The 34-Ton Bat

by Steve Rushin

  So Foulproof lived to see some iteration of the Foulproof Cup flourish in baseball. But the Beanproof Cap, worn on the head and not in the pants, was still met with metaphorical hardheadedness. Ray Chapman was the only big leaguer to die in a baseball game, but baseball players died every year, without fail, when struck in the head by a thrown or batted ball. Even those wearing helmets are not entirely safe. In the span of twenty-four hours in July 1963, two boys—a fourteen-year-old in Alexandria, Louisiana, and a twelve-year-old in Jackson, Mississippi—were killed in organized play. That spring, three others were killed, among them fourteen-year-old David Bremser of Omaha, struck just beneath his plastic batting helmet. The next summer, eighteen-year-old Tom Douglas, playing for Cascade College in Portland, Oregon, died after being struck near the ear on the lower part of his helmet. Less than two weeks later, a hundred miles down the road in Eugene, a sixteen-year-old boy, Joseph Ziegler, was killed after being struck in the helmet, which improved safety but couldn’t guarantee it.

  At the highest level of the game, helmets were still met with reluctance and occasional ridicule. In Kansas City in 1964, Jimmy Piersall walked to the plate wearing a Beatles wig where his helmet should have been. (Home plate umpire Frank Umont made him doff his hair before hitting.) Ted Williams famously declined to wear one, suggesting it impeded his progress when lighting out of the batter’s box for first base.

  They took some getting used to—Joe Garagiola thought his should have had a miner’s lamp affixed to the front—and helmets were often scapegoated for a hitter’s failure. Mickey Mantle flung his helmet into the afternoon ether in a famous 1963 picture by Life photographer John Dominis, the helmet suspended upright, as if on an invisible head, between the second and third decks of Yankee Stadium.

  But every serious beaning left an impression, and not just metaphorically. When Dodgers rookie Lou Johnson was hit in the helmet by Astros pitcher Bob Bruce, the ball left an inch-deep valley that would have been left, in a less enlightened age, in Sweet Lou’s forehead. Instead of dying, Johnson was taken to Daniel Freeman Hospital in Los Angeles for twenty-four hours of precautionary observation. There, the outfielder engaged in that cliché of sports journalism and medicine: “resting comfortably,” his life saved by a $10.50 helmet from Branch Rickey’s American Baseball Cap company.

  That worrisome dent didn’t go unnoticed by Johnson’s teammates. Pitcher Don Drysdale immediately became a partner in Southern California’s Daytona Helmet Company, whose mission was to manufacture an undentable baseball helmet, something it was already doing for race car drivers and motorcyclists. The Dodgers’ team physician, Dr. Robert Woods, pronounced Daytona’s batting helmet “much more resistant” than the one Johnson had worn, though it was more expensive, at $14.95. Drysdale, perhaps the most feared brushback pitcher of his day, began passing them out to opposing hitters, among them Willie Mays and Dick Allen. When Drysdale handed one to Gene Freese before a game, the Pirates’ third baseman said nervously, “You trying to tell me something?”

  Long before they put on those motorcycle helmets—before they wore the Oakleys fashioned for California motocrossers, before they grew Fu Manchu mustaches, before they wore coiled titanium choker necklaces—baseball players had embraced other aspects of motorcycle culture.

  In the middle of the 1913 season, Reds pitcher Rube Benton was traveling “at a high rate of speed” when his motorcycle collided head-on with a streetcar in Cincinnati. Benton “was hurled to the street with terrific force,” according to the next day’s papers, whose headlines pronounced him NEAR DEATH and FATALLY HURT. Reds owner August (Garry) Herrmann—who had forbidden Benton to ride a motorcycle—obstinately declined to pay the player’s hospital expenses. The player, meanwhile, obstinately declined to die. On the contrary, Benton didn’t even retire, playing eleven more seasons, mostly with the Giants, and living to age forty-seven, when he died in another head-on collision, near Dothan, Alabama, this time in a car.

  These were men not overly concerned with personal safety. As a four-year-old in 1944, Mickey Lolich rode his tricycle into a parked motorcycle, which fell on him, breaking his right collarbone. The effect of the collision was twofold: Lolich began throwing with his left hand, and he developed an abiding fascination with the vehicle that maimed him. As a star left-handed pitcher for Detroit, he rode one of his seven motorcycles to Tiger Stadium most days, a sixty-mile round-trip from his home in suburban Washington, Michigan. Manager Mayo Smith asked him to drive a car, but Lolich wouldn’t oblige him.

  But Lolich did wear a helmet. He had a healthy fear of the projectile that got him to the ballpark, and also of the projectile he faced on arrival there. “I’m afraid of motorcycles,” he said in 1969, a year after he won three games in the World Series. “I wear a helmet, boots and gloves.” But he acknowledged in the same conversation that a baseball could be every bit as terrifying, and every bit as lethal. “When a man can throw a baseball upwards of 90 miles per hour, a strong batter can make good contact and send it back at him at better than 150 miles per hour,” he said. “I’m not gun shy, but I don’t like the odds somehow.”

  In baseball in 1969, the one hundredth anniversary of the professional game, these were not just encouraging words but—to use a phrase that entered the culture that summer—one giant leap. After all, a ballplayer who wouldn’t wear a motorcycle helmet on a motorcycle was exceedingly unlikely to wear a motorcycle helmet on a ball field.

  To celebrate the century that had passed that summer since Doug Allison and the Red Stockings first took the field as professionals, players in both leagues wore sleeve patches bearing the new logo of Major League Baseball. It was created by a graphic designer named Jerry Dior, from the New York marketing firm of Sandgren & Murtha, who delivered—for a one-time fee somewhere between $10,000 and $25,000—what has come to be known as the Silhouetted Batter, which sounds like the name of an Agatha Christie novel, though in fact it was less a whodunit than a who-is-it. The short-sleeved batter, silhouetted in white, poised to strike a ball, was widely presumed to be Harmon Killebrew. It is not, and in fact could be just about any square-jawed hitter of the era, except for one unmistakable detail: He is wearing a batting helmet.

  But many of the players who wore that logo were not wearing helmets. At the time, helmets were still regarded by some with suspicion and contempt. The White Sox were so bad in 1970 that no players complained when their names were removed from their jerseys, rolling back the club’s decade-old innovation. They no longer cared to be identified. It was like filing the VIN off a stolen car. After one game in that 106-loss season, infielder Syd O’Brien threw his helmet in the tunnel after striking out. A few days later, when the Sox charged O’Brien $17.50 for a new helmet, he asked if he could have the cracked helmet back. His request was obliged. O’Brien set the helmet down gently and ritually shattered it with a bat.

  More broadly, though, baseball was officially embracing helmets, and if owners wanted to mandate them, that off-season gave them the perfect cover to do so. At the 1970 winter meetings in Los Angeles, owners considered—or at least pretended to consider—Charlie Finley’s proposal of colored bases. His Oakland A’s had used gold bases for their home opener that season, and Finley wanted to paint first base red, second base yellow, and third base blue for all future games. The idea was the brainchild of a fifteen-year-old fan named Brian Barsamian, who had written to the A’s owner, suggesting that he turn the infield into a kind of primary-colored Legoland. “Under the lights it will be beautiful,” Finley said. “Simply beautiful.” At the winter meetings that December, ensconced in the Beverly Hilton, Finley’s fellow owners denied him—and us—that dream.

  They likewise demurred at Finley’s suggestion of a twenty-second clock for pitchers, and declined Pittsburgh’s avant-garde offer to use colored foul lines for the season ahead. Faced with these and other terrible ideas, the nine-man rules committee—including two players, Bill Singer and Joe Torre—passed the helmet requirement with little co
ntroversy, nor even much publicity. At a stroke, helmets were made mandatory for all major-league baseball players, beginning with the 1971 season.

  Or not all players. Those who were already in the big leagues were grandfathered in and allowed to do whatever they pleased. Some still declined to wear helmets, others subjected them to ritual abuse.

  On July 9, 1971, in the nineteenth inning of a scoreless game, Angels outfielder Tony Conigliaro stepped to the plate in Oakland, where he’d gone a dispiriting 0-for-7 against A’s pitchers Vida Blue and Rollie Fingers. As a member of the Red Sox in 1967, Tony C. was the toast of Boston when he was partially blinded by a pitched ball that fractured his left cheekbone. The helmet he was wearing was unable to protect him, and Conigliaro never again felt comfortable at bat. So when A’s reliever Bob Locker struck him out looking in the nineteenth in Oakland, dropping him to 0-for-8 on the night, Conigliaro was determined to hit something. He threw his helmet in the air, swung at it with his bat, and drove it sixty feet down the first-base line, at which time he was mercifully ejected from the game.

  After the 1–0 loss, Conigliaro called a press conference for five o’clock the next morning, an hour at which sportswriters would be constitutionally incapable of attending, as he well knew. And so it was that before dawn on July 10, 1971, Tony Conigliaro announced his retirement from baseball. “I have lost my sight,” he said, “and am on the edge of losing my mind.” He caught the first flight home to Boston.

  There, the city’s newest sports hero, Bobby Orr, was playing beautiful hockey for the Bruins while unencumbered by a helmet. “This is certainly no sport for sissies,” Orr said in 1971. “I’d feel unnatural in a helmet.” At the same time, the Minnesota North Stars’ forty-one-year-old goalie, Gump Worsley, refused to wear a mask, even though three years earlier, teammate Bill Masterton died after hitting his head on the ice in a game. “I’m too old to start now,” Worsley said. In 1971, North Stars goal-scorer Bill Goldsworthy was one of only twenty players in the National Hockey League to voluntarily wear a helmet. “It’s too hot,” Goldsworthy said, “but I’ll probably keep wearing it.” Three times, after all, he’d been knocked unconscious.

  All of which is to say that helmets were still too often a hard sell. Bob Montgomery, the backup catcher of the Red Sox, was one of those players protected by the grandfather clause who chose not to wear a helmet. Through 1979, he continued stepping to the plate against big-league pitchers wearing only the protective liner—the armored cap of Dr. Dandy.

  But there were other Dr. Dandys out there, too, men laboring to build a better helmet. In 1971, George “Doc” Lentz was serving his twenty-fifth year with the Minnesota Twins organization, having joined it as a trainer in 1946, when that franchise was still the Washington Senators. When helmets were made mandatory, Lentz announced his intention to design improved models for hitters, catchers, and umpires alike, and to reap great profits in the process. He didn’t—he died of a stroke in Silver Spring, Maryland, four years later—but then he’d already left a sufficient legacy of protection. In 1946, in Lentz’s second game with the Senators, third baseman Eddie Yost sprained his ankle. Lentz ran onto the field and sprayed Yost’s ankle with a mixture of ice and ethyl chloride. At the time, the unguent was used to numb boils prior to lancing. Boston third-base coach Joe Cronin, looking on from his box, asked Lentz, “What the heck is that?”

  That was the first recorded use of magic freeze spray on a field of play. “Two weeks later,” Lentz said, “everyone was using it.”

  Alas, even magic freeze spray, with its mystical misting powers, could not work on the head of a man hit by a major-league fastball. In 1978, Bob Montgomery was still not wearing a helmet when teammate Dwight Evans was hit in the head by Seattle pitcher Mike Parrott. Evans went to the hospital instead of the morgue thanks to the $17.50 helmet he wore. “If Evans had been wearing the thing Monty wears instead of the helmet, Evans could have been dead today,” said the shaken manager of both men, Red Sox skipper Don Zimmer, who knew whereof he spoke.

  Montgomery retired the next year, 1979, the same year the National Hockey League mandated helmets for its players. Monty was the last man in baseball bereft of a batting helmet. It took 110 years, but lessons had been learned. And even then they weren’t enough: Mike Coolbaugh, the thirty-five-year-old first-base coach of the Double-A Tulsa Drillers, was struck in the head and killed by a line drive in North Little Rock, Arkansas, in 2007. Within four months, at their annual meeting, major-league general managers decided that all base coaches in the big leagues would also wear helmets, effective immediately.

  As a Yankees bench coach, Zimmer had already done so. In the fifth inning of Game 1 of the 1999 American League Division Series, while seated in the home dugout, his left jaw was bruised and his left ear bloodied by a foul off the bat of Chuck Knoblauch. The next day, an advertising executive who had attended the game purchased an authentic U.S. Army helmet at a military surplus store, affixed a Yankees logo to the front, and delivered it to Yankee Stadium, where Zimmer wore it during Game 2—and during the Yankees’ subsequent World Series parade, and later on the cover of his autobiography. His much-concussed head carapaced in that army helmet was, Zimmer conceded, the most famous image of his career, literally a capstone to his life in baseball, and a worthy legacy.

  By 2011, helmets were part of every hockey player’s uniform and mandatory on motorcyclists in twenty-one states. But they were also required—by law or by social custom—on bicyclists, tricyclists, skateboarders, Rollerbladers, and users of nearly every other wheeled conveyance. Parents whose children didn’t wear a helmet while guiding a two-wheeled scooter down a flat road risked social exile in suburbia. And all the while baseball helmets grew earflapped and ever larger. When David Wright of the Mets was concussed by a ninety-four-mile-an-hour fastball in 2009, he wore on his return an enormous Rawlings S100 helmet that drew comparisons to Marvin the Martian, bobblehead dolls, and the Flintstones character the Great Gazoo. It looked as if it were inflated, like Roger Bresnahan’s Pneumatic Head Protector. “People can say what they want,” Wright said, “but at the end of the day, it’s about trying to protect yourself and be as safe as possible.”

  That same year, at the Mets’ Citi Field, Jerry Dior was honored for the MLB logo he had created forty years earlier. Commissioner Bud Selig said, “The Silhouetted Batter is instantly recognized worldwide,” and the helmet that batter wore had by then become blessedly and universally unremarkable.

  So had protection for a hitter’s hands, in the form of batting gloves, though they too were once a source of ridicule, if you are to believe the persistent creation myth attached to them.

  This nativity story says that Ken “Hawk” Harrelson, a right-handed platoon hitter for the Kansas City A’s, wasn’t expecting to play on September 4, 1964, against the visiting Yankees, who were scheduled to throw a right-handed pitcher that night. So the Hawk played golf all afternoon and arrived at the park, left hand blistered, to see the Yankees’ plans had changed, and they were now starting left-hander Whitey Ford. Harrelson, suddenly in the lineup, retrieved the red golf glove that was still in his pants and wore it during the game, inviting much bench jockeying from the visitors, who called him “Sweetheart” and “Mrs. Harrelson” while casting other aspersions on his manhood. But Harrelson hit two home runs in the game, and so wore the golf glove forever after, despite the fact that several Yankees—in a unified display of mockery—wore a single red golf glove during batting practice the next day, the clubhouse attendant having purchased twenty of them on the instruction of Mickey Mantle.

  Ken Harrelson in a golf glove, circa 1966. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY)

  But in fact baseball players—Mantle among them—had been wearing gloves for a very long time before Harrelson did. Author Peter Morris, in A Game of Inches, cites Lefty O’Doul wearing “an ordinary street glove” to the plate in 1932. Golf gloves didn’t catch on in golf until the end of the 1930s, after which
they found their way into baseball clubhouses, to which players sometimes came straight from the course.

  Marv Rickert divided the 1948 season among the Reds, Braves, and the minor-league Milwaukee Brewers, for whom “he wears a golfer’s glove on his left hand when batting.” The Yankees’ own Billy Martin wore a golf glove on his right hand after rupturing a thumb muscle in 1953. Pirates catcher Hank Foiles wore one on his left hand in 1957. Orioles catcher Gus Triandos wore a gray golf glove after his right thumb was operated on in 1960. “That’s to give me a feeling of compactness,” he told the Baltimore Sun that summer. “You know, a feeling of security when I swing. It’s supposed to help ease the swing some, too, but mainly it will give me more confidence in my hand’s ability to take the vibration when I hit the ball.”

  Triandos wasn’t the only Oriole who wore one that season. “To ease the bat shock when he is ‘jammed’ by inside fast balls,” the Sun noted, “[outfielder Jackie] Brandt has been wearing a tight-fitting leather golf glove on his right hand.”

  Golf gloves weren’t the exclusive affectation of injured players, either. At spring training in 1961, Kansas City’s rookie shortstop, Dick Howser, wore a golf glove in batting practice. Jim Piersall did, too, but golf gloves weren’t only confined to BP. The golf glove was easing its way into major-league games, adopted by bigger and bigger stars. Orioles first baseman Jim Gentile led the league in RBIs in 1961. He hit a record-tying four grand slams that summer, the last one as a pinch hitter, after he removed his golf glove in the on-deck circle because the pine tar was causing the glove to adhere to the bat.

  That wasn’t a problem for White Sox outfielder Minnie Miñoso, who led the American League in hits in 1960. Miñoso’s bat flew from his hands and into the box seats during a game at Yankee Stadium in 1961. “This happens about once a week to Minoso,” the New York Times reported, “even though he wears a golf glove on his right hand to get a better purchase on his bat.”