The Baseball Codes

by Jason Turbow

  Ironically, one of the most noteworthy instances of an outfield deke involved Rice’s Red Sox—with Boston cast as the victim. It happened in 1978, during the one-game playoff between the Red Sox and the Yankees to determine who went to the American League Championship Series. Boston, trailing 5–4 in the bottom of the ninth at Fenway Park, had a runner, Jerry Remy, on first base with one out. Things appeared promising when Rick Burleson hit a fly ball that Yankees right fielder Lou Piniella lost almost immediately in a patch of sunlight. But Piniella never hesitated, casually acting from the outset as if he were going to make the catch. Remy, who should have made it to third base without issue, was forced to stay near first until he saw that the ball wouldn’t be caught, at which point he could advance no farther than second. When Rice followed with a deep fly ball that would have easily scored the tying run from third, the Red Sox sensed an incredible opportunity wasted. Boston’s final batter, Carl Yastrzemski, popped out to end the game.

  The common factor in the dekes by both Knoblauch and Piniella is that a postseason hinged on each. The grand stage of the playoffs, in fact, has inspired a number of such noteworthy plays—none more original than that of A’s closer Rollie Fingers.

  It happened during the eighth inning of Game 3 of the 1972 World Series against the Reds. Fingers, with his team trailing 1–0, had been called upon to get the A’s out of a one-out, runners-at-the-corners jam. Oakland had scratched out only three hits against Reds pitcher Jack Billingham to that point, and its hopes of getting back into the game hinged on Fingers’s ability to keep runs off the board. When the runner at first, Bobby Tolan, swiped second, it only seemed logical that Oakland manager Dick Williams would order an intentional walk to Johnny Bench to set up a double play.

  Williams, however, was a gambler. Bench might have been a future Hall of Famer, but so was Fingers. The manager opted to let his pitcher pitch, intervening only once Bench worked the count to 3-2. Williams called time and approached the mound.

  “Dick gets there and he starts gesturing all over the place,” said Fingers. “He’s pointing at the on-deck circle and then to first base. All the time he’s telling us that [A’s catcher Gene] Tenace is supposed to stand up when he gets behind the plate. I’m supposed to go into my stretch like we’re going to intentionally walk Bench. And he wanted me to throw a slider for a strike. He wanted to make sure that in case we didn’t fool Bench, he wanted it to be a breaking pitch that he’d be swinging at.”

  Fingers delivered: A perfect slider on the outside corner was taken for strike three. He then intentionally walked Tony Perez to load the bases, and retired third baseman Denis Menke to get out of the jam. “Bench told me later that that was the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to him in baseball,” said Fingers.

  Knoblauch, Piniella, and Fingers respectively represent dekes from infielders, outfielders, and pitchers. Less common but still valid are those from baserunners, an example of which was perpetrated by Oakland’s Jay Payton in a 2006 game against the Devil Rays. On first base, Payton took notice when the hitter, Dan Johnson, lost track of the count and started trotting to first base after receiving only his third ball of the at-bat. Gauging the indifferent reaction of the defense, Payton took off toward second at an easy canter, fast enough to make it close if the defense caught on, but slow enough to avoid raising suspicion. When the umpire informed the teams that the hitter had not, in fact, walked, Johnson was forced to return to the plate. Payton, having advanced while the ball was in play, stole second in one of the truest senses of the term, deking an entire stadium in the process.

  • • •

  Fielders like the deke, and managers like the deke, and, okay, maybe baserunners aren’t such fans, but can the play ever be considered a bad tactic?

  “I think it’s horseshit,” said Ron Hassey, who played for six teams in fourteen years as a big-league catcher. “It’s part of the game, but I think it’s horseshit to get a guy down [into a slide] if you don’t have the ball…. You can get somebody hurt when there’s not even a play there.”

  Hassey’s right. A number of players have been injured by ill-timed or unnecessary dekes, which leads to an unwritten rule about when it is and isn’t appropriate to use the maneuver. For outfielders like Piniella and baserunners like Payton, there are no limits—nothing they do could put an opponent in physical peril. But infielders throwing down phantom tags at the last possible moment can cause awkward slides, and the potential for damage is very real. “If a guy is stealing, you don’t pretend the throw is coming,” said second baseman Craig Grebeck. “If he’s coming in standing up and you all of a sudden look like the catcher is throwing the ball, a late slide can tear up an ankle or a knee.”

  That’s exactly what happened to Gene Clines in 1973. Clines, a fourth-year outfielder with the Pirates, was on first base in a game against San Diego; with a full count on the hitter, he took off for second. The pitch was taken for ball four, but instead of simply strolling to second, Clines—who never peeked homeward to assess the situation—proceeded full speed ahead. Padres shortstop Derrell Thomas waited until Clines was nearly atop the base, then inexplicably threw his glove down as if a late throw were about to arrive. Clines, flustered, went into a hurried slide and badly injured his ankle. “That play right there cost me a lot of time,” he said, still angry at the thought more than three decades later. “I never fully recovered for the rest of that year.” Clines, batting .291 going into the game, missed three weeks, and hit just .227 in the two months thereafter.

  Dusty Baker, playing for the Dodgers on a bad knee in 1981, was deked by former teammate and good friend Darrell Evans on a similar play at Candlestick Park. Baker had gone from first to third on a base hit against the Giants, and Evans, manning third base, put down a late phantom tag. “Darrell is deking me when the throw wasn’t even there—it was to second base and cut off,” said Baker. “I tried to slide late and I stumbled and almost hurt my knee again. I said, ‘D, we were teammates—what are you trying to do to me?’ He just said, ‘I don’t know.’”

  Los Angeles pitcher Tom Niedenfuer responded by drilling Evans later in the game at Baker’s request. “He spent the next three days with his elbow in a sling,” Baker said. “Later, he asked me, ‘Dusty, did you guys drill me on purpose?’ Of course I told him no.”

  A deke is essentially baseball pantomime, a player catching a ball that isn’t really there, then tagging a befuddled opponent. Its inverse is the hidden-ball trick, in which a fielder applies a tag with a ball the runner thinks is somewhere else. The play usually involves the first or third baseman receiving the ball from an outfielder after a hit, then acting like he’s given it to the pitcher, often through a fake handoff near the mound. When the baserunner takes his lead, the fielder has simply to tag him; as long as the pitcher isn’t atop the mound when this happens, it’s perfectly legal.

  “A lot of people thought it was kind of a chickenshit play,” said Steve Lyons, “but my feeling always was, Pay attention.” Lyons’s favorite situation in which to utilize the strategy was on tight double plays, when all eyes were on the first-base umpire to see whether he’d call the runner safe or out. Because many first basemen naturally hop off the bag toward the pitcher, said Lyons, “all you have to do is take three more steps, give [the pitcher] a little nod, hang on to the ball, turn around, and come back to first base. Guys get off the base too early all the time.”

  Third baseman Matt Williams was one of his era’s foremost practitioners of the trick, going so far as to induce runners off the base. With the Giants in 1994, Williams pretended to give the ball to pitcher Dave Burba, then returned to his position and asked the runner, Dodgers rookie Rafael Bournigal, if he “could clean the bag off.” The runner graciously stepped aside, which Williams immediately made him regret. “The intent was not to embarrass anybody or to pick on anybody,” he said after pulling the trick against Royals rookie Jed Hansen three years later. “But you want to win, and we needed to win that game.”r />
  At least he got that much out of it. Lyons said that in the minor leagues he once pulled off the play at first base on consecutive days, against the same baserunner, Carlos Martinez. “He was probably pissed off, but the embarrassment when you actually get caught overrules everything,” he said. “You get caught, you’re embarrassed, you start walking back to the dugout. He was big enough to pinch my head off if he wanted to.”

  Lyons once hid the ball so well that baserunner Scott Fletcher wasn’t the only one completely snookered—so was the umpire, who called the runner safe on the play. “I got in a pretty good argument over that one,” said Lyons. “I said, ‘Do you think I’m stupid enough to pull the hidden-ball trick, have everybody in the entire ballpark not know that I have the ball, fool every player on both my team and their team, fool the guy who’s on first base, and then tag him before he’s off the bag? Do you think I’m that dumb?’ And what I didn’t realize until that point was that I didn’t really give the umpire a shot to know I had the ball. In fact, I fooled everybody. It’s a little unfair to have him make the right call on that play if he doesn’t know I have the ball, so after that I tried to make sure that they did. It’s pretty hard to try to hide the ball from everybody in the world and still show it to the umpire and say, Hey, I’ve got it here, keep your eyes open—but that’s what I tried to do.”

  Philadelphia infielder Steve Jeltz presented an even harder-luck case in 1986. He had the ball, showed it to the nearest infield umpire, and picked the runner, Curt Ford of the St. Louis Cardinals, cleanly off second base. The only problem was that Phillies catcher John Russell, unaware of what was going on across the diamond, requested time out, which plate ump John McSherry granted just as the shortstop was racing to apply the tag. Because the ball was no longer in play by the time Jeltz reached Ford, the runner was allowed to return to second.

  If only Lonnie Smith had been so lucky.

  10

  Mound Conference Etiquette

  Jim Barr was an outspoken pitcher who over the course of a dozen seasons developed what can be charitably described as a philosophy of independent thought when dealing with managers. Another way to put it is that he wasn’t shy about expressing disagreement with his skipper, something that’s discouraged in most pitcher-manager relationships and is expressly verboten when done in public. Should it happen on the mound during a game, even the most levelheaded manager will get ticked off. If that manager happens to be Frank Robinson—who was known for harboring little appreciation for independent thought from his players—look out.

  With his Giants holding a 7–5 lead against the Mets at Shea Stadium in 1983, Barr, in his fourth inning of relief work, walked Dave Kingman to give New York two baserunners with two outs. The walk had been semi-intentional, Barr having decided he’d be just as comfortable facing the next hitter, Brian Giles (of Manhattan, Kansas, not his All-Star namesake), whose .238 season average included zero home runs. When the right-hander’s first pitch to Giles sailed wide, however, out came Robinson, who quickly signaled for closer Greg Minton. Barr wasn’t pleased.

  “One ball doesn’t bother me, because I don’t walk very many guys,” said the pitcher, describing the scene. “All of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye, I see Frank coming out, and as soon as I see him signal to the bullpen it was ‘You gotta be kidding me.’ … I wasn’t wild; I could throw strikes when I wanted to.” Frustrated, Barr didn’t wait for his manager to reach the mound before flipping him the ball—a clear act of insolence in the hard-edged presence of Robinson, who made it clear to his pitchers that they were to hand him the ball as they departed.

  Barr planned on storming to the dugout, but was interrupted when Robinson caught the baseball, grabbed the pitcher by the arm as he tried to pass, spun him around, and dragged him back up the hill to await Minton’s arrival. Robinson had been the league’s most fiery player, and his managerial furnace burned nearly as hot.

  As the duo waited for Minton to arrive, Robinson told Barr exactly what he thought of his stunt, poking a finger into the right-hander’s chest to emphasize his point. Barr was no stranger to confrontation with his managers, having once called Giants skipper Wes Westrum “gutless” for removing him for a pinch-hitter. As a member of the California Angels in 1979, he almost came to blows with broadcaster Don Drysdale over criticism the ex-pitcher had leveled his way. On the mound at Shea, it was hard to miss the battle brewing, and the New York fans looked on in delight. All four members of the Giants infield raced in and surrounded the pair in an attempt to calm things down.

  Barr didn’t help matters when he decided that if he wasn’t allowed to leave until Robinson gave him permission, he wouldn’t leave at all. This meant that when Minton arrived at the mound he found two people, Robinson and Barr, standing between himself and the catcher, which made it somewhat difficult to warm up. “It seemed like five minutes,” said Barr, “even though it was probably only ninety seconds.” Robinson finally led Barr back to the dugout, at which point both pitcher and manager had to be restrained from going after each other.

  Barr was hardly the first pitcher to treat a visit from his manager like he was about to be served court papers. Hall of Famer Early Wynn was reportedly once so upset to see White Sox manager Al Lopez coming to the mound that, rather than handing over the ball, he fired it into his manager’s stomach. The action was apparently enough for Lopez to reassess his previous estimation of the diminishing velocity of Wynn’s fastball, and the manager left him in the game. In a similar move, St. Louis Cardinals manager Eddie Dyer left the dugout for a mound visit in 1946, but was quickly warned by pitcher Blix Donnelly that he’d be hit between the eyes with the baseball if he got any closer. More intelligent than brave, Dyer ceded the battle (Donnelly stayed in the game) but won the war shortly thereafter, when the pitcher was sold to Philadelphia.

  The greater the pressure, of course, the better the mound discussions. Mix in the anxiety of the postseason, and players can find it difficult to hold back. Nerves can get frayed in October even when things are going well, and when they aren’t—like when a manager has to remove his starting pitcher in the second inning of a World Series game—it can be disastrous.

  This was the case in Game 4 of the 1977 Fall Classic, when Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda took the long walk to remove his starter, Doug Rau, who had given up two doubles and a single in the second frame, allowing one run while failing to record an out. Yankees were at second and third, and no matter how Lasorda might have reacted to a similar situation during the regular season, his team was down two games to one, and he couldn’t afford to let this one get out of hand. The conversation is truly memorable, though, because Lasorda was wearing a microphone for the TV broadcast. Also, as Lasorda admitted to one of his coaches in the dugout, his goal was to stall for time and allow reliever Rick Rhoden additional warm-up tosses. Before he ever left the bench Lasorda had made the decision to remove Rau, but the pitcher, not privy to his manager’s thinking, lobbied to remain in the game—which was exactly what Lasorda didn’t want to hear.

  RAU: I feel good, Tommy.

  LASORDA: I don’t give a shit you feel good. There’s four mother-fucking hits up there. [There were actually only three.]

  RAU: They were all fuckin’ hit the opposite way….

  LASORDA: I don’t give a fuck.

  RAU: Tommy, we got a left-handed hitter. I can strike this motherfucker out.

  LASORDA: I don’t give a shit, Dougie.

  RAU: I want to get out of this myself.

  LASORDA: I may be wrong, but that’s my goddamn job.

  RAU: I ain’t fuckin’ hurtin’.

  LASORDA: I’ll make the fuckin’ decisions here, okay?

  RAU: [Tommy John] gave up three runs on the fuckin’ board yesterday.

  LASORDA: I don’t give a fuck! Don’t give me any shit, goddamn it! I make the fuckin’ decisions. Keep your fucking mouth shut—I told you.

  Second baseman Davey Lopes, interjecting on behalf of the sport�
��s image: “Hey, hey, hey. This looks bad up here. Just back off the mound. You want to talk about it, talk about it inside.”

  LASORDA: We’ll talk about it in my fucking office.

  RAU: If I felt bad, then I wouldn’t say nothing.

  LOPES: I’m just saying, talk about it inside. This is not the place to be talking about it, okay? That’s all I’m trying to say. I’m just trying to avoid a fucking scene out here, that’s all.

  LASORDA: That’s right. It’s fucking great for you to be out here talking to me like that.

  RAU: If I didn’t feel good, I wouldn’t say nothing.

  LASORDA: I don’t give a shit, Doug. I’m the fucking manager of the fucking team. I gotta make the fucking decisions. And I’ll make them to the fucking best of my ability. They may be the fucking wrong decisions, but I’ll make it. Don’t worry about it. I’ll make the fucking decisions. I gave you the chance to walk out here. I can’t fuck around—we’re down two games to one. If it was yesterday, it’s a different fucking story.