by Jason Turbow
Before a game several days later, McClure got his answer. As the pitcher loitered in the outfield before a game, a fan called him over to the bleachers. “Do you want to know who locked you in that room?” she asked. His instinct was to play dumb, but when the woman told him she had pictures, he couldn’t resist. She handed them over in exchange for a ball autographed by Robin Yount, and McClure saw exactly what happened: It had taken two men to pull the flagpole rope tight enough to trap him, and their uniforms were clearly visible. It was pitchers Mike Caldwell and Reggie Cleveland.
McClure immediately set to plotting. Six weeks later, when the Brewers had an off-day in Kansas City before a series with the Royals, he struck.
While many players, including Caldwell and Cleveland, spent the afternoon golfing, McClure opted for a hunting trip with a local friend. On the way back they stopped by a farm, where the pitcher bought a small, live—and exceptionally filthy—pig. “It had so much pig dung on it that you couldn’t even hardly tell it was a pig,” McClure said. “It was perfect. We put it in a burlap sack in the back of my buddy’s pickup.”
When the pitcher returned to the hotel, he saw that his teammates hadn’t returned, and figured they’d be out until the wee hours. McClure bribed his way into the room that Caldwell and Cleveland conveniently shared, and let the pig loose atop the bed. “When that pig hit the sheet, it looked up at me and started projectile shitting everywhere, like a shotgun,” he said. “That pig was alive. It jumps off the bed, and it’s squealing and going nutty. There’s shit on the bed, on the floor, on the curtains. It was so loud that I had to get out of the room.”
He was staying just across the hall, and hours later was roused by the sounds of his returning teammates. Caldwell was the first to enter, and nearly as quickly lit back into the hallway, shouting, “There’s someone in there!” As McClure listened with delight, his teammates rushed the room, then spent the better part of an hour trying to corner the pig. Finally, the noise quieted and McClure went back to sleep.
The next morning, the pitcher veritably bounced across the hall to see how his victims had held up. He entered the room under the pretense of rounding up breakfast companionship, but wasn’t at all prepared for what he saw. The place was spotless. The walls, the drapes, the bedspread, and the carpet had all been cleaned. Caldwell was lying on his back in bed, shirtless. Also on its back, in the crook of Caldwell’s right arm, was a freshly washed pig. It sported a red dog collar. Caldwell was feeding it French fries dipped in ketchup.
Feigning ignorance, McClure asked why there was a pig in the room and was told the entire story, up to and including an early-morning trip to a nearby pet store, where Caldwell bought collar, leash, and industrial-grade pet shampoo. The pig joined the team at the ballpark that day, serving as the Brewers’ mascot. It ended up living on Cleveland’s farm, of all places, dreaming recurrently, no doubt, of room service and burlap.
By their nature, practical jokes are random acts, their sporadic occurrence serving to add an element of surprise to an otherwise structured environment. Their closest cousin in clubhouse culture, however, is built less on shock value than on sheer abuse. The unfortunate targets: rookies.
Upon their initial entry through the clubhouse door, first-year players immediately become, in the minds of many teammates, lightning rods for criticism, punishment, and flat-out abuse. They’re forced to run clubhouse errands (both real and imagined, sometimes searching in vain for things like the key to the batter’s box or a bucket of steam); find their clothes shredded, frozen inside ice buckets, or replaced entirely with garish costumes; and serve as the primary butt of locker-room jokes. Sixto Lezcano was given an all-green wardrobe for one of his team’s West Coast swings—green pants, shirt, coat, socks, shoes. (“I looked like a fucking grasshopper,” he said.) Minnesota’s Eddie Guardado had everything in his locker—glove, cleats, uniform—fastened down with Torx-head screws, for which he couldn’t find an appropriate screwdriver, which left him scrambling to find alternate gear to simply take the field on time.
Once, rookie treatment consisted primarily of silence. This extended as far as freezing a young player out of infield or batting practice, the better to protect the job of the veteran ahead of him on the depth chart (as Indians third baseman Ken Keltner and other of the team’s tenured players did to a young Al Rosen, who was forced to show up hours before the rest of the team just to receive batting practice from fellow rookie Ray Boone). Jim Davenport estimates that in the 1950s a player had to accumulate at least four hundred at-bats before he was allowed so much as to speak up in the presence of veterans.
Modern rookies have it different, to the point where some would prefer the silent treatment. Rather than being ignored they’re assigned such duties as carrying beer onto the plane and doing various clubhouse errands for the veterans. Rookie relievers stock and transport the bullpen’s candy bag, which is often an embarrassing children’s backpack. Dan Ford made John Shelby give him haircuts. Gaylord Perry made rookie Duane Kuiper fetch cups of coffee from the clubhouse during games, after which he’d take a sip and order one that was hotter … or colder … or sweeter—again and again. “It was a long way from the dugout to the clubhouse in Municipal Stadium,” said Kuiper. “I got to know those corridors very well.” Once Kuiper reached veteran status with the Giants he made rookie Mark Grant do the same thing at Candlestick Park.
Jeffrey Leonard summed up the sentiment as a veteran in Seattle’s clubhouse in 1989, when he greeted highly touted rookie Ken Griffey, Jr., with the immortal declaration, “There’s going to be a lot of people kissing your ass. I won’t be one of them.”
The ones who get it worst are those who either resist or act somehow entitled, a state of being that any veteran will happily inform them must be earned through tenure. On Lenny Dykstra’s first day in the big leagues, he called a batboy to his locker and said, “Kid, how ’bout lacing my shoes?” Veteran pitcher Ron Darling wasted no time responding, quickly approaching the rookie with a pair of scissors and snipping his laces in half.
Dodgers rookie Chan Ho Park went ballistic in response to veteran teammates shredding the suit that was hanging in his locker. It wasn’t an unusual practice, but Park took it badly, he said, because the clothes had been given to him in Korea by his mother as a good-luck totem. No matter; his reaction cost him support from many Dodgers. So did that of Armando Benitez, who, after teammates on the Orioles replaced his clothes with a dress on getaway day, refused to don the outfit and, screaming for the return of his wardrobe, pinned down a number of veterans against the far wall of the shower room with a steady barrage of baseballs picked out of a nearby bucket. In the end, the pitcher refused to capitulate, even after being told that his clothes had been packed and were already en route to the airport. “He wore a T-shirt and a pair of shorts on the frickin’ plane,” said one team member. “That didn’t sit too well with the veterans, I can tell you that.”
“The guys who make a big fuss about it, who get mad at it, they’re usually the ones who don’t last too long,” said Doug Mientkiewicz, who was forced into female clothing by his Twins teammates as a rookie in 1998. “If you can’t be mentally strong enough to wear a dress for one day when every other rookie is, too, then you’re probably not going to be mentally strong enough to handle an 0-for-35 stretch in four different cities.”
“Of course there were guys who took it the wrong way,” said Cubs star Mark Grace. “Then [pitcher Rick] Sutcliffe would take you aside and tell you, ‘If you’ve got a problem with it I’ll be glad to beat the ever-lovin’ shit out of you.’ You learned quick.”
There are traditions built around a rookie’s first hit (a dummy ball is marked up either with mistaken statistics and misspelled names, or with an abundance of curse words, then presented as the real thing), first home run (upon a rookie’s return to the dugout, he’s greeted by an impregnable front of silence), and even a rookie’s first outstanding play in the field (such as a spectacular catch made by
Willie Mays, after which Giants manager Leo Durocher ordered the rest of the Giants to remain silent).
It’s not all bad, though. Checks are often picked up by veteran players, as are bills for items such as suits and luggage that can help a rookie look more “big-league.” When Brewers rookie Bill Schroeder tried to buy a round of drinks for a group of veterans seated across the bar, one of the players, pitcher Mike Caldwell, marched every glass over to Schroeder, instructed him to finish them all, and left explicit instructions that rookies were to pay for nothing when in the presence of a veteran. “Needless to say,” said Schroeder, “I finished the beers, staggered to my room, and never bought them another drink.”
It’s pretty typical of a veteran’s approach to looking out for rookies—a pat on the back alternating with a kick in the rear. Ivan Calderon looked out for Craig Grebeck both on and off the field during the latter’s rookie season with the White Sox, serving a role that Grebeck described as “my bodyguard.” “If I ever had a problem and I said something to him about it, I didn’t have a problem anymore,” he said. At the same time, however, Calderon made a habit of confiscating Grebeck’s shoes in every airport through which the team passed, refusing to return them until they checked in to the team hotel.
Or take Angels utility man Rex Hudler, who in 1996 viciously lit into rookie Todd Greene for boarding the team plane ahead of some veterans. It didn’t make much difference to Hudler that Greene couldn’t have been greener—it was his first day as a major-leaguer—but the following evening, when the young catcher connected for his first home run, Hudler atoned. The game was at Detroit’s Tiger Stadium, and as soon as the inning ended, Hudler—out of the game and with a baseball in each hand—dashed to the outfield fence near the bleachers where the ball had landed and offered a two-for-one deal to whoever caught Greene’s homer. Before he could get a response, though, the inning break ended, and Hudler found himself urged back to the dugout by center fielder Jim Edmonds. Rather than give up his quest, the player vaulted into the stands and watched the Tigers’ half of the inning from the bleachers. It was more than enough to win over the locals, and Greene’s ball was offered up in short order. “When I came back in, everyone was going, ‘What the hell were you doing out there?’” said Hudler. “I went up to Greene and said, ‘Greenie, I got your ball for you, man!’ You’d have thought I gave him a ten-carat diamond. And now every time I see him he tells someone, ‘Hud went out into the center-field stands and got my ball for me.’ He never forgets—it’s a form of love.”
Love is one way of looking at it. If the word contains any accuracy in describing the source of most rookies’ treatment, there’s never been more collective affection shown than in Chicago. It’s the location of one of the most enduring rookie traditions in big-league history, which manages to connect pride, art, and the Civil War.
On the city’s North Side, a statue honors Philip Sheridan (1831–88), the fourth general in U.S. history to earn four stars, and the subject of poet Thomas Buchanan Read’s “Sheridan’s Ride.” He is depicted atop his horse, Rienzi, at the intersection of North Lakeshore Drive and West Belmont Avenue, along the route between Wrigley Field and the downtown hotels at which visiting teams stay. Over the years, it became known as bad luck for players to look at the bronze testicles of the prancing and anatomically correct horse when the team bus passed by, for fear of prolonged slumps. Jose Cruz referred to it as the Balls Horse and yelled for his teammates to avert their collective gaze, screaming, “You gonna take an oh-fer every time!”
Somewhere along the line, the legend expanded to something more than simply looking at the horse’s genitalia. An example from 1984 serves to illustrate the point. That season, the moribund Giants closed their April schedule with a nine-game losing streak, at which point they were already nine games behind the Dodgers. When the club rolled into Chicago in early May, several veterans had seen enough.
In the bus on the way to Wrigley Field, Mike Krukow, Duane Kuiper, and Steve Nicosia spun an off-the-cuff tale of tradition, passion, and paint, informing the team’s impressionable rookies about how ballplayers had been sneaking out at night for decades to paint the horse’s testicles in team colors. Krukow had done it with the Phillies, Nicosia with the Pirates, Mays and McCovey with the Giants. “We told them that if they got caught they’d go downtown to sign the police register,” said Krukow, “and they’d be signing underneath the names of Billy Williams and Ernie Banks. Lou Gehrig’s in there—he got caught.” Not a word of it was true.
“We didn’t think anything of it,” said Kuiper, “until the next day, when we drove by and the horse was painted orange.”
Rookies Frank Williams and Jeff Cornell had taken it upon themselves to complete the fictional task, and their teammates were suitably impressed. “There were about nine layers of paint on it,” said Krukow. “It was a beautiful job.”
Two years later, the Giants featured so many first-year players—fourteen rookies suited up for them over the course of the season—that traveling secretary Dirk Smith had to arrange a bus to transport the masses to the horse. “You try climbing a bronze horse in pouring-down rain armed with spray paint,” said Jeff Brantley, who took his turn in 1989. “That was very difficult.”
For a long while, it was possible to tell which team had most recently visited Wrigley Field by the color of the horse’s undercarriage—Dodgers blue, Pirates yellow, Cincinnati red. Chris Speier not only painted the horse during his rookie season, but made sure he was sitting atop it when the bus passed by.
This is how pranks evolve. As the paint-heavy response to the Sheridan curse became commonplace among visiting teams, a Chicago police officer—a lifelong Cubs fan stationed at Wrigley Field—got into the act. The day following a given team’s late-night escapades, the officer (sometimes accompanied by one or more colleagues) would march into the visitors’ clubhouse and “arrest” the offending parties, sometimes going so far as to put them in cuffs and lead them away, while their teammates tried to stifle their laughter. (According to Andy Van Slyke, Pirates rookie Dan Miceli told the police to “go fuck themselves” under interrogation, rather than give up the names of his cohorts. “He got our respect for that,” said Van Slyke, “which is worth its weight in gold.”)
In 1989, San Francisco’s Charlie Hayes was the victim of the clubhouse police, and was especially terrified after having already been warned against painting the statue. He was the only person in the room who didn’t know what was actually going on and, upon being threatened with jail time, quickly sold out his accomplices. “I swear I thought Charlie was going to start crying,” said Brantley. “He jumped out of that chair and ratted out everybody who was there, the veteran who took them—everybody. We were crying, laughing so hard. It was funny. He heard a lot about it after that.”
If the collective rookie experience regarding General Sheridan can be summed up in a single sentiment, no one has come closer to it than Kevin Mitchell, whose turn came with the New York Mets in 1986. Said Mitchell: “Painting nuts ain’t fun.”
Conclusion
Deion Sanders came to the major leagues in 1989 as a fully formed personality. Noteworthy primarily for his excellence as a defensive back and kick returner with the Atlanta Falcons, he made a habit of scrawling dollar signs into the batter’s-box dirt before at-bats and did his best to carry over the personality that led to his NFL nicknames, “Prime Time” and “Neon Deion.”
Batting for the Yankees in a game against the White Sox in 1990, Sanders popped up to shortstop and did little to hide his lack of interest in heading toward first. The move would increasingly become the mark of major-league superstars over the coming years, and even then it wouldn’t have drawn much attention—on most days.
Unfortunately for Sanders, Chicago’s catcher was Carlton Fisk, forty-two years old and entrenched at the time as one of the premier members of baseball’s old guard. Watching Sanders’s lackadaisical display, the future Hall of Famer could barely contain himself. “
Run the fucking ball out, you piece of shit—that’s not the way we do things up here!” he screamed at the startled hitter, two decades his junior and playing in just his twenty-fourth big-league game. By that point, of course, it was too late; the ball was already settling into the shortstop’s glove, and Sanders had nowhere to go but back to the dugout.
When Neon Deion came to the plate two innings later, he took the time to inform Fisk that “the days of slavery are over.” The catcher responded in kind, and the dugouts quickly emptied. “I just told him I thought that there was a right way and a wrong way to play the game, and he was playing it wrong, because it offended guys like me,” said Fisk. “And if he didn’t care to play it right, let’s go at it, right here.”
Intentionally or not, Fisk’s actions represented a desperate grab at the unraveling thread of the unwritten rules, a selfless effort to restore balance to a sport that even then was forgetting many lessons from its own history. Though there’s no debating the Code’s importance, neither can we deny that its vitality has recently waned. Many players, particularly those born in the 1980s and later, have little idea what many of the rules even mean.
The reasons for this aren’t difficult to pinpoint. Baseball is now more than ever an individualistic sport, with many players more beholden to their agents than to the teams that employ them. The increased frequency of franchise-hopping means that more players have friends and acquaintances on rosters around the league, which results in the inevitable erosion of the us-versus-them ethos that once permeated clubhouses. The situation was described by Bob Gibson in his book, Stranger to the Game; even though the author was speaking specifically about pitcher-hitter relationships, he might as well have been addressing the primary reason why, on the whole, ballplayers no longer burn as hot as they once did.