The Baseball Codes

by Jason Turbow

  Unfortunately for the A’s, the press conference at which Chavez was speaking was being broadcast live on the Oakland Coliseum scoreboard for early-arriving fans. Also watching were the Yankees, on the field for batting practice. “So he’s dropping the past tense on us? Did you see that?” spat third baseman Scott Brosius from the batting cage. One New York player after another—Derek Jeter, Paul O’Neill, Bernie Williams—took Chavez’s comments and blew them up further. The Yankees hardly needed additional motivation, but now they had it. Their first three hitters of the game reached base, four batters in they had the lead, and by the end of the frame it was 6–0. The A’s were in a hole from which they could not climb out before they even had a chance to bat.

  “You don’t want to light a guy up,” said longtime catcher Bill Freehan, repeating ages-old wisdom. “Just let a sleeping dog lie.”

  Managers are hardly exempt from the unwritten rules, in ways that stretch far beyond the purview of ordering retaliatory strikes. Perhaps most prominent is the mandate to protect one’s players at all costs. This has nothing to do with strategic maneuvers like deciding who bats cleanup or pitches the eighth inning, but instead covers things like restraint from overt criticism and refusing to speak publicly about players’ private issues. Prominent in this category is the greatest indignity of all: Except for pitchers or in case of injury or a double-switch, a manager shall never pull a player from the field in the middle of an inning.

  That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Frank Robinson was one of the toughest players in baseball history, a guy who during his Hall of Fame playing career exhibited virtually no mental weakness on a ballfield, the perfect example of an indestructible personality. As a manager, however, he was once broken down completely by this section of the Code. It happened in 2006, when the seventy-year-old Robinson was managing the Washington Nationals. Over the previous weeks he had watched helplessly as his catchers went down to injury, one by agonizing one. Starter Brian Schneider was disabled with a hamstring strain. Robert Fick, who was primarily an outfielder/first baseman anyway, missed the first six weeks of the season with elbow damage, and had come off the disabled list to be used only as a pinch-hitter, not to play in the field. (Two months later, he’d suffer that rib injury against the Giants and be drilled by Noah Lowry for bunting with a big lead.) The only other guy on the club with catching experience was Wiki Gonzalez, who by that point wasn’t actually on the team—he was due to be outrighted to Triple-A New Orleans the following day and had already appeared in what would be his final game for Washington.

  Desperate before a game against the Astros, Robinson turned to one of his favorite players, Matt LeCroy. Although LeCroy had come up as a catcher, he had primarily been a designated hitter to that point in his seven-year career and had spent all of one inning behind the plate the previous season. Additionally, LeCroy was battling bone spurs in his elbow. LeCroy was willing to catch, but he’d effectively be taking one for the team—and both he and Robinson knew it.

  The Astros stole a base against the injured catcher in the second, and another in the fourth. By the sixth inning, they had homed in on his weakness and began a slow, painful process of exploitation, swiping four more bags in the frame. In the seventh, Morgan Ensberg stole Houston’s seventh base of the night, advanced to third on LeCroy’s second throwing error of the game, then scored on Preston Wilson’s single, to close what had been a 7–1 Nationals lead to 7–5. At that point, Robinson couldn’t take any more. In the middle of the inning he instructed Fick—who had started only twenty games as a catcher over the previous four seasons—to strap on some shin guards, and walked slowly toward the plate to replace LeCroy.

  Robinson knew the Code, and, as repugnant as he found it, he felt he had no choice. He wasn’t angry at LeCroy, but sorry for him. Sorry that he was exposed as being so vulnerable, sorry he couldn’t get the job done, sorry circumstances dictated that he had to be out there in the first place. LeCroy certainly took it well, saying, “If my daddy was managing this team I’m sure he would have done the same thing,” but when Robinson was asked about it after the game, one of the hardest men in baseball was unable to maintain his composure. As he talked, tears streamed down his cheeks.

  “It’s not LeCroy’s fault,” he said. “We know his shortcomings. They took advantage of him today. That’s my responsibility. I put him in there…. That’s on my shoulders.” In protecting his player from one evil—the base-path assault of the Houston Astros—Robinson exposed him to another: potential ridicule from fans and players alike. The manager was forced to choose between two barely palatable options, and ultimately decided to put the good of the team ahead of the good of both LeCroy and, to gauge by his analysis of the situation, himself.

  Robinson wasn’t the first manager to pull a player midway through an inning, but his motives were certainly the most pure. When Billy Martin pulled Reggie Jackson from right field in the middle of the sixth inning of a game in 1977 for failing to hustle after a ball, his primary goal was to embarrass the superstar. “When a player shows the club up,” spat the manager after the game, “I show him up.”

  Martin was more straightforward than most managers, but he wasn’t alone in his motivation. In 1969, Mets left fielder Cleon Jones had given a similarly lackadaisical effort while chasing a double into the corner at Shea Stadium, and was subsequently pulled mid-inning by manager Gil Hodges. Unlike the Martin-Jackson saga, however (which nearly ended in fisticuffs in the dugout), there were a number of mitigating circumstances involved. To start, Jones was playing on a sore leg. Also, the field was soaked after days of persistent rain, and the outfielder had been chasing balls through the slog for hours—it was the second game of a double-header, and to that point in the day New York had been outscored by the Astros 24–3. The double in question was Houston’s sixth hit of the inning (in addition to two walks); Jones followed up his leisurely effort at corralling the hit by lofting a lazy throw back to the infield. “Without an injury, on a dry field in a close game, I might have dived for the ball,” he said, “but I’m only saying that because of what happened next.”

  What happened next was Hodges calling time and emerging slowly from the dugout, head down, ostensibly to visit Nolan Ryan on the pitcher’s mound. Instead, he veered slightly, heading toward shortstop Bud Harrelson. Hands in pockets, Hodges finally looked up, altered his route again, and tramped out to left field. Putting his arm around Jones, he asked the player if he was hurt. Jones mentioned his hamstring. “If you’re not running good,” Jones recalled the manager saying to him, “why don’t you just come out of the ballgame?” The two men walked together back to the dugout. It was as ferociously passive a display as can take place on a ballfield, and the immediate assumption was that Hodges wanted to make a statement both to his star outfielder (whose .346 batting average at the time ranked second in the league) and to the rest of the team.

  Even though Hodges publicly pinned the move on Jones’s injury, bullpen coach Joe Pignatano said that after the game Hodges could clearly be heard yelling at the player from behind his closed office door: “Look in that mirror and tell me if Cleon Jones is giving me 100 percent!” Jones’s opinion was that Hodges’s message was intended for the entire roster, to counter a lack of life on the bench amid a pair of blowout losses. If that’s the case, it worked: After that day, the Mets—to that point 55–43 and five and a half games behind the Cubs—compiled a 45–19 record, en route to a World Series win over Baltimore.

  There’s one more possibility for Hodges’s motivation in pulling Jones, though, and it had nothing to do with firing up his team: The manager was willing to embarrass his player in order to save face for himself. It’s possible that Hodges, weighed down by the marathon drubbing, simply lost track of where on the diamond he was heading. “Gil once told me that he was just going to the mound to take out the pitcher,” said one of the manager’s close friends, National League executive Frank Slocum. “He told me he was walking with his head down and
when he looked up, he realized he was almost at third base. He didn’t want to turn back to the mound, so he kept walking.”

  That the man who would guide the Mets from 101 losses to a world championship in just two seasons got lost on his way to the pitcher’s mound may seem like the least plausible explanation of the bunch, but Slocum’s story is corroborated by perhaps the subject’s greatest authority—Hodges’s wife, Joan. “Gil wasn’t the type of man who would make up stories. He would give it to you straight or he wouldn’t give it to you at all,” she said, talking about the questions she had for her husband after he returned home from the game. “He said to me, ‘You want the gospel truth?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m your wife.’ He said, ‘I never realized it until I passed the pitcher’s mound, and I couldn’t turn back.’”

  • • •

  For the all the preening exhibited by the game’s greatest hot dogs, some players put just as big a premium on not being noticed. These are the guys who put their heads down and race around the bases after hitting home runs, who walk briskly from mound to dugout after stifling a potential rally. Usually it works, but sometimes the desire for anonymity is so great that it actually calls attention to itself.

  Pitcher Allie Reynolds, a six-time All-Star with the Yankees and Indians, was just such a player. He’d never had the chance to pimp a home run, having failed to hit one during the first six years of his career. On opening day, 1948, however, despite a .143 lifetime batting average, Reynolds somehow smacked an Early Wynn fastball into the left-field bleachers at Griffith Stadium. Reynolds ran with his head down, taking extra precaution to keep from offending the pitcher he had just victimized. His eyes were so low, in fact, that he never saw the ball leave the park, and figured his shot for a double. And when, approaching second, he looked up to see the Yankees’ third-base coach with his arms raised in celebration, he mistook it for a “stop” sign. So he did.

  The New York dugout started hollering at him to complete the circuit; Reynolds wasn’t buying it. Senators infielders Al Kozar and Mark Christman informed him that he had hit a home run, to which Reynolds replied, “I’ve seen you guys talk people off bases before.” Finally, Yankees manager Bucky Harris convinced Reynolds that his home run was legitimate, and the pitcher completed his circuit. “After they talked me off second I finally got to do my home run trot, even if it was only halfway,” Reynolds said. “Everyone in the place got a big laugh out of it.”

  In the end, of course, Reynolds’s self-effacement garnered more attention than he would have received had he stood in the box watching his homer like Reggie, pirouetted like Barry Bonds, and flipped his bat like Albert Pujols—or even just jumped and clapped like Mickey Mantle.

  8

  Responding to Records

  Tigers pitcher Denny McLain always had a soft spot for Mickey Mantle, having idolized him as a boy growing up in Chicago. When they met at Tiger Stadium in September 1968 the two were at opposite ends of their careers, McLain peaking en route to thirty-one wins and both the Cy Young and MVP awards, while Mantle was nine days from retirement. The great slugger’s previous home run, almost a month earlier, had him tied with Jimmy Foxx on the all-time list with 534.

  Before the game, McLain decided to do his hero a favor. Recalled Tigers catcher Jim Price, “Denny told me, ‘Let him hit one.’” Price relayed the good news when Mantle stepped into the batter’s box, at which point the Yankees star extended his bat over the plate to indicate just the spot in which he’d like to see a pitch. McLain delivered, and Mantle connected for a homer. Said Price, “Denny stood out there on the mound and clapped.” Mantle had his milestone, and McLain had his joy.

  Properly dealing with records—either one’s own or someone else’s—has long been a part of the Code. It’s why Yankees outfielder Tommy Henrich laid down a curiously timed ninth-inning bunt to avoid a possible double play, assuring Joe DiMaggio another chance to extend his hitting streak in 1941. (DiMaggio did.)

  It’s also why, when Yankees second baseman Bobby Richardson went into the final day of the 1959 season needing a hit in his first at-bat to push his average to .300, manager Casey Stengel informed him that since the Yankees didn’t have a single .300 hitter on the roster he’d be immediately removed from the game should it happen, to avoid falling below the mark in ensuing at-bats. It’s also why members of that day’s opponent, the Baltimore Orioles, took up the cause: Brooks Robinson informed Richardson that he’d be playing deep in case the hitter found appeal in bunting; pitcher Billy O’Dell offered to groove pitches; and catcher Joe Ginsberg verbally called for pitches instead of dropping down signs. Umpire Ed Hurley even got in on the act, offering that, if Richardson could “just make it close,” things would go his way. Said Richardson, “There couldn’t have been a more complete fix on.” (The fix might have been on, but it wasn’t complete. Richardson doubled in his first at-bat, refused Stengel’s entreaties to leave the game, went 2-for-3, and ended up at .301.)

  It was also why Yankees general manager Ed Barrow called a rainout on a day in which there was no rain, simply because Lou Gehrig and his record streak of consecutive games were still at home, in bed with the flu. “Say, Ed,” a reporter asked Barrow the next day, “you really didn’t think it was going to rain, did you?” “Damn it, of course I did!” Barrow snapped. “Gehrig will be able to play today.”

  When Don Drysdale was on the precipice of breaking Carl Hubbell’s National League record for consecutive scoreless innings in 1968, he loaded the bases against the Giants with nobody out in the ninth inning. When he hit the next batter, Dick Dietz, it forced in a run and killed his streak at forty-four innings, four outs short of Hubbell’s mark. Plate umpire Harry Wendelstedt, however, ruled that Dietz made no effort to get out of the way of the pitch, and ordered him back to the plate with a full count, whereupon he flied out to shallow left field. Drysdale got out of the inning unscathed, in the process tying Doc White’s 1904 record with his fifth straight shutout, and eventually ran his streak to fifty-eight and two-thirds innings.

  If Drysdale needed assistance from an umpire while playing the Giants to set his mark, so too did the successor to his record. In 1988, Orel Hershiser compiled forty-two consecutive shutout innings in pursuit of Drysdale’s standard before finally allowing a run on, of all things, a fielder’s choice—against the Giants, of course. Umpire Paul Runge, however, belatedly called hitter Ernie Riles out at first, ruling that baserunner Brett Butler went out of his way to interfere with Dodgers shortstop Alfredo Griffin on the play at second, ending the inning and wiping the run off the board. (“That slide was just like every other time I slid,” said an indignant Butler, who had indeed advanced directly into the bag.) Hershiser went on to run his scoreless-innings streak to fifty-nine. “It was a slow chopper, and there was no way they were going to get him at first no matter what I did, so what incentive did I have to try to take [Griffin] out?” said Butler. “A lot of times when records are in the balance like that, there’s no explaining some of the things that happen. People react in different ways.”

  If the previous two examples are any indication, umpires are interested in seeing records broken. Opponents, however, are another matter. As DiMaggio built his fifty-six-game hitting streak in 1941, A’s pitcher Johnny Babich vowed to end the festivities by retiring DiMaggio in his first at-bat, then walking him in every plate appearance thereafter. DiMaggio’s teammates were furious, but it was the Clipper himself who administered the most appropriate response. In his first trip to the plate, DiMaggio lined a ball between Babich’s legs and into center field for a single.

  In 1961, Roger Maris was denied his final chance to tie Babe Ruth’s home-run record within 154 games when Orioles manager Paul Richards called for closer Hoyt Wilhelm to come on in the last inning of a meaningless game in which the Orioles trailed, under threat of a fine if he threw the slugger anything but knuckleballs. Maris struck out.

  For Babich and Richards, the only things on the line were pride and history. When a t
eam has the opportunity to directly assist one of its own, however, tactics can get even weirder. In 1929, New York Giants outfielder Mel Ott and Philadelphia’s Chuck Klein were tied with forty-two homers apiece as their teams met for a doubleheader on the last day of the Phillies’ season. (The Giants had one game remaining, against Boston.) Klein took the home-run lead in the first game with his forty-third longball, after which Phillies pitchers responded by walking Ott in the first, fourth, sixth, eighth, and ninth innings of the nightcap—including once with the bases loaded—to keep his total static and effectively hand the crown to Klein. It might not have been sportsmanlike, but at least they had the interests of a teammate at heart.

  The same couldn’t be said for St. Louis manager Jack O’Connor, whose motivation wasn’t in anyone’s best interests, but to bring down a hated opponent whose team he wasn’t even playing at the time. It happened during a doubleheader on the final day of the 1910 season between O’Connor’s Browns and the Cleveland Naps. Cleveland star Napoleon Lajoie, despite his .372 batting average, still trailed Ty Cobb’s .380 for the league lead, and had all but given up hope of catching him. At that point, Cobb, the three-time defending batting champion, was merely the least-liked player of his time; over the next eighteen seasons he would cement his reputation as the most reviled player ever. Lajoie, meanwhile, was so popular that the Cleveland franchise had renamed itself in his honor.