by Jason Turbow
Stengel’s was a soft touch; other managers were more direct: “I will order it,” said Frank Robinson in 1975, “and it better be thrown.” Leo Durocher added to his mystique by putting hundred-dollar bills in Whit Wyatt’s locker when the pitcher threw at opponents’ heads. Gene Mauch would yell, “Spin his helmet!” to his pitchers from the dugout.
Occasionally it’s not even the manager who orders it. During spring training with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1978, pitcher George Frazier made his first-ever appearance in a big-league uniform. After recording two quick outs against the Red Sox, he got ahead of the third batter he faced, Carlton Fisk, 0-2. Because the right-hander was on a roll, he found it curious when catcher Ted Simmons gave him the “flip” sign—flicking his thumb upward across his index finger—calling, for a reason Frazier couldn’t fathom, for Fisk to go down. The rookie, terrified at the thought of crossing an icon like Simmons, hit Fisk between the numbers. Boston’s All-Star threw down both bat and helmet and glared at Frazier all the way to first base. After the inning, Frazier approached Simmons to find out what Fisk had done to merit such retaliation. “Nothing,” Simmons told the rookie. “I just wanted to see if you’d do it.”
One manager noteworthy for his love of ordering retaliatory pitches was Billy Martin, who went from being one of the game’s most intense, ready-to-fight players to being one of its most intense, ready-to-fight managers. “Billy would call down to the bullpen and say, ‘Get Stan Thomas up,’” said Charlie Silvera, Martin’s longtime coach, who fielded the manager’s calls to the bullpen. (There was a reason Martin liked Thomas for the job—this was the same guy who, while with Seattle two seasons later, threw four pitches at the head of Mike Cubbage.) “He’d say, ‘Tell Stanley to throw at him until he hits him.’ Well, I’d get off the phone and alert the bullpen, ‘Get ready, boys, we’re going again.’ They’d take out their false teeth and take off their glasses and spit out their tobacco and get ready for the big sprint to home plate.”
As long as Thomas—or any other of Martin’s pitchers—hit his mark, everything went smoothly with the manager. Should one of them fail—or, worse, refuse—there was perhaps no more vindictive man in baseball. Goose Gossage once did that very thing, and says that it strained his relationship with his manager for the duration of the time they spent together. It happened during spring training in 1978, shortly after Gossage joined Martin’s Yankees from the Pittsburgh Pirates. The pitcher was shagging balls in the outfield when Martin ambled over. Gossage guesses the ensuing conversation was some sort of test; if it was, he failed miserably. According to Gossage, the dialogue went like this:
MARTIN: Goose, when you get in the game today, I want you to hit Billy Sample in the head.
GOSSAGE: What?
MARTIN: I want you to drill Billy Sample in his fucking head.
The pitcher deliberated for a moment before denying his manager’s request, telling Martin that he had no bad feelings for Sample and wasn’t about to fight somebody else’s battle. Martin’s response was to berate the pitcher, both on the field and in the clubhouse. This may well have contributed to Gossage’s horrible start with the team, in which he took losses in three of his first four appearances. (He did manage to rebound, winning that year’s American League Rolaids Relief Award.)
Though few managers were as fiery or as direct as Martin, the game has a long history of angry reactions when retaliation—whether ordered or not—failed to be carried out. When White Sox star Frank Thomas was hit by a pitch in 1998, it didn’t matter to his manager, Jerry Manuel, that it happened in the first inning of a game early in spring training, and that the offending pitcher, Willie Blair, was clearly still working out off-season kinks. Chicago pitcher James Baldwin failed to respond in kind, so Manuel—in his first season at the helm of a big-league team—wasted no time in calling a clubhouse meeting. “The message was, we will not tolerate the guys who are the heart and soul of the team getting hit,” he said, describing the moment. “Those are things they have to understand about me. That’s part of the ‘fearless’ package and the ‘respect’ package. We’re not looking to start anything, but we’re definitely not looking to back off anything either.”
Manuel’s successor with the White Sox, Ozzie Guillen, felt similarly, occasionally to the point of controversy. In 2006, he quickly identified Texas’s Hank Blalock as a target for retaliation after Rangers pitcher Vicente Padilla twice hit Chicago catcher A. J. Pierzynski during a game. That was the plan, anyway. Filling the space between conception and execution, however, was Guillen’s choice of executioner: rookie Sean Tracey. The right-hander had appeared in all of two big-league games to that point and was understandably nervous. Even under optimal circumstances he didn’t have terrific control, having led the Carolina League in wild pitches two years earlier, while hitting twenty-three batters. When Tracey was suddenly inserted into a game at Arlington Stadium with orders to drill the twentieth major-league hitter he’d ever faced, it was hardly because he was the best man for the job. To Guillen, Tracey was simply an expendable commodity, a reliever whose potential ejection wouldn’t much hurt the team, especially trailing 5–0, as the Sox were at the time.
If the manager knew his baseball history, he might have realized that precedent had already been set in this regard. In 1942, Boston Braves manager Casey Stengel, wanting to get even with the Brooklyn Dodgers for stealing his signs, ordered his own rookie pitcher—greener even than Tracey, appearing in just his second big-league game—to hit Dodgers shortstop Pee Wee Reese. Faced with an assassin’s assignment, the nervous lefty tried three times to hit Reese, and three times he missed. The following day, a fuming Stengel shipped him back to the minors, an action he would later call his biggest mistake as a manager. It would be four more years before Warren Spahn returned to the big leagues, by which point he was better prepared to handle the rigors that came with his promotion.
The same probably won’t be said about Sean Tracey. When the right-hander’s first pitch to Blalock ran high and tight but missed the mark, Tracey did what he’d been taught in the minors, sending his next pitch to the outside corner in order to avoid suspicion. Blalock tipped it foul. When Tracey’s third effort was also fouled back, for strike two, the pitcher altered his strategy and decided to go after the out, not the batter.
According to his manager, it was the wrong decision. After Blalock grounded out on the fifth pitch of the at-bat, Guillen stormed to the mound and angrily yanked Tracey from the game. He didn’t let up after they returned to the dugout, berating the twenty-five-year-old in front of both his teammates and a television audience. With nowhere to hide, Tracey sat on the bench and pulled his jersey up over his head, doing his best to disappear in plain sight. Two days later, without making another appearance, he was returned to the minor leagues, and during the off-season was released.
In his previous game, Tracey had hit a batter without trying to, said Tim Raines, Chicago’s bench coach, “so we figured it’d be easy for him to hit a guy if he was trying…. But it’s much harder than it looks. I think it’s harder knowing you’re going to hit a guy. And if the target knows you’re trying to hit him, he’s going to be loose in the box. It’s not something you’re taught. You can’t practice hitting a guy.”
Ultimately, Tracey shouldered the responsibility for his actions, saying he “learned from it,” but the lesson was lost on his more tenured teammate, Jon Garland, a seven-year veteran en route to his second consecutive eighteen-win season. Before Padilla’s next start against the White Sox, Guillen launched a pre-emptive verbal sortie, positing to members of the media that if the Rangers right-hander hit any Chicago player, retribution would be fast and decisive. His exact words: “If Padilla hits somebody, believe me, we’re going to do something about it. That’s a guarantee. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but something’s going to happen. Make sure [the Rangers] know it, too.” Padilla did, in fact, hit Chicago shortstop Alex Cintron in the third inning, at which point it didn’t tak
e much predictive power to see that a member of the Texas lineup would soon be going down. The smart money was on the following inning’s leadoff hitter, second baseman Ian Kinsler.
The smart money was correct, but the payoff left something to be desired. Garland’s first pitch sailed behind Kinsler, a mark clearly missed. Plate umpire Randy Marsh, well versed in the history between the clubs, opted against issuing a warning, effectively granting Garland a second chance. The pitcher didn’t exactly seize the opportunity, putting his next pitch in nearly the same place as the first. At this point, Marsh had no choice—warnings were issued and hostilities were, willingly or not, ceased. Guillen rushed to the mound for a vigorous discussion about the merits of teammate protection. Kinsler ultimately walked, and after the inning Guillen reprised his dugout undressing of Sean Tracey, spewing invective while Garland listened and the White Sox batted. “I make it clear, I won’t wait for two months or until I see you in spring training or until I see you next year,” Guillen told reporters the following day. “When you get it done, you get something done right away. If it didn’t happen that day, we get over it and move on.”
As Raines said, however, it’s not as easy as it looks. A designated driller carries the expectations of twenty-four guys, plus coaches, plus fans. If he tends to internalize things the task can become difficult, with the necessary steps to intentionally hitting someone growing surprisingly involved.
One such pitcher was notoriously streaky left-hander Shawn Estes of the New York Mets, who, at the center of the baseball universe in June 2002, proved Raines’s theory. Estes was in the spotlight as the man expected to avenge teammate Mike Piazza, who for nearly two years had been subject to the aggressive and occasionally bizarre intimidation tactics of Roger Clemens.
It started before Estes had even joined the team, during a Yankees-Mets game in July 2000. Clemens, traded to the Yankees a season earlier after winning back-to-back Cy Youngs with Toronto, had been laboring through an utterly mediocre campaign, during which he racked up a career-worst 4.60 ERA. New York management tied the pitcher’s problems to the fact that he had drifted from the inside intimidation that so closely marked his past success. “He wasn’t pushing people off the plate,” said Yankees manager Joe Torre. “They were getting too comfortable hitting off him.”
That applied to the Mets in general (Clemens was 1-4 with a 9.10 ERA against them) and Piazza in particular (the catcher was hitting an astounding .583 off the Rocket, with three home runs and nine RBIs in a dozen at-bats). Perhaps this motivated the pitcher. In the second inning, Clemens unleashed an inside fastball with such velocity that Piazza barely had time to flinch before it ricocheted off the “NY” on his batting helmet. The hitter fell like a chunk of granite, lying motionless in the dirt for several long moments as Clemens stood about thirty feet away, hands on knees. Piazza was eventually taken to the hospital and diagnosed with a concussion; he missed two games—one in the regular season and the other the All-Star Game, three days later. The tension created by the moment was enough for the All-Star representatives from both New York teams, who had planned to share a charter flight to Atlanta for the festivities, to scuttle their arrangement and make individual travel plans.
That Mets pitcher Glendon Rusch hit the next Yankees batter, Tino Martinez, in the backside was of little consequence to Mets fans, who wanted nothing less than an eye-for-an-eye measure of frontier justice. The Yankees, though, never afforded them that opportunity. Clemens didn’t come to bat in games at Yankee Stadium, and the next time the teams met at Shea was for Games 3, 4, and 5 of the World Series—but Clemens, having started Game 2 at his home yard, never took the field. (“Did I juggle the rotation to keep him from pitching at Shea? Yeah, I probably did,” admitted Torre. “I’m not going to deny that. I didn’t need another soap opera.”)
He got one, anyway. Even though Clemens wouldn’t bat, that Game 2 matchup with Piazza was at the forefront of public anticipation, and the pitcher didn’t disappoint—albeit in a way that defied comprehension. Piazza, the third batter of the first inning, split his bat while fouling off an inside fastball. The hit itself was inconsequential—the ball squibbed harmlessly foul outside the first-base line—but the bat’s barrel helicoptered toward the mound, landing at Clemens’s feet. The catcher trotted absentmindedly toward first, bat handle still in his fist, as he watched the ball roll farther and farther from fair territory. Then things got historically interesting.
Clemens bent, cleanly fielded the barrel, and threw it—jagged edge and all—toward Piazza. It landed several feet from the stunned Met.
Clemens seemed to realize immediately what he had done. Piazza, in disbelief, started walking toward Clemens and shouted, “What’s your problem?” It was the pitcher’s reaction at that point—the Rocket seemed as shocked as anybody—that Piazza used to opt against settling matters with his fists. “[Clemens] was obviously jacked up,” said the catcher. “In essence, I think he kind of cracked.” The pitcher’s excuse: He thought it was the ball. (Needless to say, this reasoning was a hit with the media.)
Mets manager Bobby Valentine called it “an overemotional, rather immature act on a big stage.” Although the only real harm done to the Mets was the two-hitter Clemens threw over eight innings, the incident left the team’s fans clamoring for nothing less than Clemens’s head on a stick.
After the game, the pitcher ended up an emotional wreck in his manager’s office, sitting alongside Torre, pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre, and owner George Steinbrenner, after Stottlemyre found him sobbing unremittingly in the clubhouse. It was clear to those in the room that, despite the pitcher’s brave face and outstanding performance, the moment had taken a toll. “Rocket’s always very high-strung and emotional …,” said teammate David Cone. “Certainly, he was wound up. He was scrambling a little bit.”
The Yankees won the series in five games, and Clemens was fined fifty thousand dollars for his actions. Like the rest of the country, Estes—then in the employ of the San Francisco Giants—watched the moment unfold on TV, unaware that he would ever become part of the story line. Estes had never even shared a field with Clemens, let alone built up any animosity toward him. But when the Yankees’ next turn at Shea, in June 2001, again passed without Clemens’s taking the mound, the showdown was delayed until the following season—less than three months after Estes threw his first pitch for the Mets, and a year and a half after Clemens thought a bat was a ball.
On June 15, 2002, Clemens finally took the mound in the Mets’ ballpark. Estes didn’t even realize that the fateful day would coincide with his turn in the rotation until reporters informed him of it, and even then he said he was aware of only “bits and pieces” of the story. That his teammates didn’t exactly rush to fill him in wasn’t too surprising—only seven of them were left from the 2000 World Series roster, and they pretty much kept to themselves. Pitcher Al Leiter—who Estes says would have been much better suited to this particular role of enforcer, partly because of his take-no-prisoners approach, but mostly because he had been with the club through the duration of the affair—remained silent. Valentine never said a word. Even Piazza steered clear of the subject. Estes was, in every sense, said a veteran Mets player, fighting “someone else’s battle.”
Complicating matters further in the pitcher’s mind was his long-held belief that not only wasn’t this his fight, but that it had been Piazza’s—and Piazza made the choice to avoid it that day two Octobers before, after a baseball bat had been thrown in his direction. “Based just on what was said in the media, I couldn’t understand how Mike didn’t do anything,” said Estes in 2006. “That was my feeling while I was watching that game—how does he not go after Roger on the mound right now? I would think that most guys would at that point…. I’ve played with Mike [in both New York and San Diego]…. I know his emotions going into that game. [Talking to him about it after the fact,] I know he wasn’t real happy about getting hit in the head…. I cannot understand how he didn’t retaliate.”
That, however, wasn’t the message the pitcher was getting from outside the clubhouse. Had the media ever made a bigger deal of a single at-bat? When Estes took the mound against the Yankees on June 15, he felt that the fans cared far less about the outcome of the game than they did about seeing Clemens lying flat on his back. The left-hander stewed.
Said Valentine: “I thought the whole thing was so overblown, so immature, and so not right for baseball, but it was right for the media circus, so we played into that. It was more to appease the fact that Shawn was the guy who was going to have the ball and he was going to be [judged].”
Perhaps it was with that in mind that Valentine chose to wait until an hour before game time to tell his pitcher what he wanted to happen and how it was to go down. There would be signs from dugout to catcher and from catcher to pitcher, indicating when Clemens was to get it. Estes was expected first to listen, then to execute.
When Clemens finally stepped to the plate, it was as a man who in nineteen years as a major-leaguer had never been hit by a pitch (but who had hit 132 batters of his own during that time). Bringing a year and a half of anticipation to a head, Estes received Valentine’s relayed sign, stared at the hitter, took aim … and missed. He missed by so much, in fact, that Clemens barely flinched, didn’t so much as move his feet as the eighty-seven-miles-per-hour fastball sailed behind him without so much as scraping his uniform. Estes pounded his glove, which sent reporters into a tizzy of speculation. Was he angry that he hadn’t thrown a strike? That he hadn’t hit the batter? Was the ball placed where he wanted it so as to save face while by some measure fulfilling his duty as designated sniper? Or was it all just part of a spectacle with Estes at its center, a psych game for both the Yankees and the American public? “I didn’t execute my pitch,” Estes cryptically told the assembled media after the game, carefully omitting whether he was talking about the strike zone or Clemens’s thigh. “You can draw your own conclusions on that.”