared more about his wheat than his pitching and effectively gave up on a one-million-dollar contract when he refused to alter what the team felt had become an untenable travel schedule.) A decade or so later, Roger Clemens had a similar deal with the Houston Astros, in which he was allowed to skip road trips where he wasn’t scheduled to pitch.

  But it’s more than travel arrangements. When Ted Williams refused to wear a necktie in the late 1940s, he got scant argument from Red Sox manager Joe McCarthy, even though the skipper insisted that everyone else on the club be so attired. When a sportswriter asked McCarthy why he let Williams get away with it, the manager offered a simple answer. “I want to be fair,” he said. “Any other gentleman on this club hits .390, he won’t have to wear a necktie either.” Just down the Eastern Seaboard, Joe DiMaggio had a perk in the form of an on-field caddy—backup outfielder Hank Workman, who was devoted to making sure a lit Chesterfield cigarette was ready when DiMaggio came in from the field.