The Baseball Codes

by Jason Turbow

  RAU: We got a left-handed hitter coming up, why—

  LASORDA: I don’t give a shit! You got three left-handed hitters and they all got hits on you. Rivers, Jackson, and that fucking other guy. That guy who just hit the ball was a left-hander, wasn’t he? [Chris Chambliss, who had doubled, was indeed left-handed.]

  RAU: I jammed him. I pitched it on the inside part of the plate….

  LASORDA: I don’t give a shit whether you jammed him or not—he didn’t get out. I can’t let you out there in a fucking game like this—I’ve got a fucking job to do. What’s the matter with you?

  It’s rare insight into the language of diplomacy from baseball’s putative ambassador. Lasorda made his fucking decision, and though Rhoden let both runners score, he held the Yankees from there. It didn’t do much good, however, because the Dodgers lost the game 4–2, and the series in six.

  To get around those kinds of conversations, Hall of Fame manager Sparky Anderson implemented a rule with his pitchers. “I don’t want to hear you,” he said. “Just give me the ball. I have no desire to hear a pitcher’s feelings, because if something goes wrong I’m the one who’s gonna get fired, not the pitcher.”

  The manager’s also the one who’s going to get booed, as demonstrated in a story told by Rangers skipper Bobby Valentine: “Okay, so I’m the manager of Nolan Ryan,” he said. “Nolan and I get along fine. I have asked him to do only one thing for me. I said, ‘Nolan, every time you pitch at our stadium, it’s filled with people who have come just to see you. Now, a lot of those times, I’m going to have to be the guy who has to come out and get you. This is not going to be a popular decision. When I come out and get you, can you just stay on the mound for a minute? Give the ball to the relief pitcher and wait. I’ll say what I have to say and we’ll walk off the mound together to a great standing ovation. Okay?’ He never does it. I go out to get him. He gives the ball to the relief pitcher. He walks. Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaay. I talk. I walk. Booooooooooooo. Valentine, you no-good blankety-blank.”

  Robinson, Lasorda, and Valentine all knew what they wanted when they left the dugout. Should a manager head to the mound without such certainty, however, he’s invariably looking for a clue to his pitcher’s ability to continue in the game. This brings up another unwritten rule about mound etiquette: When a manager asks how a pitcher feels, the pitcher lies.

  No matter how much respect a pitcher holds for his manager, he’s rarely happy to see him heading to the mound. Even if the pitcher is clearly spent, his shoulder, elbow, or hip shooting pain with every pitch, he’ll insist to his last breath that he can still get the job done. “They’re starting pitchers,” said Tony La Russa. “They need to be heroes.”

  “If you don’t say the right thing it’s perceived as a lack of heart,” said pitcher David Cone, who admitted to deceiving manager Joe Torre about his condition during a mound conference in the sixth inning of Game 3 of the 1996 World Series. (Cone insisted he was fine, stayed in the game, and, despite increasing fatigue, willed his way out of a jam.) “All guys worth their salt do it,” he said. “That’s why it’s hard for a manager to go out there. They know that in the heat of battle it’s hard to get straight answers from a pitcher.”

  “When [Cone] lied to me, he had to make it the truth,” said Torre. “He just had to find a way to get it done, and that’s what separates those guys. That’s what matters.”

  It’s the same section of the Code that prevents players from missing games for all but the most serious injuries. Anything less than an unflinching desire to compete—or at least the appearance of such—is perceived as weakness of character. It’s a fine line walked by athletes, and especially star players; even though staying in a game at limited capacity might hurt one’s team, asking out when it counts is tantamount to surrender. Few in baseball want to see perceived cowardice in action from their teammates, even if it’s ultimately for the collective good.

  As for Jim Barr and Frank Robinson, the pair made up quickly after their Shea Stadium spat, but that didn’t much change the pitcher’s outlook on what had happened. In fact, it was a full decade before Barr finally understood his manager’s position—and it took Barr’s appointment as pitching coach at Sacramento State University for it to happen. Suddenly Barr was the one examining situations, noticing when guys start to leave pitches high in the strike zone, playing lefty-righty percentages, and knowing what’s available in the bullpen. He soon made it a practice to deliver a speech at the beginning of every season outlining one of his most intractable rules, which bore echoes of Sparky Anderson: When Barr visits the mound for a pitching change, he wants only for the departing player to give him the ball and walk quietly away, no questions asked.

  “Now that I’m a coach I understand exactly where Frank was coming from,” he said. “I tell my pitchers: ‘Guys, I know you want to stay in there, but from personal experience … just hand me the ball and say goodbye.’”

  PART TWO

  RETALIATION

  11

  Retaliation

  In 1986, Mike Scott pitched like a Hall of Famer, winning the NL Cy Young Award and throwing a no-hitter in his second-to-last start of the season to clinch the NL West title for Houston. He opened the playoffs against the Mets nearly as strong, allowing only two hits through seven shutout innings in Game 1 of the NLCS, his split-fingered fastball dropping like an anvil as it rocketed toward the strike zone. By the time Lenny Dykstra came to the plate in the eighth, eleven Mets had already gone down on strikes, and New York was just five outs away from falling into an early hole in the series.

  That the Mets still had hope was thanks to the spectacular performance of their own pitcher, Dwight Gooden, who had held the Astros to a single run. So, when Danny Heep, pinch-hitting for Gooden, delivered a one-out single in the eighth inning to give his team just its fifth baserunner of the game, it was a minor cause for celebration on the New York bench.

  Next up was Dykstra, nicknamed “Nails” for his crash-and-burn style of play. Just twenty-three, he lived for this sort of competition and was the only player in the Mets’ starting lineup whom Scott had been unable to strike out. In the eighth he made contact again, topping a ball to the right side of the infield that Astros second baseman Bill Doran was able to knock down with a dive. When Doran’s wide throw was bobbled by first baseman Glenn Davis, however, Dykstra was safe, and New York had two baserunners—its best rally of the game.

  That’s what Dykstra did right. Here’s what he did wrong: When he crossed the bag and spun to see the umpire signal safe, he let loose his emotions, turning toward the Houston dugout, pumping his fist, and unleashing a primal bellow.

  Whether or not Scott noticed is unimportant to this story, because Dykstra’s actions caught the attention of the one guy on Houston’s bench he’d have been best off leaving alone. Had Nails considered it, he’d probably have agreed that it was in his best interests to avoid riling up Nolan Ryan.

  Ryan was scheduled to start Game 2 for the Astros, and looked on quietly from the bench as Dykstra’s histrionics played out. Without removing his gaze from the area near first base, Ryan tapped the leg of pitcher Larry Anderson, sitting just to his left. “That boy,” he said, in his slow Texas drawl, “just asked for a bow tie.”

  It was a euphemism that, except by Ryan himself, likely hadn’t been used in the major leagues for thirty years. Ryan had picked it up as a young pitcher in the 1970s from none other than Satchel Paige, in his lone encounter with the former Negro Leagues star. Paige, then about seventy, had gone to meet the fireballer who was setting all the strikeout records, and gave Ryan a piece of advice that stuck with him for the rest of his career: “One of the best pitches is the bow-tie pitch.”

  Ryan had no idea what Paige was talking about. A bow-tie pitch, explained the ancient ballplayer, was “when you throw it right here”—he then mimed a horizontal line across his Adam’s apple, as if slashing his own throat—“where they wear their bow tie.”

  Ryan took Paige’s
wisdom to heart, and began utilizing it with regularity. The bow tie is a purpose pitch, an intimidator, and it meshed nicely with Ryan’s demeanor. “The bow tie was part of Ryan’s mound presence,” said Craig Biggio, who caught Ryan as a rookie with the Astros in 1988. “If he didn’t like the way somebody played the game, they got hit. They got on the ground.”

  “[Dykstra] was really clapping there, and it was showy,” said Astros pitcher Jim Deshaies, who watched the moment unfold alongside Ryan on the bench. “That didn’t fly very far with Nolan.”

  Ryan didn’t have to wait long to make his feelings known. It was his job to follow up Scott’s five-hit shutout in Game 1, and the second batter he faced was none other than Dykstra, who compounded his troubles by laying down a bunt. The entire league knew how Ryan felt about players bunting on him, mostly because the pitcher himself informed them of the fact with a regular pre-game ritual in which he tamped down the grass around home plate with his toe while staring daggers into the opposing dugout. His message: No bunting on me, fellas. And there rarely was.

  Dykstra was thrown out, and when he came to the plate with two out in the fifth inning, the pitcher forced him to the dirt with a second-pitch fastball that sailed inside at neck level. It was a Ryan-model bow tie, custom-fitted and personally delivered. “You’ve seen the cartoon where Charlie Brown goes to kick the football and Lucy pulls it out and his feet go flying up in the air?” asked Anderson. “That’s what Lenny looked like.”

  Dykstra didn’t stay down long, leaping up and glaring at the mound. As intimidating as Ryan could be, Dykstra wasn’t one to be bullied. Two pitches later, he drilled another fastball into left field for a base hit, and the Mets went on to score three runs in the inning, eventually winning 5–1. After the game, Dykstra wondered if there was intent behind Ryan’s knockdown, but it probably should have been clear to him. The pitcher recognized behavior that needed correcting, and used fastballs to make his points.

  In that much, at least, Ryan was ordinary; fastballs are the weapon of choice for most angry pitchers. It might seem that such heavy-handed tactics would only foster more conflict, but it’s actually just the opposite. Because most baseball people understand the Code’s eye-for-an-eye mentality, getting even is not just tolerated, it’s usually expected. Should a team or player fail to retaliate when the opposition oversteps its boundaries, a loss of respect may result, in the other dugout and around the league.

  “It’s a delicate subject, of course. To the uninitiated or uninformed, it might appear to be childish or an emotional thing, but it’s not,” said Dick Bosman, who spent eleven years as an American League pitcher and nine more as the pitching coach in Baltimore and Texas. “An example: When you have a guy on the other team who, out of frustration, drills the next guy after someone on your team hits a home run—and I’m talking about the home-run hitter not standing there and doing six pirouettes like some of the players today, but he just hits the home run and runs around the bases—that pitcher’s angry because he screwed it up and made a bad pitch and the ball went into the stands. That constitutes a situation in which you have to make sure you protect your teammates. In my mind, the first guy in the next inning gets it…. Now, what happens then? That guy goes back to the dugout and tells the pitcher who originally drilled our guy, ‘You better knock that stuff off, because you’re going to get some of us hurt.’ That’s how that’s taken care of.”

  A profound majority of baseball’s policing emanates from the pitcher’s mound, and covers numerous Code violations: shows of disrespect, like stealing a base while holding a big lead; or acts of showboating, such as watching a home run; or pumping a fist after beating out an infield single in the 1986 NLCS. It can come in reaction to an opposing player’s success, or some long-held grudge that was never resolved in its own time. The retaliation is not always understood by the victim or even the pitcher’s own teammates, but if it’s genuine, there’s always a reason for it.

  “You have to do it, because if you don’t do it then maybe the next day somebody will take a liberty that they shouldn’t,” said longtime Royals pitcher Paul Splittorff. “It’s protecting us.”

  It’s rare for a hitter to request retaliation on his own behalf, largely because most pitchers don’t need to be told. They judge the appropriate response by any number of things, none more immediate than the reaction of their offended teammate. During a game in 2006, for example, A’s pitcher Joe Blanton hit Blue Jays third baseman Troy Glaus to lead off the second inning. (It appeared to be unintentional, although Glaus had hit two home runs in the previous meeting between the teams ten weeks earlier.) As it happened, Oakland’s designated hitter, Frank Thomas, led off the following inning for the A’s, and the first pitch from Toronto starter Ted Lilly hit him in the back—clear retaliation—and drew warnings for both benches from umpire Jeff Nelson.

  As one of the best players in the American League for a decade, Thomas was no stranger to being the unwitting subject of similar retaliatory measures. He didn’t so much as look at Lilly after getting hit, just trotted to first base as if he had drawn a walk.

  “That’s happened to me thirty, forty times,” he said later. “Nowadays it’s what you expect. [Glaus] is their big guy, their big slugger, and we got him. He was the first one up in the inning, and I was the first one up the next inning. I knew I was going to wear it. You just take it and move on down to first. That’s baseball.”

  Thomas’s attitude informed the reaction on the A’s bench. Because the slugger was calm about the matter, so too were his teammates; had he reacted differently, the situation could have been far more volatile. “We all saw what happened, but Frank took it calmly, so we took it calmly,” said Oakland third-base coach Ron Washington. “If Frank had taken it with an uproar, we’d have taken it with an uproar. We have to wait for the reaction of the guy who it happened to. If Frank had charged him, there would have been a fight. If Frank had raised some hell going down to first base, we’d have raised some hell. But Frank took it calmly and went on down there, the umpire checked everything, and we played baseball.”

  Of course, such ironclad protection does have its downside. One member of the A’s posited that Lilly’s retaliatory strike against Thomas threw the pitcher off his rhythm, which appears to be true: Six of the next eleven batters reached base, including a Jay Payton home run. “When he hit Big Frank, he wasn’t so sure that Big Frank wasn’t coming out to get him,” said the Athletic. “He thinks he helped his team by hitting Big Frank, but I’ll tell you what—his heart was pumping a mile a minute until he realized that Frank was just going to take first base. And after that, Lilly couldn’t find the strike zone. He was all over the place.”

  If a pitcher has any doubt about what he should or shouldn’t do on a teammate’s behalf, it doesn’t hurt to check in. After Barry Bonds was hit by a Randy Johnson fastball in 2004, for example, Giants pitcher Jerome Williams—scheduled to start the following day’s game—looked down the bench to see if the superstar wanted a response. “I shook my head either yes or no, and he said no,” said Williams. “I’m showing him respect by asking if he wants me to do something because he got hit. Do you want me to shake them up or hit somebody? Because I’m going to protect you if you say yes.” The concept is so ingrained that when Royals pitchers failed to retaliate after Mike Sweeney and Jermaine Dye were hit by pitches in 2001, Kansas City general manager Allard Baird apologized to the players directly: “I can promise you as long as I’m general manager that will never happen again.” Alternatively, pitchers who protect teammates earn immediate and abiding respect. Every member of the Los Angeles Dodgers appreciated Don Drysdale’s two-for-one policy, in which he made it known that he’d drill two opponents for every Dodger who got hit.

  Sometimes the two-for-ones are aimed at the same player, because getting him once just doesn’t seem like enough. After Rangers catcher Ivan Rodriguez was hit on the elbow by Cleveland’s Jack Morris in April 1994, he took out his frustration by barreling hi
gh, hard, and late into shortstop Omar Vizquel on a subsequent play at second, spraining Vizquel’s knee so severely that the shortstop spent the next fifty-one days on the disabled list. Rodriguez was just twenty-two years old at the time but already in his fourth big-league season, and Indians players felt that he should have known better. Rodriguez maintained that he was merely trying to break up a double play, but Cleveland shortstop Alvaro Espinoza, Vizquel’s replacement, called it “dirty baseball.” “It was really kind of a cheap shot,” said Vizquel later. “Why should he take it out on me? Go out there and see Jack.”

  The following day, Indians manager Mike Hargrove told the press that he had no problem with good, hard baseball, but, he added, “that slide wasn’t good, hard baseball. From the looks of it he went down there with every intention of hurting someone, and he succeeded. That’s the sad part of the whole deal.” From that moment on it became clear that Rodriguez was a marked man. Texas manager Kevin Kennedy, ever the pragmatist, chose to sit his catcher for the final two games of the series to keep him from the business end of an ill-intentioned pitch. This saved Rodriguez in the short term, but only delayed the inevitable because the two teams had nine games remaining against each other that season, the next of which was scheduled for five days later, in Cleveland. Retribution didn’t take long to follow.

  In the seventh inning of the first game of the series, Rodriguez was anything but surprised when Indians starter Charles Nagy hit him on the hip. Not only did the Texas catcher fail to complain, he went so far as to pick up the ball, flip it to Nagy, and trot quietly to first. In his mind, his account was settled, and according to many who observe the Code, it should have been. Cleveland reliever Jose Mesa, however, wasn’t yet satisfied.