by Jason Turbow
“You staked out your turf, and you worked around those who had it,” said Cecil Cooper, who played seventeen years for the Red Sox and Brewers. “If I’m a star, I get the first shot at seating and you get what’s left. I get premium time with the trainer and you work around it. That’s how it worked when I was a player. Superstars came first and the rest of us brought up the rear. And that’s the way it should be.”
“Let’s put it this way,” said former Giants reliever Matt Herges. “If Barry [Bonds] calls down to get his luggage at the hotel and I call down at the same time, there’s a pretty good chance Barry is getting his first.”
When players rebel against the established order—or even when they simply mess something up—there are systems in place to right the ship quickly. The most noteworthy is the kangaroo court, baseball’s informal clubhouse version of the judicial system—regular convenings of the team in which ballpark justice is meted out to any reprobate member by a jury of his peers. Players are kept in line for both on-field and off-field indiscretions through a system of small fines and good-natured ridicule from their teammates. No offense is too small.
Take, for example, Jay Mazzone, the Baltimore Orioles’ batboy in 1967. He was an ordinary kid except for one thing—hooks where his hands should have been, the result of a childhood accident. Some players were understandably confused about how to act around the boy, unsure what to do or say, until a single moment in kangaroo court brought everybody together.
Baltimore’s court was enthusiastically led by star outfielder Frank Robinson, who on the day in question was calling for a decision on some long-forgotten offense. He put it to the court to decide whether a fine should be levied via a thumbs-up, thumbs-down vote. As soon as the result was tallied, Robinson affixed his gaze directly on the batboy. “Jay,” he said, “you’re fined for not voting.” Amid the gales of laughter, it became clear that Mazzone needed no special treatment, and he was quickly accepted for what he was, not for what he wasn’t. “Somebody even made a big cardboard hand with a thumb,” he said, “so I could take part in future votes.”
Robinson presided over his court like few others, donning a mop-head wig and using a bat for a gavel. He kept players in line for legitimate mistakes and lightened the tension with outrageous accusations, such as the one against Mazzone. Another of his victims was Brooks Robinson, whose performance in the 1970 World Series was so spectacular—he hit .429 and played consistently wondrous defense—that Frank Robinson eventually fined him for showboating.
Courts are generally made up of a judge (who must be blessed with a strong personality and quick wit), a secretary (who records the charges, which can be brought up by any member of the team against any other member of the team, as long as a witness is procured), and a treasurer (who collects and holds the fine money—traditionally between five and a hundred dollars a pop—which at the end of the season is sometimes donated to charity and sometimes used for a blowout party).
Typically, all charges can be challenged, but if the defendant is overruled, the fine doubles. Of course, the defendant almost never prevails. “That’s the kangaroo code,” said Oscar Gamble. “You never win.” (With the Mets in 2006, David Wright got thrown out at first base after he rounded the bag following a single, and when it was later brought up in kangaroo court he pleaded not guilty, under the auspice that “being a spoiled athlete of this modern era, the player is never wrong and the coach is always wrong.” He then accused first-base coach Jerry Manuel of dereliction of duties, but Manuel’s argument successfully convinced judge Tom Glavine to clear his name. Wright’s fine was subsequently doubled, in addition to his being publicly presented with the Tom Emanski instructional baserunning videotape. “Jerry can only suggest that David run hard through the bag,” said Glavine. “If David doesn’t listen, that’s hardly Jerry’s fault.”)
In the Orioles clubhouse, Frank Robinson initiated rookie Don Baylor into the system after the twenty-one-year-old boasted to a reporter that he’d break into the starting lineup as soon as he got “in the groove.” Baylor was fined for the infraction, tagged with the nickname “Groove” (which stuck with him through his career), and then had to suffer the indignity of spending virtually the entire season in the minors. Baylor, however, had learned a valuable lesson about the power of the court, and quickly stepped into the judge’s role after leaving the Orioles. One of his victims was Red Sox utility man Steve Lyons, who was fined by Baylor in 1986 for wearing eye black even though he was not in the starting lineup. Lyons knew better than to fight the ruling, despite having what he felt was a quality explanation. “I played a bunch of different positions, and once they wanted me to go play third base for an inning,” he said. “I didn’t have my third baseman’s glove with me, so I had to run back into the locker room to get it. Baylor fined me for that. Later, I thought there’s no way that I wasn’t going to be prepared. I made sure I had everything. It was a day game, so that included eye black. If I had to pinch-hit, or if someone got hurt and they ran me out to center field, I didn’t want to have to go put eye black on. I became a favorite target for Don.”
When Baylor was the judge in the Yankees court, fines were levied against pitchers who gave up hits on 0-2 counts. Ron Guidry reacted by giving Baylor a hundred-dollar deposit in advance of fines he knew would be coming, since, he said, “I throw strikes even on 0-2 counts.” Phil Niekro gave Baylor similar advances for the weekly fines he knew he’d accrue when, out of superstition, he refused to stand on the top step of the dugout for the national anthem.
It wasn’t just Baylor, of course—courts across baseball pile up fines. After Ken Griffey, Jr., had a rough first month in Cincinnati, batting .217 in April 2000, after the Reds acquired him from Seattle, he was fined by a mop-wig-bedecked Barry Larkin for “imitating an All-Century Player.” As a member of the Pittsburgh Pirates, Barry Bonds was fined for standing next to a batting-cage tee so he could practice taking pitches. Yankees coach Don Zimmer was once fined for simply being Don Zimmer. Jim Eisenreich was so perfect in Kansas City—he didn’t drink, wasn’t loud, and never embarrassed himself—that judge Jamie Quirk fined him for his lack of previous fines. Guys are dinged for poor wardrobe selection and for failing to pick up the tab frequently enough. On-field infractions include failing to hit the cutoff man and forgetting how many outs have been recorded. Fred Stanley was fined in the Oakland A’s court for overacting his shock and pain in response to a pitch that didn’t actually hit him, before eventually taking first base.
With the Mets in 1991, Vince Coleman once took pity on former Cardinals teammate Willie McGee, whose equipment had been stolen from the visitors’ locker room at Shea Stadium, and loaned him a glove. He was subsequently fined for aiding the enemy—ten dollars for each ball McGee caught.
Although they’re usually good-natured, kangaroo courts have been known to get uncomfortable. In the Pittsburgh Pirates clubhouse in the 1980s, one player felt the need to bring up a teammate on the relatively typical charge of being seen out on the town with an ugly woman. (Former Tiger Jim Price recalled a teammate who was once similarly fined because his date “could eat corn through a picket fence.”) The case on the Pirates was so egregious, insisted the player, the woman so ugly, that the fine must be doubled. “We’re all sitting around listening, and when he brought up the player’s name we all got real quiet and said, ‘Sit down, sit down!’ as quickly as we could,” said one member of the team. That’s because, unlike the plaintiff, most of the guys in the room knew that the player—who was sitting there among them—hadn’t just been out with this woman on the night in question, he had asked for her hand in marriage. “Usually there’s razzing going on, but instead there was this dead silence,” said the player. “It was pretty awkward.”
There were also awards handed out. In the 1970s, the Orioles presented the Don Buford Red-Ass Award, a red-painted toilet seat, to players who grew exceptionally angry during a game. The Indians had a similar totem, with the winner being responsible f
or transporting the seat from town to town until he was finally able to pass it along to the next red-ass. The offending member of the Kansas City Royals would find a large gong (which wasn’t just similar to the one on The Gong Show—it was the one from The Gong Show, courtesy of first baseman Pete LaCock, whose father was Peter Marshall of Hollywood Squares fame) in his locker after the game. The Houston version involved a stuffed skunk, which would stay in the player’s locker through media interviews and the ensuing questions about why on earth he had a stuffed skunk in his locker.
For a time, the Milwaukee Brewers awarded their star of the game a three-foot rubber phallus, which was placed inside his locker for the duration of the post-game activity. It didn’t garner much notice until 1987, when Juan Nieves threw a no-hitter. “He has this thing hanging in his locker, just dangling there,” said Brewers catcher Bill Schroeder. “So here’s ESPN and everybody interviewing him, and you see this thing hanging over his shoulder. Then you see a hand reach in and grab it and pull it away. It was [general manager] Harry Dalton! That was our kangaroo court, and it was the funniest thing in the world.”
Kangaroo courts are just one of many venues in which a ballplayer can express his feelings; most others are far less group-oriented, and virtually all involve a mechanism for blowing off steam. These are men who must regularly handle the pressure of high expectations and public scrutiny. Normal people have therapy; ballplayers have the practical joke.
In a big-league clubhouse, pranks are afforded more than a passing fancy—they’re the basis on which much of a team’s communication is built. The one most associated with baseball is the time-tested hotfoot, which at its essence involves the simple act of setting fire to a pair of shoes, with the condition that their owner’s feet must still be inside them.
Giving a hotfoot can be as simple as igniting some shoelaces, but the classic version involves attaching a lit cigarette to a book of matches, then taping the package to the heel of an unsuspecting victim. The cigarette acts as a fuse, giving everyone in the dugout time to prepare for the impending show as it burns down. When ember hits match, the flame startles (if not scars) the target, who inevitably vows revenge. If he’s lucky, his shoes haven’t been presoaked in rubbing alcohol to augment the flame. “It hurts,” said David Cone, who gave better than he got over the course of his career. “It burns. Baseball players are very fastidious about their shoes, their spikes, their footwear, and it gets ruined, absolutely ruined by a hotfoot. And it hurts. It burns your ankle, it burns your calf.”
Ambitious players are known to crawl under the dugout bench in order to set flame to someone’s dangling shoes; more frequently than one would imagine, there’s also someone behind them, returning the favor before the original act can even be perpetrated. Pitcher Moe Drabowsky would wait under a tarp at Tiger Stadium for his teammates to line up for the national anthem, then get them in bunches as they faced the flag. (Drabowsky was so relentless in hotfooting a particular member of the Baltimore media that the guy eventually spent most of his time in the clubhouse staring down at his shoes; Drabowsky responded by setting fire to his notes.) Dick Bosman laid absolute waste to his teammates’ footwear during a 1966 doubleheader at Washington’s RFK Stadium: “In eighteen innings of baseball I got every guy out there,” he said. “And that’s quite a challenge.” In the 1970s, the New York Yankees made a habit of crawling between rows on their airplane to set fire to the shoes of teammates who slept. In the 1980s, pitcher Ray Searage attached an alligator clip to the end of a car antenna, which he used to extend his reach when surreptitiously applying flame to shoe.
The undisputed master of the craft, however, was pitcher Bert Blyleven. The right-hander pitched in the major leagues for twenty-two years, and if Cooperstown applied the instigation of podiatric discomfort as one of its entry criteria, he would have been enshrined five years after his 1992 retirement. How good was he? For a time, the fire extinguisher in the Angels’ clubhouse read “In case of Blyleven. Pull.”
Ordinary hotfoot artists settle for wrecking their teammates’ cleats, but Blyleven was so good that he took the rare step of drawing the opposition into his line of fire. In 1990, the pitcher, then with the Angels, set his sights on Seattle manager Jim Lefebvre, who made the mistake of conducting an interview near the Anaheim dugout. Never mind that Lefebvre was there at the request of Angels analyst Joe Torre; Blyleven was deeply offended. There was, in the pitcher’s mind, only one appropriate response.
“I crawled behind him on my hands and knees,” Blyleven said. “And I not only lit one shoe on fire, I lit them both on fire.” Torre saw it all, but continued the interview as if nothing was happening. As Blyleven retreated to the dugout to enjoy the fruits of his labor, he was dismayed to see that Lefebvre refused to play along. “We all stood there and watched the flames starting,” said Blyleven. “The smoke was starting to come in front of [Lefebvre’s] face, but he was not going to back down. By God, he was going to continue this interview. And Joe was laughing, trying not to roll.”
Torre offered up an apology as soon as the interview wrapped, but Lefebvre was too busy trying to extinguish his feet to pay much attention. He also knew exactly whom to blame. Blyleven, the following day’s starter for the Angels, found out later that Lefebvre offered a hundred dollars to anyone on his team who could hit a line drive off the pitcher’s face. Part of the reason the manager was so angry was that he was deeply superstitious about his shoes; in fact, he continued to wear the scorched pair for several weeks, despite the damage.
In the end, Lefebvre wasn’t the prank’s only dupe. “Bert really screwed me up with that one, because Lefebvre thought I was in on it, and I wasn’t,” said Torre. “Lefebvre didn’t think it was very funny—they were brand-new shoes and he got embarrassed in public. Blyleven was nuts—absolutely nuts.”
Hotfoots are a staple, but the pantheon of great baseball pranks extends far beyond fire. Babe Ruth once took a teammate to a woman’s house on a blind double date, and in a prearranged skit pretended to be shot by the husband of his “date” while urging his teammate, pitcher Ed Wells, to flee. When a thoroughly disoriented Wells eventually returned to the team hotel, he was greeted by numerous mournful players and told that Ruth was upstairs. “Ed, Babe’s been shot. He’s in bad shape and asking for you,” said second baseman Tony Lazzeri. Wells was taken to Ruth’s darkened room, where the slugger lay on his bed with ketchup smeared across his shirt. All it took was outfielder Earle Combs to say, “He’s dying,” and Wells fainted where he stood. It wasn’t until Ruth himself began laughing that his victim believed it to truly be a joke.
Pepper Martin and Dizzy Dean once passed pre-game hours by donning workmen’s clothes and redecorating a hall at the upscale Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia with whatever tools they could find—in the middle of a banquet. Cardinals pitcher Joe Hoerner took advantage of a tardy post-game bus driver and leaped behind the wheel to ferry his teammates back to their hotel at high speed, whereupon he parked the carriage in a flower bed atop the Marriott sign. In the early 1980s, an intrepid band of Yankees spent an evening with a high-powered slingshot, shooting water balloons two city blocks from the roof of their Boston hotel. The list goes on and on.
A full examination of the lengths to which players will go for a good prank is impossible, so one will serve here as an example for the rest. It began in Milwaukee in the 1970s, and features at its core a pig, a hotel room, and an enduring mystery. Whenever the Brewers of that era stage a reunion, it’s not long before the pig story is retold. The only detail left out has been the name of the culprit, because he never stepped forward. While members of the team have their suspicions, nobody ever found him out … until now.
Bob McClure was a fun-loving reliever for those Brewers clubs, someone who proved, if nothing else, that he could take as good as he gave. The story started with his Sunday routine before day games, for which he holed up with a newspaper in the long cinderblock outhouse behind the outfield fence at Milwauk
ee County Stadium. It was a cool place for an American League pitcher to pass the morning in the shade of the bleachers, escaping the summer heat while his teammates took batting practice.
When the door slammed shut on McClure in the middle of one of these siestas, the pitcher attributed it to a gust of wind. But when he tried to exit, the door wouldn’t budge, even though it had no lock. With just a hint of panic, the pitcher pushed again … and again. Soon he was exerting so much energy in his frantic bid to escape that he had to stop for periodic breathers. The day was growing hotter, and McClure worked up a sweat; eventually he kicked the air vents from the walls and stripped down to his underwear. “I bet I lost about seven or eight pounds in there,” he said. “It was hot.”
After a half-hour, the pitcher was able to wedge the door open just enough to squeeze through (“I still remember the scrapes across my chest”), whereupon he saw that someone had taken the rope from a flagpole on the other side of the outhouse and pulled it so taut to reach the doorknob that the pole had bowed under the pressure. Once it was affixed to the handle, the rope’s tension kept the door from opening; it was only as the fibers started to give that McClure was able, finally, to free himself. (He found out later that members of the visiting Minnesota Twins, coming out for their own batting practice, had been told by his mystery assailant to watch the flagpole, that someone was locked in the lavatory and it would bounce every time he tried to get out.) He put on his clothes and returned directly to the clubhouse, as if nothing had ever happened. “I would say that, if someone gets you, never let them know that they got you,” he said. “I think it’s inappropriate, if someone really gets you good, to overreact. Don’t get mad, just get even.” The problem was that he had no idea upon whom to visit his revenge.
