The Baseball Codes

by Jason Turbow

  By the time Sandy Koufax threw his perfect game in 1965, Scully had completely turned the corner on the rule, and his poetic description of the ninth-inning pressure stands as one of the enduring calls in the game’s history, largely because he counted down inevitability while acknowledging exactly what was happening:

  There’s 29,000 people in the ballpark and a million butterflies…. I would think that the mound at Dodger Stadium right now is the loneliest place in the world. Sandy fussing, looks in to get his sign, 0 and 2 to Amalfitano. The strike-two pitch to Joe: fastball, swung on and missed, strike three! He is one out away from the promised land…. You can’t blame a man for pushing just a little bit now. Sandy backs off, mops his forehead, runs his left index finger along his forehead, dries it off on his left pants leg. All the while, Kuenn just waiting. Now Sandy looks in. Into his windup and the 2-1 pitch to Kuenn: swung on and missed, strike two! It is 9:46 p.m. Two-and-two to Harvey Kuenn, one strike away. Sandy into his windup, here’s the pitch: Swung on and missed, a perfect game!

  When Scully called Jack Morris’s no-hitter for Detroit on the NBC Game of the Week in 1984, he came out in the middle innings with the following gem to introduce the topic: “[Tigers catcher Lance] Parrish, needless to say, is not superstitious. He wears No. 13. We have a reason for bringing that up, because we’re in the business of telling you what’s going on here, and not getting cute and superstitious. So the big story, really, with Detroit leading 4–0, is the fact that Jack Morris has not allowed a hit, and it’s going to start to build.”

  If that’s not enough to disprove the notion that talking up a no-hitter is a surefire jinx, what explains the fact that Yankees broadcasters Michael Kay and John Sterling have called four no-hitters, two of them perfect games, and discussed each one along the way? “I’m not a big believer in jinxes, but I heard ‘perfect game’ about 100 times for four or five innings,” said Cone, who listened to Kay in the clubhouse during his own masterpiece. “Believe me, there is nothing to that jinx.”

  “It doesn’t mean a damn thing,” agreed Hall of Fame broadcaster and former player Jerry Coleman. “If you’re going to pitch a no-hitter, you’re going to pitch a no-hitter. If you don’t want to mention it, don’t. That’s a very personal kind of thing.” Coleman made that comment from the perspective of the booth, but there are indications that when he was still a Yankees second baseman in the 1950s he felt differently. According to legendary sportswriter Jimmy Cannon, Coleman had such trouble dealing with the pressure of Larsen’s perfect game that he had to leave the bench and pace the tunnels under the stands. A groundskeeper saw him there and informed him that Larsen still had not given up a baserunner. “Coleman didn’t reply,” wrote Cannon, “just glared at the guy.”

  21

  Protect Yourself and Each Other

  Because baseball clubhouses are insular by nature, an extraordinary amount of protection takes place within their walls, aimed mostly in three directions: from the media (don’t let slip potentially compromising personal tidbits, or anything about internal conflicts), from management (the less the boss knows about last night’s bender, the better), and from women (never let someone else’s wife or girlfriend in on road-trip indiscretions).

  It doesn’t take much effort to refrain from spilling clubhouse secrets to the media, since most players inherently prefer to avoid the press whenever possible. Standing up to management, however, is a different matter. The first step is to understand whom one’s dealing with. Clubhouse secrets are known to filter their way upstairs; the trick for players is figuring out how it happens, and putting an end to it. The conduit of sensitive information between clubhouse and the executive offices is known informally as “the pipeline,” and, to the consternation of players everywhere, most teams have one. “There’s one on every team I’ve gone to,” said pitcher Matt Herges. “When I came to the Marlins I called [catcher] Paul Lo Duca and asked what’s up with the team. He said, ‘So-and-so is the pipeline, this guy is a jerk, this guy comes to the park drunk every day,’ and so forth. You get the whole rundown, and the pipeline is always the first guy mentioned.”

  The pipeline can be a trainer, a coach, or an equipment man—anyone with an ear to the clubhouse wall. Trainers are especially notorious, holding the potent combination of being beholden to management and possessing unassailable information about the health of the roster. Say a player is injured enough to merit taking several days off. He’s struggling, though, and maybe not on the best terms with the manager, so rather than risk earning a reputation as being soft, he decides to play through it—with some help. He approaches the trainer with a dual request: something to treat his ailment, and secrecy.

  Some trainers deliver this; some go straight upstairs. Their information becomes useful for management when it comes to things like roster decisions and arbitration hearings. It’s hardly limited to the trainer’s room, however.

  On the A’s teams of the early 1970s, the pipeline was said to be broadcaster Monte Moore, the only radio man team owner Charlie Finley allowed to last as many as two seasons. (“I was fired by Finley after my first year,” said play-by-play legend Jon Miller, the longtime voice of ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball. “I didn’t take it badly. Everybody was fired by Charlie.”) There seemed to be a primary reason that Moore outlasted sixteen play-by-play partners in as many years with the team: He reportedly passed inside clubhouse information to the owner—in one case specifically, details of a drunken incident on a team flight in 1967, which likely led to the release of first baseman Ken Harrelson and the dismissal of manager Alvin Dark. Moore long denied the allegations, but as with most men suspected of serving as a pipeline, the rumor hardly endeared him to the players—to the point that protections were put into place: “It’s an automatic $500 if anyone punches Monte,” said A’s catcher Dave Duncan at the time.

  Suspicions run so deep in this arena that when the Mets hired Allan Lans to be the team psychiatrist in 1987, he was immediately pegged by a number of players as a clubhouse spy. It didn’t matter a bit that as the associate director at the Smithers Center for Alcoholism and Drug Treatment Lans had cared for Dwight Gooden, and had clearly been brought in to ease the pitcher’s return to the game after the right-hander missed the first third of the 1987 season while in rehab.

  Pipelines were a regular feature of the George Steinbrenner–era Yankees, though over his thirty-plus years in charge of the team, the owner seemed to use them against his managers as often as against his players. Of particular interest to him in this regard was Billy Martin. In The Bronx Zoo, Sparky Lyle’s day-by-day account of the 1978 season, the pitcher noticed that coach Gene Michael was forced to locker separately from the rest of the staff. Lyle guessed that he had been exiled by Martin on suspicion of spying for Steinbrenner. “It’s a good example of what the love of baseball can make a person do,” Lyle wrote. “He loves the game so much that this is what he’d do to stay in it.”

  During his later tenures as Yankees manager, Martin also had suspicions about players such as Lou Piniella and Bobby Murcer, and another coach, Jeff Torborg, who was probably suspected because he didn’t fit in with the late-night, hard-drinking crowd with which the manager surrounded himself. Although it was Martin who initially brought Torborg to the team, their relationship soured quickly. Torborg, however, became a favorite of Steinbrenner’s, and managed to outlast Martin’s protestations for a decade, being retained on staff four of the five times Martin was fired by the club.

  Gene Michael took over two seasons after Martin was fired by Steinbrenner for the second time, at which point another coach, Clyde King, was rumored to have become a spy for the owner. (And just as the accused spy Michael took over when Martin was fired, King took over the ball club upon Michael’s dismissal midway through the 1982 campaign.) When Buck Showalter led the team in 1994 and 1995, he was convinced that coach Bill Connors served as Steinbrenner’s ears in the clubhouse. “He kept his own book with pitchers’ and hitters’ matchups, and
kept it all to himself,” Connors said. “He actually got pissed off at me for looking at it one time. ‘What’s that?’ I asked him. ‘I thought we were on the same team.’”

  As late as 2007, New York’s bullpen coach, Joe Kerrigan, was purported to be a mole for Steinbrenner—after filling that role while on the coaching staffs in Montreal, Boston, and Baltimore, said Hall of Fame writer Tracy Ringolsby—in the process damaging a previously strong relationship between manager Joe Torre and general manager Brian Cashman.

  “It’s a give-and-take thing,” said one player who wished to remain anonymous. “If someone in the front office is desperate to know what really goes on down here [in the clubhouse], they have their ways. But they take the chance on splintering apart what could already be good chemistry. Proceed at your own risk.”

  • • •

  There are times when management doesn’t need a mole to find out what’s going on. Take a story from the Tampa hotel owned by George Steinbrenner that was used by the Yankees during spring training. In 1979, numerous players—by multiple accounts, virtually the entire roster—broke curfew one night by tying bedsheets together and rappelling to the ground from their second-floor rooms in order to visit a local after-hours establishment. (The team couldn’t walk out the front door on account of the sentry posted there, who recorded the names of everyone who came and went.) Things were especially delicate at the time, because the team was off to a rocky start to the exhibition season; it may only have been spring training, but this was the Yankees and expectations were high.

  When the team returned to quarters near dawn, pitcher Ron Guidry was first up the bedsheet ladder, then helped his teammates into the building. People returned to their rooms via outdoor balconies, since Steinbrenner also had guards posted in the hallways. It was a perfect plan, and would have gone undetected had only someone remembered to pull the sheets back through the window. This became relevant when Steinbrenner decided, in a rare occurrence, to join his team on the bus to the ballpark the following day. Looking toward his hotel, he saw the sheets flapping in the wind and flew into a fury.

  “He wanted to know whose room that was,” said pitcher Dick Tidrow, who was especially nervous owing to the fact that it was his room. As the owner dressed down his roster from the front of the bus, Tidrow weighed his options. A solid member of the bullpen but hardly a star, the pitcher was probably expendable should Steinbrenner want to make an example of him. He also knew that if he kept his mouth shut it was a simple matter for the Boss to get all the relevant information with a phone call to hotel security, at which point things would only get worse.

  On the hook either way, Tidrow spoke up. “Um … I think it might be mine,” he said softly. Steinbrenner’s eyes fixed sharply on the right-hander, and as the owner opened his mouth Tidrow contemplated the possibility that he had pitched his last game for the Yankees. Before Steinbrenner could speak, however, Guidry’s hand shot up. “No,” he said emphatically. “It’s mine.”

  Now the owner was confused. Tidrow might have been expendable, but Guidry, the reigning AL Cy Young Award winner, certainly was not. Steinbrenner closed his mouth and quietly pondered the situation. After a moment’s hesitation, he perked up and shouted, “I like the initiative that shows!” The subject was never raised again.

  In many ways, it’s not so difficult for players to protect themselves from management. They usually know whom to talk to and whom not to talk to, and the social circles of the two groups rarely intersect. Protecting teammates from the women in their lives, however, can be significantly more complex, especially when it comes to trysts on the road. The crux of the problem with this particular endeavor is that it involves ballplayers—the most visible people in virtually any public environment—trying to stay as invisible as possible. The bond between players is strong, however, and they do what they can to maintain each other’s anonymity. It’s why players whose wives show up during road trips make clear to their teammates where on the town they’ll be that night, so they can avoid the chance of running into a married player on a “date” with someone other than his wife. (Mets pitcher Doug Sisk was once guilty of this when he brought his wife, Lisa, to the team’s hotel bar, where she saw a number of his married teammates getting friendly with ladies unknown to her.)

  It’s why some players implement an ignorance rule at home. “My policy with my wife is this: Don’t ask me,” said one longtime pitcher who claimed fidelity but didn’t want to incriminate his teammates. “First of all, I don’t want to lie to you. Second of all, I don’t want to tell you that this guy’s cheating on his wife. You’re her friend, you’re going to be sitting next to her at games, your heart will be breaking for her—you can’t do it. Please, just don’t ask me. Don’t ask me, because I don’t want to put you in that situation.”

  Not everybody is so virtuous. Players have been known to prattle to their wives about the extramarital adventures of their teammates in an effort to mask their own infidelities. Wives inevitably talk to each other, and if word gets out about where it all started, clubhouses can fracture. When a player is inexplicably traded over the off-season for less than full value, there’s a reasonable chance that he betrayed his teammates in this or some other regard (or, in turn, that he was betrayed by a less expendable star).

  Perhaps the best story of teammate protection in this category was told by Negro Leagues star Buck O’Neil, who found himself one day in the middle of a Satchel Paige love triangle that involved Paige’s fiancée and a woman named Nancy, who at the pitcher’s request had traveled to Chicago to visit the team.

  We’re in Chicago, on the South Side, at the Evans Hotel. We’re housed on the third floor, but Satchel and me are down in the restaurant sipping on a little “tea,” right near a bay window. We could look right out on the street. A cab drives up and out stepped Nancy, as pretty as a picture. Satchel jumps up and gets the bellman, goes out and gets Nancy, takes her stuff upstairs, and gets all situated. As soon as they get through, they’re going to be coming back down.

  I go back to the table and was sipping on my tea—it wasn’t twenty minutes—and here comes another cab. And out steps Lahoma. Lahoma was Satchel’s fiancée. I said, uh-oh. I jumped up, ran out, and greeted Lahoma. I said, “Lahoma, Satchel ran off with some reporters but he’ll be back presently. Come on in.” I went to get the waiter and sat her down and told him, “Get her whatever she wants.”

  Then I went to the bellman and I said, “Hey, man, you go upstairs and you tell Satchel that Lahoma’s here.” I’m sleeping next door to Satchel, but next door to me is a vacant room. I tell him, “You take Nancy and her stuff and put them in the vacant room, and when you get everything straight, you come and let me know.” Then I go back with Lahoma, and about twenty-five minutes later he gives me the signal everything is okay.

  Now, from the third floor, Satchel has to come down the elevator, come down the stairs, and he’s got to come by us, but he can’t do that because he’s supposed to be off with some reporters. So, from the third floor, Satchel comes down the fire escape and walks all the way around the hotel and walks in the front door. “Oh, Lahoma, what a pleasant surprise, I’m so glad to see you.”

  We had a good time that evening too. Joe Louis stopped by and dined with us, and Jesse Owens stopped by—we had a good time. Now it’s eleven o’clock. I said, “Well, we’ve got a doubleheader tomorrow. I guess it’s time we better go to bed.” Well, Satch and Lahoma and me, we go up. I get in bed but I can’t sleep, because I know Satchel has to see Nancy and give her some money to get back home.

  After about a half-hour, Satchel’s door opens. I say, “Mm-hmm, it’s going down right now.” Satchel goes to Nancy’s door and knocks soft, whispers, “Nancy.” Nobody answers. He knocks louder and says, “Nancy,” under his breath, and nobody answers. “Now he knocks loudly, and says “Nancy!” And I hear Satchel’s door open again. I go, “Uh-oh, this has got to be Lahoma, and Satchel’s at Nancy’s door.” I run out into the hall and say, �
��Satchel, you lookin’ for me?” And he says, “Yes, Nancy!”

  And I’ve been Nancy ever since.

  22

  Everybody Joins a Fight

  Troy Percival was pissed. It was 1999, and the Angels closer had blown a lead to Cleveland, hanging a 1-2 curveball that Indians first baseman Richie Sexson had crushed for a three-run, game-winning homer. Percival was pissed that Sexson’s blast was the capper on an eighth-inning rally that brought the Indians back from what had, at the beginning of the frame, been a 12–4 deficit. He was pissed that Sexson and the Indians rejoiced on the field before the next batter came to the plate. He was pissed that he was lousy that night. He was pissed that his team lost what had, a half-hour earlier, looked like an unlosable game. He was pissed that the Angels were 10-36 since the All-Star break. But mostly he was pissed at Mo Vaughn.

  Percival had responded to Sexson’s homer by hitting the next batter, David Justice, in the midsection with a ninety-six-mile-an-hour heater. The pitch was clearly fueled by a reckless blend of frustration and anger, and its intent was unmistakable. Suddenly, Percival was no longer the only one stewing on the field; Justice, incensed, charged the mound, throwing his helmet at the pitcher when he got close. (Percival later called it “a Little League move.”) The benches emptied, and though there weren’t many punches thrown, the few that were seemed to connect with Percival’s face; the pitcher was cut when the strap from Justice’s batting glove whipped across his cheek, and he sported a bruise under his right eye.

  When Percival returned to the bench following the skirmish, he found Vaughn, Anaheim’s designated hitter, standing in the corner of the dugout, having never set foot on the field.

  It seemed a fitting cap to Percival’s wretched day. The pitcher went straight into the trainer’s room after the game and didn’t emerge for more than an hour, while the media lurked in the adjacent clubhouse. When he did, he made it worth their wait. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said to those who had bothered to stick around. “I gained respect for certain people, and there are certain people that I have to question. You can watch the video and figure it out. I was pretty impressed with some people, I can tell you that much.” It just so happened that TV cameras caught Vaughn in the dugout, looking on as the fight came to a close, and Percival, watching replays in the trainer’s room, knew it. “I’ve got respect for my infielders—they were out there,” he continued. “Gary DiSarcina, Darin Erstad, [Troy] Glaus. That’s where you learn who the people are on your team who are standing behind you 100 percent. In the future, you know what guys will go to battle with you and which ones won’t.”