The Baseball Codes

by Jason Turbow

  With his 107-loss Browns having nothing else for which to play, O’Connor opted to help dethrone Cobb by positioning rookie third baseman Red Corriden far behind the bag whenever Lajoie came to bat. The hitter’s drives were so fierce, said O’Connor, that the strategy was for Corriden’s safety.

  Lajoie, oblivious to the tactic, hit a triple in his first at-bat. When he noticed the chasm between Corriden and the batter’s box during his second trip to the plate, however, he took advantage and bunted for a base hit. O’Connor made sure that Corriden’s positioning against Lajoie didn’t change throughout the game; subsequently, neither did Lajoie’s tactics. With Cobb sitting out his own game, three straight bunt hits in the opener for Lajoie, and another four in the nightcap, put the batting title squarely in the Cleveland star’s sights. In Lajoie’s final plate appearance of the season, however, he tired of the routine and swung away, hitting a grounder to shortstop Bobby Wallace. That left him with eight hits in nine at-bats and a whisker short of Cobb, who beat him .3850687 to .3840947 to win the title and the luxury Chalmers automobile that went with it. The subsequent outcry led to O’Connor’s dismissal; he never managed a big-league ball club again. (Seventy-one years later, the commissioner’s office found that Cobb had been incorrectly credited with an extra 2-for-4 game that season and recalculated his season average to .383. Twenty-two years after his death, Lajoie was crowned the American League’s batting champion for 1910.)

  Although it was less contentious, a similar tactic was attempted in 1953 to help Cleveland’s Al Rosen win the American League’s triple crown. Heading into the final day of the season, Rosen already held a slight edge in the home-run race and had the RBI title locked up. His most precarious category was batting average, in which he was tied for the league lead with Senators first baseman Mickey Vernon.

  In Cleveland’s game against Detroit, the Tigers took a page from the Jack O’Connor playbook and positioned their infield very deep—an invitation for the well-liked Rosen to bunt. Rosen, however, harboring an abiding sense of fair play, chose instead to swing away and went 3-for-5 with two doubles.

  In the Senators’ game against the Philadelphia Athletics, Vernon collected two hits in his first four at-bats. Shortly thereafter, Rosen’s game in Cleveland ended, giving Vernon a razor-thin lead heading into his final plate appearance. Having been notified of Rosen’s line, every player on the Washington bench understood the situation: A hit would cement the crown for Vernon, and an out would hand it to Rosen. The Senators decided to go with option three: Don’t give Vernon the chance.

  The slugger was scheduled to bat fourth in the ninth inning, and when Washington catcher Mickey Grasso doubled with one out, it seemed like a certainty that Vernon would again reach the plate. Grasso, however, managed to get picked off at second, a development observers attributed to the fact that he more or less wandered away from the base. Kite Thomas followed with a single, but when he tried to stretch it to a double without benefit of running hard, he was easily thrown out for the third out of the inning.

  Whatever instincts Vernon may have had toward justice became irrelevant; he never made it to the plate and Rosen missed his triple crown by .0011 points.

  Whatever problem one might have with the likes of Grasso, Thomas, or Jack O’Connor, at least they were aware that something great was going on. The same couldn’t be said for rookie Angels reliever Tim Fortugno in 1992, after George Brett collected his three thousandth hit. It was hard to miss, actually, since the game was stopped for five minutes as Kansas City players mobbed the third baseman and Anaheim fans applauded. But literally moments after the game resumed, Brett, in the middle of a conversation with first baseman Gary Gaetti, was unceremoniously picked off first base. Fortugno, said Brett, “didn’t let me finish my sentence.”

  “All of a sudden, I forgot I was on base …,” the third baseman said, laughing. “It was kind of a comical way to put an exclamation point on the whole thing.”

  Just as circumstances surrounding streaks or records compel entire sections of the Code, respect for single-game feats also has its place in the book. Primary in this category are the appropriate methods for dealing with no-hitters. In the press box, an unwritten rule for official scorers holds that the first hit of any game must be unequivocally clean; if it reasonably could have been ruled an error and no subsequent hits are tallied, outcry is certain.

  On the field, things take another turn. The more a pitcher mows down the opposition, the more the opposition is expected to respect the feat. Cardinals outfielder George Hendrick did exactly this in 1984, when he stepped to the plate with two outs in the ninth inning against Reds ace Mario Soto, who had yet to allow a hit. Hendrick stood passively and watched the first two pitches of the at-bat split the plate for strikes. Rather than go for the kill, however, Soto inexplicably used a third-pitch fastball to buzz Hendrick’s chin, knocking him to the ground. The slugger got up, slowly returned to the box, and knocked Soto’s next offering over the fence in left field. “I don’t know why he did that,” Hendrick said afterward. “I was going to let the man have his no-hitter.”

  Players aren’t always so generous. When Detroit pitcher Tommy Bridges was within an out of a perfect game against the Senators in 1932, Washington manager Walter Johnson—despite trailing 13–0—sent up curveball-hitting specialist Dave Harris as a pinch-hitter, to try to figure out the bender with which Bridges had baffled Washington all afternoon. Harris connected for a single, and Johnson absorbed criticism from around the league. Bridges himself abstained, however, saying, “I would rather earn it the competitive way than have it handed to me.”

  Whatever heat Johnson took had nothing on Padres catcher Ben Davis, who turned heads with his at-bat in a 2001 game against Arizona. Davis came up in the eighth inning as the twenty-third hitter to face Curt Schilling, entirely cognizant that his team was 0-for-22 to that point. Because swinging the bat against the big right-hander had not yet paid dividends, Davis switched gears and, noting the deep positioning of third baseman Craig Counsell, laid down a bunt. Although the execution was lacking—Davis popped the ball up, just over Schilling’s head—the hit nonetheless fell between the mound and second baseman Jay Bell, who was also stationed deep. Davis safely reached base with his team’s first hit.

  The Arizona bench exploded at the audacity, calling the player gutless and intoning that he was afraid to take his hacks like a man. To judge the play by the unwritten rules, the Diamondbacks had a point. “The first hit of a no-hitter is not a bunt,” said Kansas City Royals pitcher Danny Jackson fifteen years earlier, in 1986, after Angels rookie Devon White attempted to break up his own no-hitter with a failed eighth-inning bunt attempt. “I don’t know how long he’s been around,” Jackson said about the outfielder, “but he’s got to go down.” Arizona manager Bob Brenly felt the same way about Ben Davis, calling the play “chickenshit” and saying that Davis “has a lot to learn about how the game is played.”

  “It wasn’t the heat of the pennant race in September, or something like that,” said Diamondbacks left fielder Luis Gonzalez. “They say every game counts, but when a guy’s doing something masterful like that, if you get a hit you want to earn it in the right way.” Third baseman Matt Williams said he wouldn’t have done it. First baseman Mark Grace said that, although he didn’t fault Davis, if it was him he wouldn’t have had the balls. Schilling was “a little stunned” at the move; his experience taught him that players should earn their way on base in that type of situation.

  There was, however, a mitigating factor. The score of the game was 2–0, and when Davis reached base it brought the tying run to the plate. The Padres clearly hadn’t been getting it done against Schilling in any other regard, so from a strategic standpoint Davis’s approach worked. “I don’t know if you saw my swings against him …,” the catcher said. “I’m just trying to get on base any way I can right there, and I did.”

  “What if it’s the seventh game of the World Series? Would they or anybody b
e upset?” asked Padres manager Bruce Bochy. “No, because that’s a huge game and you’re trying to win.” Arizona, he said, wanted the Padres to “drop our weapons and raise our hands.”

  Even Schilling grasped both sides of the argument. Though stopping short of taking Davis’s side, he expressed understanding for those who did. “Whether I agree with it being the right thing to do or not is not really relevant,” he said. “It was a 2–0 game…. If it’s 9–0, yeah, I think it’s a horseshit thing to do. But it was a 2–0 game and the bottom line is, unwritten rules or not, you’re paid to win games. That’s the only reason you’re playing in the big leagues.”

  One interesting aspect of the play was that even among the ranks of baseball’s old guard—guys who lived for and played by the Code—there was hardly unanimity of opinion. Cases were made both for and against Davis, with precedents cited from every generation—like the bunt by Milwaukee catcher Bill Schroeder that broke up a 1987 no-hitter by Royals left-hander Charlie Leibrandt in the sixth inning. Nineteen years after that, when Tampa Bay rookie Ben Zobrist bunted for his team’s first hit in the sixth inning of a game against Seattle’s Jerrod Washburn, the pitcher himself agreed that nothing improper had transpired. “If it was the eighth or ninth, maybe that would have rubbed me the wrong way,” Washburn said, “but bunting is just part of the game, and he was just trying to make something happen.”

  The Schilling-Davis affair, however, was full of gray area. Some baseball people will accept a no-hitter-spoiling bunt if bunting is an established part of the hitter’s offensive repertoire—but Ben Davis was hardly a bunter. In fact, said Brenly, “That was the only time Ben Davis ever tried to bunt for a base hit to my recollection…. For a backup catcher who had never bunted for a base hit before in his life to do it, I thought that was unnecessary to begin with, and disrespectful, to top it off.”

  The notion of disrespect stems from the fact that Davis clearly took advantage of Counsell’s extra-deep positioning, as the infielder attempted to protect against hard-hit balls that might otherwise have shot by him. Counsell felt safe at that range because he thought there was little chance that a runner as slow as Davis would so blatantly violate the unwritten rules.

  Part of the problem was that Davis’s bunt wasn’t even good enough to benefit from Counsell’s positioning. “I was mad that it was such a bad bunt and was still a hit,” said Schilling. “He bunted as bad a ball as you can bunt, to the most perfect spot in the infield to bunt it…. I never said it was a horseshit play. I thought it was a horseshit bunt.”

  Once the dust settled a bit, the last man standing at the center of the controversy wasn’t Schilling or even Davis—it was Brenly, who, as the most outspoken critic of the play, was left in its aftermath to defend his initial anger. He has since softened his stance, even going so far as to admit that much of his posturing was simply a matter of standing up for his pitcher, to make sure that “Curt Schilling knew that I was looking out for his interests.”

  Still, years after the fact, he had a question for which he says he never received an adequate answer: “If it’s such a good fuckin’ play, why didn’t he do it every time?”

  9

  Gamesmanship

  Lonnie Smith was on first base. It was the eighth inning of the seventh game of the 1991 World Series, and for baseball’s last teams standing, runs were difficult to come by. Each club’s starting pitcher—John Smoltz for Atlanta and Jack Morris for Minnesota—had thrown seven frames of shutout ball, which is what made the prospects of Smith’s leadoff, check-swing single so exciting. At age thirty-five, Smith could still run, and with the concrete-hard surface of the Minnesota Metrodome’s outfield turf able to shoot balls into the gaps like slap shots on a hockey rink, he was likely to score if one of his teammates could come through with a well-placed hit. These were Lonnie Smith’s final albatross-free moments, just before he became the victim of perhaps the most prominent fake-out in baseball history.

  When the next batter, Terry Pendleton, got the extra-base hit the Braves so desperately sought, rocketing a double between Twins left fielder Dan Gladden and center fielder Kirby Puckett, there was no doubt in the ballpark that Smith would score. On the Braves bench they knew it. Smoltz, having been removed moments earlier and watching the game on a clubhouse TV, knew it. Millions of viewers around the country knew it. Twins second baseman Chuck Knoblauch, though, wasn’t so sure.

  Smith had taken off on a delayed steal when the pitch was released, which should have prompted him to look toward the plate to pick up the ball. Had Pendleton failed to swing, or swung and missed, Smith would have known to slide in anticipation of a play at second; once contact was made, he then could have decided what to do based on where the ball was hit. But Smith didn’t look. Smith had no clue where the ball was.

  This was an especially egregious mistake in a ballpark like Minnesota’s, with a pillowy white dome interior that provided ample camouflage for fly balls. Smith was helpless, and made no effort to hide his confusion. He looked left. He looked right. He couldn’t find the ball.

  Enter Knoblauch. While Gladden raced toward the wall to track down the gapper, Knoblauch, a rookie second baseman, acted as if he were fielding a ground ball, then pantomimed a throw to shortstop Greg Gagne, who ran to “cover” second. The decoy (shortened in baseball terminology to “deke”) wasn’t enough to fool Smith entirely, but it did serve to delay him. He slowed as he rounded second, then came to a complete stop four steps past the base. He looked to the outfield to see what was going on, because he knew that with defensive whiz Kirby Puckett in center field, anything was possible. He took two more hops toward third. It wasn’t until the ball hit the turf in front of the left-center-field wall that Smith was finally able to track it down, and having received no prior instruction from Braves third-base coach Jimy Williams, he belatedly trotted to third as Pendleton pulled into second. Against the odds, Smith hadn’t scored.

  Some paint Smith as the goat of the series for his baserunning gaffe. Others exonerate him, because Atlanta still had runners at second and third with nobody out, yet failed to bring a run home. (Morris retired Ron Gant on a grounder to first, and after intentionally walking David Justice, induced Sid Bream to ground into an inning-ending double play.) When the Twins plated a run in the tenth to take the game and the championship, Smith’s baserunning miscue was up there with Morris’s ten shutout innings as the day’s primary topics of conversation.

  Never mind that Smith hit three home runs in the series. Never mind that he already had three championship rings from other clubs, and clearly knew how to win. It was all about the fact that the fourteen-year veteran had been suckered by the rookie, and at tremendous cost. And though Smith still insists that Knoblauch didn’t fool him—“If I did think Knoblauch had the ball, why didn’t I slide?” he asked—it’s difficult to argue against the fact that, at the very least, the deke cost Smith precious moments of hesitation.

  In numerous ways, a deke isn’t so different from many other pantomimed aspects of baseball. A pitcher who may not be able to locate his fastball has to pitch as if he can, at least until the other team catches on. A slugger with a recently injured shoulder will attack pitches with as close to his standard form as possible (if not his same effectiveness), hoping that the pitcher will fail to recognize a weakness upon which to prey. A diving outfielder will act as if he’s caught a ball he actually trapped. If these people can fabricate their own reality on and around a baseball diamond, why not a guy with a glove on his hand?

  To Hall of Fame third baseman George Kell, the deke was an integral part of the game, because any extra moment it bought could be enough to keep a runner like Lonnie Smith from advancing. “But I would never do it unless it was a key run—maybe could turn around the ballgame or something,” he said. “You can’t get away with it but a time or two, and then they know you’re going to fake them.”

  “You know not to trust middle infielders—it’s their job to deke,” said former infiel
der Bip Roberts. “Your job as a runner is to pick up the baseball, not the fielders. You look into the hitting zone, and if the ball’s hit, you find it. If you can’t find it you look at the coach. If you look at the infielder it’s bad baserunning.”

  The deke has been part of baseball history for as long as there’s been baseball history. In 1892, with Cleveland’s Jesse Burkett on second base, Boston catcher King Kelly watched a clean hit as if the fielder had no chance for a play at the plate. Seeing Kelly drop both mask and mitt, Burkett slowed, thinking he would score easily. When the throw arrived at the plate, however, Kelly caught it bare-handed and tagged out the befuddled runner.

  Kansas City Royals shortstop Freddie Patek went so far as to bobble air in an effort to elicit slides. Patek’s keystone partner, Cookie Rojas, helped out by moving in to make phantom pivots near the base.

  “I don’t think any baserunner should fall for a deke,” said Rangers manager Ron Washington. “There are things I’m supposed to be doing when a ball is put in play, so how can you deke me? A ball is hit, and I’m supposed to know where that ball is at all times. And if I run blind and get deked out, whose fault is that? Is that the infielder who deked me out, or is that my fault for not knowing what’s going on?”

  Ask Johnny Jeter. In a 1972 game between the Giants and Padres, Jeter stole a base so easily that there was no throw. He dived headfirst into the base anyway, a clear sign that he hadn’t looked in to follow the action. Seeing this, San Francisco shortstop Chris Speier pounced. “Hold up, hold up—foul ball,” he said nonchalantly. Astonishingly, the ploy worked. Jeter started back to first base, Giants catcher Dave Rader fired the ball to second, and Jeter was tagged out. “Oh shit, was he pissed,” said Speier, grinning at the thought more than three decades later.

  Infielders’ proximity to baserunners gives them a natural advantage when it comes to deking, but outfielders can get in on the act as well. Jim Rice made a habit of treating many balls hit over his head at Fenway Park as if they would end up clearing the Green Monster by a mile, gazing up with detachment as the hitter started into his home-run trot … before racing to the carom and firing the ball in to second. “You could make a great video of all the shocked faces of baserunners who were cut down at second because they fell for this trick,” said outfielder Doug Glanville.