The Baseball Codes

by Jason Turbow

  The most incredible thing about Ellis’s feat isn’t the fact that he avoided ejection, fine, and suspension—it’s that he wasn’t even the first player to attempt such a strategy. Nearly forty years earlier, in 1937, St. Louis Cardinals star Dizzy Dean unleashed similar tactics. Unlike the threat Ellis perceived from Pittsburgh, Dean reacted to something much more tangible: getting thrashed by the New York Giants. It started in the sixth inning of a game in which New York’s Burgess Whitehead was on second, with Dick Bartell at the plate. Dean induced Bartell to pop up to shortstop Leo Durocher, but umpire George Barr, under instructions from National League commissioner Ford Frick to more closely enforce the balk rule, decided that Dean failed to come to a complete stop before delivering the pitch. He waved Whitehead to third and returned Bartell to the batter’s box, whereupon the hitter smoked the next pitch for a line drive that was dropped by right fielder Pepper Martin, allowing White-head to score. Another error and a subsequent single gave the Giants a 4–1 lead, and Dean completely unraveled.

  The Hall of Famer proceeded to throw at everyone in the lineup save Whitehead, with whom he had previously played in St. Louis, and Giants pitcher Carl Hubbell, who had the power to return the favor. Wrote John Drebinger in The New York Times: “The Giants went up and down at the plate like duckpins.” Durocher said that one of Dean’s offerings even struck New York player-manager Bill Terry twice, hitting him in the back, then bouncing up and hitting him in the neck. The assault finally ended when Giants outfielder Jimmy Ripple laid down a ninth-inning bunt, then threw a punch at Dean when the pitcher moved to cover the base, sparking an enormous on-field brawl so ferocious that police intervention was required. Incredibly, Dean was never thrown out of the game.

  Dean’s performance stuck with Durocher when he took over as manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1939, as he sought ways to counter Cincinnati’s superior firepower. The Reds won the pennant during Durocher’s first season with Brooklyn, and in ’40, despite his team’s scorching 27-12 start, Cincinnati nonetheless held a one-game lead when the clubs met on June 8. So Durocher changed tactics.

  After two Dodgers pitchers surrendered eight runs over the first three innings, Durocher decided to stick with right-hander Carl Doyle, even though he’d given up three runs in his single frame of work. Durocher didn’t want Doyle in the game to keep things close, however; over the next two innings the right-hander gave up twelve runs on twelve hits, walked three, and threw two wild pitches. The manager’s intent was to have his pitcher send a message, which he did by hitting four Reds batters—tying a modern record—all while offering “frequent ‘duster’ pitches,” according to The New York Times. As with Ellis’s strategy, the evidence is purely theoretical, but Durocher’s plan worked—the following season, Brooklyn won its first pennant in more than twenty years.

  With first base open during a game in 1961, Dodgers manager Walter Alston ordered Don Drysdale to issue a free pass to Frank Robinson. The Cincinnati outfielder was on his way to winning the NL MVP Award; in Drysdale’s mind that made him the perfect candidate to be knocked down. Robinson was a ten-year vet, and though Drysdale knew his opponent was probably the toughest player in the league and beyond intimidation, the big pitcher loved a challenge. Rather than sail four balls wide of the strike zone, Drysdale took action.

  The first pitch rocketed directly at Robinson’s head, dropping the slugger to the dirt. In response, Robinson got up, spat fire, and moved closer to the plate. The following pitch again knocked him down. Again he moved closer. Next two pitches, same thing. “I was mad inside at Drysdale, but I refused to show it because I knew that’s what he was trying to do, upset me,” said Robinson. “By upsetting me he knew I couldn’t play at my best, so I just refused to let it bother me.” Still, there wasn’t much he could do against the pitcher. Drysdale hit Robinson four times over the course of his career (the only player he tagged more was Ernie Banks) and knocked him down on countless other occasions, which helped hold the Hall of Fame slugger with the .294 lifetime average to a paltry .213 mark over seventy-nine lifetime at-bats against the right-hander.

  The approach was typical Drysdale. Dodgers teammate Ron Fairly tells the story of Alston going to the mound with instructions for Drysdale to give a free pass to Pirates slugger Donn Clendenon, and barely making it back to the dugout before the pitcher planted a fastball in the batter’s rib cage. “When the inning ended, Alston says to him, ‘I thought I told you to walk him,’” said Fairly. “Drysdale says, ‘No, you said to put him on. I can get him there in one pitch—I don’t need to throw four. Besides, it might help the next time he comes up.’ Sure enough, the next time he came up Don threw him three little sliders away, and Clendenon just kind of waved at them and struck out.”

  The fact that Fairly was mistaken—Drysdale never hit Clendenon with a pitch in the seven seasons during which the two competed—hardly makes the story worse. This is the way Fairly remembers Drysdale, and even if the story actually took place against a different hitter or different team—even if it never took place at all—this tale, told with love and admiration, is a result of Drysdale’s legacy.

  All this intimidation serves a purpose. After all, a ball needn’t make contact with a player to drive fear into his suddenly palpitating heart. It’s the near misses that inspire philosophical soliloquies from uncontemplative men about the meaning (and shortness) of life. Catcher Randy Knorr put it in baseball terms: “They say the anticipation of death is worse than actually dying. Well, the anticipation of getting hit is a lot worse than actually being hit. You can’t play your game. You think you’re going to get drilled, so you aren’t focused on hitting. You’re focused on avoiding.”

  There are two options for pitchers who want to instill fear without having to hit a batter: the brushback and the knockdown.

  The brushback is more common, if only because it’s more utilitarian. Assuming an absence of acrimony between hitter and pitcher, any clearheaded batter should take an intentionally thrown brushback pitch to carry a single meaning: Move off the plate.

  A more interactive pitching tactic is the knockdown, intended less to move a batter from one side of the box to the other than to get him off his feet. It’s a powerful message—a “brushback pitch with attitude,” according to Drysdale’s peer in intimidation, Bob Gibson.

  Take Roger Clemens, who in Game 4 of the 2000 ALCS sent consecutive first-inning pitches at the head of Seattle shortstop Alex Rodriguez, making use of Drysdale’s maxim that the second knockdown was more important than the first, because it showed that the first wasn’t a mistake. Clemens ended up with a complete-game one-hitter, with Rodriguez going 0-for-3 with two strikeouts. A year later, Clemens again faced the Mariners in the playoffs, again in Game 4, whereupon he threw a fastball at Bret Boone’s chin. The second baseman went hitless against the Rocket, who reprised his previous performance by giving up only a single hit (this time over five innings) as the Yankees tallied another victory. Said Clemens: “I want to jiggle their eyeballs.”

  A good knockdown can take a hitter not just out of an at-bat, but out of an entire game, or even a series. Sometimes the World Series. In the 1980 Fall Classic between Philadelphia and Kansas City, the underdog Phillies, after unexpectedly winning the first two games, quickly began to falter. The Royals took Game 3, then knocked Philadelphia’s Game 4 starter, Larry Christenson, out of the box before he could record his second out of the game. By the time reliever Dickie Noles replaced Christenson, Kansas City had four runs in and a runner at second, still with only one out in the first. The Royals were on the precipice of a massive momentum swing, and Noles’s goal was simply to minimize the damage.

  He succeeded in shutting down the rally, but gave up a second-inning homer to cleanup hitter Willie Mays Aikens, the slugger’s second of the game. This is where Noles’s issues began—not with the home run itself, but with the fact that Aikens lingered in the batter’s box to admire his blast.

  In just his second big-league season
, Noles already possessed a reputation as one of the game’s prominent hotheads, built largely upon his willingness to knock opponents down at any opportunity—and opportunity was about to come knocking again.

  The next hitter, Hal McRae, hustled his way into second with a double, then pumped his fist—which served only to stir the pitcher further. When Noles noticed McRae standing atop the glove of second baseman Manny Trillo, who had dived to make a belated tag, he began to seriously fume.

  After retiring Amos Otis for the third out of the inning, the pitcher stormed into the Philadelphia dugout. Bypassing manager Dallas Green and the team’s position players, he made a beeline for the water jug at the far end of the bench, where fellow pitchers Bob Walk, Marty Bystrom, and Tug McGraw were sitting. “Who the heck do these guys think they are, doing all this crap, standing at home plate and watching their home runs?” he spat, talking to no one in particular. “Somebody has to put this down.”

  McGraw looked up slowly, then said the one thing the young right-hander most wanted to hear. “Don’t tell me about it,” said the veteran reliever. “You have to show me, brother.”

  Bystrom asked, “What are you waiting on?”

  “It’s not a bad idea,” added Walk. “Do it.”

  That was all Noles needed. Aikens’s actions demanded response; the hitter would go down in his next at-bat. Noles worked through a scoreless third inning, counting down, Royal by Royal, until the fourth spot in the lineup came around again. Aikens eventually stepped to the plate as the third batter of the fourth inning, but before he could, the guy before him in the order changed Noles’s plan entirely.

  That was George Brett, who had tripled in Kansas City’s four-run first and was 6-for-11 with a home run to that point in the series—without question the Royals’ MVP. When he couldn’t catch up to Noles’s first-pitch fastball, however, he stepped out of the batter’s box to get his bearings. As Noles watched in disbelief, Brett lingered for a moment away from the plate before slowly making his way back in. The pitcher’s next offering, also a fastball, was fouled off. Now it was 0-2. Again Brett stepped out, and again he took longer to return than Noles would have liked. This time, he gazed at his bat for a moment with an expression that the pitcher read as “How could I miss two straight fastballs?” That the slugger was coming off a season in which he hit .390 hardly mattered; Noles stared daggers toward home plate. At that moment, his target shifted from Aikens to Brett.

  Under ordinary circumstances, baseball’s code dictates that a guy like Brett—a five-time All-Star about to win an MVP Award—could take as long as he pleased against Noles, just twenty-three and still in his first full big-league campaign. Furthermore, the Code says unequivocally that, unless a pitcher is a superstar himself, he does not intentionally knock down one of the five best third basemen of all time.

  This, however, was the World Series, and this was Dickie Noles, who at that moment had concerns more important than the unwritten rules. Besides, targeting Brett made sense on multiple levels. “George was their best hitter,” said Phillies shortstop Larry Bowa. “If Dickie was sending a message, you send it to their best hitter, you know?”

  That message, according to Noles: “‘I’m coming at you guys and I ain’t playing around.’ … I was trying to take his head off.”

  Noles’s 0-2 pitch did very nearly that, riding in directly at Brett’s jaw. The third baseman avoided it only with an acrobatic tumble that left him splayed flat on the ground, facing the mound and dazed. “If I didn’t get out of the way,” he said, “it would have hit me in the head.” A hush descended on what had been a raucous Royals Stadium. Noles took several steps toward the plate, an invitation for Brett or his teammates to react.

  What he got was Royals manager Jim Frey, streaking onto the field “like a little bantam rooster,” according to Philadelphia’s Del Unser, before Brett had a chance to regain either his feet or his senses. Frey screamed at plate umpire Don Denkinger, “Stop it right now! Don’t tell me he’s not head-hunting there! Don’t tell me he’s not taking a shot at the head! Stop it right now—he’s going to hurt somebody!”

  Frey had been primed for this moment by one of his coaches, Bill Connors, who had worked with Noles in the minor leagues and knew all about his tendencies. The manager’s protest was a powerful combination of passion and volume; that it didn’t gain more traction was largely due to a single impediment: Pete Rose. While most of Philadelphia’s players were as stunned by Brett’s treatment as their counterparts on the Royals, Rose didn’t waste a moment, racing from his position at first base to place himself between Noles and Frey. Whatever void in credibility had been created by the pitcher’s inexperience was instantly filled by Rose’s superstar status. “He wasn’t throwing at him,” Rose definitively told the manager. “Yes, he was!” shouted Frey. “No, he wasn’t,” replied Rose. “If he was, he’d have hit him.” Rose spun to stare directly at Brett, the slightest hint of a grin tracing his face. He then turned toward the Kansas City dugout, his glare lingering, almost daring the Royals to respond. The message was clear, said Noles: “Rose was telling everybody on the field, ‘I’m behind this kid. We did this, not just Dickie.’”

  With that, Rose patted the pitcher on the rump, said, “You just pitch your own ballgame,” and trotted back to first.

  Said Noles, looking back: “I don’t think the Royals handled that part very well.”

  Kansas City’s handling of it started with Brett, who flailed at a slider on his hands for strike three. It continued with Aikens, who ended the inning by striking out on the same curveball he’d hit out of the park an inning earlier. McRae, the Royals’ leadoff hitter the following inning, also fanned, the third Royals hitter in a row to do so.

  “I don’t think you can say that [Noles’ pitch] was the one thing that turned around the Series,” said Green, “but it was a big piece of the puzzle. We were struggling, and it brought us back into focus.” It did just the opposite for Kansas City. Virtually every member of the Royals has denied it since the moment it happened, but the upending of George Brett absolutely erased whatever momentum they had been building. The Royals, who by all rights should have been riding a wave of energy after holding on to win the game, mustered just four more runs over the Series’ remaining twenty-two innings. Brett went 3-for-11 from that point on, and Aikens was held to a single hit. The Phillies won in six.

  Noles, while appreciating the significance of his action in retrospect, later came to recognize the importance of the Code regarding brushbacks, knockdowns, and hit batters—specifically the part about never throwing at an opponent’s head. “I don’t brag about it,” he said. “The mentality I had when I was twenty-three years of age later changed…. I was trying to take his head off, and I’m not proud of that.” One thing that didn’t change for Noles was his feeling about how he’d have reacted had he been a member of the Royals when Brett went down. “If I’m on that team, I can’t wait for number 20 [Brett’s third-base counterpart on the Phillies, Mike Schmidt] to come up, because I’m going to plunk him—not in his rear end, but in his ribs. You took a shot at my guy’s head; I’m putting one in your guy’s back or his ribs. If it hurts, good. If it knocks him out of the game, better.”

  Sound extreme? No less an authority than Brett himself agrees. “As far as I was concerned, that was very legit, what Noles did,” said the Hall of Famer. “He knocked me off the plate, and that was part of the game of baseball…. No hard feelings, no nothing. I just wish one of our pitchers would have done the same thing to Mike Schmidt. That’s how the game is played. That’s how the game wasn’t played that day.”

  Fearlessness is a boon for pitchers, but it can backfire on them too. Even the most aggressive pitcher can take things too far, and when he does it can be all too easy for him to psych himself out instead of his opponents. Few examples are starker than the one provided by the game’s master intimidator, Nolan Ryan.

  It began on April 30, 1974, when Boston’s Doug Griffin attempted
to lay down a bunt against the cantankerous flamethrower. Ryan’s feelings about this strategy were hardly a secret, so when a hundred-mile-an-hour message pitch found its way toward the right-handed batter’s box it shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise. The pitcher insists that he wasn’t trying to hit Griffin with the pitch, just place a fastball where it would be difficult to bunt. Instead, the ball tailed in and struck the wide-eyed hitter behind his left ear. Griffin was unconscious before he hit the ground.

  “That’s the first time the thought crossed my mind that I was capable of possibly killing somebody,” Ryan said. Griffin suffered a concussion and temporary hearing loss, and though it’s impossible to say with certainty, it’s likely that the injuries—which necessitated two full months of recovery—led to the premature end of his career three years later, at age thirty.

  It may have been the first time Ryan considered the concept of unintentional manslaughter, but it wasn’t the last. Starting that day, for the first and only stretch of his career, the pitcher grew apprehensive. No longer the intimidator, he became the intimidated—fearful not of another player but of the potential damage his fastballs could inflict. As a result, the frequency and ferocity of his inside pitches diminished, and the advantage he had so carefully cultivated began to disappear. Ryan described the process of dealing with the aftermath of Griffin’s beanball as “trauma.”

  This was the same man who, when he faced Boston’s Dwight Evans—making his first plate appearance since being knocked unconscious by a pitch from Rangers reliever Mike Paul—started the outfielder off with a fastball behind him. Asked later if Ryan was trying to intimidate him, Evans said simply, “Intimidate and kill are different.”