The Baseball Codes Read online

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  PART ONE: ON THE FIELD

  1 Know When to Steal ’Em

  2 Running into the Catcher

  3 Tag Appropriately

  4 Intimidation

  5 On Being Intimidated

  6 Slide into Bases Properly

  7 Don’t Show Players Up

  8 Responding to Records

  9 Gamesmanship

  10 Mound Conference Etiquette

  PART TWO: RETALIATION

  11 Retaliation

  12 The Wars

  13 Hitters

  14 Off the Field

  PART THREE: CHEATING

  15 Sign Stealing

  16 Don’t Peek

  17 Sign Stealing (Stadiums)

  18 If You’re Not Cheating, You’re Not Trying

  19 Caught Brown-Handed

  PART FOUR: TEAMMATES

  20 Don’t Talk About a No-Hitter in Progress

  21 Protect Yourself and Each Other

  22 Everybody Joins a Fight

  23 The Clubhouse Police

  Conclusion

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Introduction

  With apologies to Joe Carter, the most memorable moment of the 1993 baseball season didn’t even happen while a ball was in play. It began the moment that Robin Ventura charged Nolan Ryan on the Arlington infield, causing many of the 32,312 jaws in attendance to drop at the spectacle. Ryan was as close to a personification of the term “battle-hardened” as baseball had ever seen, at forty-six a big-leaguer longer than his would-be assailant had been alive.

  If pitting a strapping twenty-three-year-old against a graying veteran more than two decades his senior seems like a mismatch, it was—in reverse. Ryan quickly put Ventura into a headlock and rained blows upon his forehead, providing the season’s most enduring visual and a source of endless jokes about his own toughness and Ventura’s lack thereof. In 2001, ESPN rated it the No. 1 televised baseball fight ever.

  “The way [people] carry on,” said Ventura, “you’d think [Ryan] was a combination of Clint Eastwood, Bruce Lee, and [rodeo star] Larry Mahan.”

  The most interesting thing about the fight, however, isn’t the fight at all—it’s what led up to it. The genesis of the moment occurred years before the fateful pitch left Ryan’s fingertips, long before Ventura’s head ended up in the crook of the pitcher’s left arm. It was less an ill-placed fastball that drove Ventura to the mound than an ongoing dispute over baseball’s code of conduct, informally known as the “unwritten rules.” Less strategic than moral, these rules collectively drive the game, forming not just a code but the Code, the ultimate measure used to shape ballplayers’ attitudes toward themselves, each other, and the game they play.

  Ryan and the White Sox had been going back and forth about a variety of perceived Code violations for years. Ventura, in fact, was only tangentially involved with most of it; it was just on his unfortunate watch that the pot happened to boil over.

  America saw an apparently calm Ventura start toward first base after being hit on the elbow with a Ryan fastball, then spin toward the mound, drop his helmet, and charge. Ryan, a part-time rancher, referred to the treatment he dished out as “cow-mugging,” and although the punches were purely superficial—one account called it an “atomic noogie”—the humiliation was profound. The young All-Star was helpless against a man on the verge of retirement, unable to do more than absorb whatever it was Ryan decided to dish out. The lack of severity only added to the fight’s comic overtones, said Mike Leggett of the Austin American-Statesman, making Ventura “the first guy ever to get five straight hits off Nolan Ryan.”

  For Ryan, it was the final season of a splendid twenty-seven-year career, during which he compiled stats that completely transcended those of his peers. He was the all-time strikeout leader by a wide margin, had started the second-most games ever, and allowed the fewest hits per nine innings. His seven no-hitters were as many as the next two guys on the list, Sandy Koufax and Bob Feller, combined.

  He was also unquestionably a throwback to a different era, and no one in history better served to illustrate the evolution of the Code from one generation to the next. Ryan came up in the time of Gibson and Drysdale, pitchers who, when feeling beneficent, allowed batters to vie for offerings over the inner portion of the plate, but who ferociously discouraged anyone with the guts to reach for a pitch outside. They treated a number of canons as gospel:

  If you dig in, you’ll be brushed back or hit.

  If you hit a home run, you’ll be brushed back or hit.

  If you watch your home runs, you’ll be brushed back or hit.

  These were the rules that Ryan grew up learning, and as his career progressed—and as the older generation gave way to the new—he became their foremost champion. Ryan was, according to Jack McDowell, whose twelve-year big-league tenure included five seasons as Ventura’s teammate in Chicago, the “last guy standing from that head-hunting era.”

  “If you were digging into the batter’s box [against Ryan] … you were digging yourself a grave,” said Craig Grebeck, who played alongside Ventura for six seasons. Grebeck learned an early lesson about Ryan’s rules in 1992, when he made the mistake of questioning the great pitcher by naïvely asking the umpire to check the baseball after a pitch with fastball rotation broke on him like a slider. Players on the White Sox bench howled at the audacity—check a ball on this guy? Grebeck’s own coaches were yelling that he’d soon be on his backside … or worse. That Rangers catcher Ivan Rodriguez had already returned the ball to Ryan only inflamed matters, because the pitcher then had to toss it back to the umpire. Terrified, Grebeck tried to stay light on his feet for the rest of the game, looking at every pitch he saw from Ryan as a potential weapon to be used against him. He still doesn’t know why Ryan held back, figuring only that the pitcher laughed at the third-year player’s impudence and chose to pitch to him, not at him. Perhaps it was respect for the fact that in 1990, Grebeck, then a rookie, crushed the first pitch he ever saw from Ryan for his first home run as a big-leaguer. Whatever it was, virtually the entire White Sox clubhouse was surprised when the pitcher didn’t so much as knock him down.

  Ryan’s old-school tendencies seemed to grow in stature over the course of his career, even as the rest of baseball relaxed around the inside corner through the eighties and nineties. It started at the game’s lowest levels, as youth-league pitchers began to learn their craft against the enlarged sweet spots of aluminum bats, which trained them early not to try to dominate the plate’s inner half. At the major-league level, the newfound power of the steroid era gave pitchers ever more reason to stay outside, as pitches that could once be counted on to jam even the strongest players were hit over outfield fences with regularity.

  At the same time, two more phenomena took shape. The first was that umpires began working from the assumption that most pitchers who hit batters did so intentionally, and as a result many batters followed suit. The second was that as salaries skyrocketed, newly minted millionaires became more protective of their ability to maintain earning power, and took increasingly more offense when pitchers came inside with potentially career-threatening fastballs.

  The result was that intimidation tactics were slowly but certainly abandoned by huge numbers of pitchers. This starts to explain why some players began to have a problem with Nolan Ryan, who hadn’t changed a bit over all those years.

  The series of events that culminated with Ryan’s fist bouncing atop Ventura’s forehead illustrates how long baseball grudges can last. It began during the second game of a doubleheader between the Rangers and White Sox on August 10, 1990, almost three years to the day before Ventura’s misbegotten charge. In that game
, Ryan allowed back-to-back home runs; the first was the aforementioned shot by Grebeck, the second to the equally diminutive Ozzie Guillen. They would be the only home runs either player would hit that season. Ryan lasted just five innings, and Chicago swept the twin bill.

  When the same clubs met seven days later, it wasn’t difficult to predict what would happen the first time Grebeck stepped to the plate. “My first two at-bats ever against Ryan, I hit the ball hard, and he wasn’t going to allow me to have that edge,” said Grebeck, who, after his home run, had smashed a ball into the right-center-field gap that was tracked down by outfielder Ruben Sierra. “His unwritten rule was that he wanted that edge. And if someone had some good at-bats against him, he was going to get that edge back on his side. And back then, the way you did that was by knocking a guy down.”

  Ryan did more than that—he hit Grebeck in the back. “That,” said Chicago All-Star Frank Thomas, “was what really started it all.”

  In the same game, Ryan knocked down Scott Fletcher one pitch after the White Sox second baseman asked umpire Tim McClelland to examine the ball for scuff marks. Chicago pitcher Greg Hibbard responded by hitting Rangers third baseman Steve Buechele in the arm, igniting a brawl between the teams.

  That was the first part of the bad-blood equation. The second was Texas’s propensity for coming back big against the White Sox. On June 20, 1991, Texas scored five runs in the ninth to beat Chicago 7–3. Eleven weeks later, on September 8, the Rangers scored four runs in the ninth to win 7–6. On May 1 of the following season, Texas scored two in the sixth and three in the ninth for an 8–4 victory. The following day, the Rangers scored three in the eleventh for a 4–1 win.

  This sort of trend is not easily forgotten by an opponent. Eventually the White Sox became inured to certain baseball mores when facing Texas, such as displaying compassion when holding a big lead. On August 3, 1993—the day before the famous fight—the White Sox built a 10–0 advantage by the sixth inning, led in part by a three-hit day from Ventura, who was riding a ten-game hitting streak. The third baseman also happened to skirt the unwritten rule mandating cessation of aggressive tactics during a blowout when he tallied the team’s ninth run by scoring from second on a single by Lance Johnson in the second inning. In most corners that’s too early to alter tactics, no matter what the score. It was enough, however, to tick off a Code adherent such as Ryan.

  True to form, Texas scored six runs in the final innings of an 11–6 loss, but Ventura’s slight had already registered.

  “We didn’t even think anything about it, but the next morning in the paper they were all talking about how we were trying to run up the score,” said McDowell. “We’re thinking, ‘Fuck you. You stop scoring six runs in the ninth and we’ll stop running with a nine-run lead in the sixth.’”

  Ryan took the mound for Texas the next day.

  In their clubhouse, Chicago players discussed their collective beef with Ryan and came to the conclusion that they’d taken enough abuse. “The whole world stops when that guy pitches, like he’s God or something,” McDowell said at the time. “He’s been throwing at batters forever, and people are [too] gutless to do anything about it.” The White Sox set out to change that trend, coming to the collective conclusion that only an extreme measure—like, say, charging the mound—had a chance to effect measurable change.

  With little voice in the matter, Ventura found himself at the center of it all the instant he was hit on the elbow. “Robin really didn’t want to charge him,” said Thomas. “It was just one of those things where we all knew he was going to drill him, and once it happened he reacted. He wasn’t angry, he was just saying, ‘You can’t be doing that for no reason.’ … He really, wholeheartedly didn’t want to do it.”

  “That was the problem,” said McDowell. “When he went out there, he didn’t know what to do, because he wasn’t mad.”

  Ryan had been charged exactly once before, thirteen years earlier, by Dave Winfield. In that brawl he actually took a step backward as Winfield lit out toward the mound, and ended up paying for it—Winfield got in the only blows of the fight before the pair tumbled to the turf and were buried beneath a pile of players. The pitcher was not about to make that mistake again. “When someone comes out to the mound, they’re coming out there with the intent to hurt you, and I’m not going to be passive about it,” he said shortly after the fight.

  Thus, the unwitting Ventura found himself in a place he very clearly did not want to be. He’d charge Ryan again, he said at the time, if he “felt it was necessary,” but he never got the chance—Ryan made only six more starts that season, none against the White Sox, then retired. And because of a series of events triggered by the Code that dated back at least three seasons, a two-time All-Star who drove in more than ninety runs eight times is remembered primarily for one thing—the atomic noogie administered to him by Nolan Ryan.

  Ryan and Ventura are just two participants in baseball’s long history of Code-fueled disputes. For more than a century, ballplayers have built the unwritten rules to cover everything from trivial clubhouse interactions between teammates to all-hands melees between bitter rivals. The rules are in a constant state of development and evolution, and nearly every section of the proverbial codebook has both supporters and detractors. When enough players and coaches eschew a given rule for a long enough period of time, it simply falls by the wayside, often to be replaced by something new. (Take digging into the batter’s box; once forbidden, it’s now a common occurrence.)

  Because they’re unwritten, the rules must be picked up through experience. “You learn what’s acceptable and not acceptable and where you fit and where you don’t fit, and the only way you can learn is by basically fucking up,” wrote eight-year major-leaguer-turned-psychologist Tom House in The Jock’s Itch. This can lead to painful lessons, either from irate teammates or from opposing pitchers, many of whom revel in the opportunity to offer seminars to young players, using as their instructional tool of choice a fastball to the rib cage.

  As filled with minutiae as the unwritten rulebook can be—“Don’t walk in front of the catcher on the way into the batter’s box? I’ve never heard of that,” said Davey Lopes—at its essence is basic sportsmanship.

  “I can break it down into three simple things,” said Bob Brenly, who followed a nine-year big-league career by managing the Arizona Diamondbacks to a world championship in 2001. “Respect your teammates, respect your opponents, and respect the game.”

  If this sounds simple, there’s a wild diversity of philosophies on just how to go about it. For example, though it’s commonly acknowledged that running up the score on an opponent is discourteous, the definition of “running up the score” not only has evolved over time, but is far from universally accepted within the modern game. Additionally, when and how to retaliate for Code violations is as complex as what constitutes a violation in the first place.

  Further complicating matters, at least from an outsider’s perspective, is that the more stringently a ballplayer adheres to these tenets, the less likely he is to talk about them to people outside the game. He’s secretive because he’s insulated, and he’s secretive because the outside world doesn’t truly have a handle on the politics of his particular office. Mostly, though, he’s secretive because he can be. It’s the way the system’s set up. Without any explanation of what’s happening and why, outsiders tend to become baffled at what they often consider to be extreme reactions.

  A case in point can be taken from the angry response Giants broadcaster Mike Krukow received from a number of Bay Area parents after praising pitcher Tyler Walker on the air for launching a retaliatory strike against Mark Mulder after the A’s ace hit two Giants, including Barry Bonds. “They’re pissed off that they have Little Leaguers and I’m teaching them the wrong baseball,” Krukow said. “But I’m not teaching Little League baseball. Their fathers teach them Little League baseball. I’m explaining what goes on here at the major-league level. And if Walker doesn’t do w
hat he did, then he’s got to answer to Barry Bonds. And Barry Bonds has every right to get in his face, and every other pitcher’s face, that doesn’t protect him.”

  If these comments seem at all inflammatory, it must be pointed out that Krukow is an ex-pitcher, a baseball man, whose opinions reside in the mainstream of the sport. He understands how baseball as an institution is improved by the Code, and, just as important in his role as a broadcaster, he understands how those who don’t pay close attention might fail to comprehend that fact. It makes for a tough balancing act.

  Generally speaking, the more fans know, the more they’re likely to misconstrue. So the wall effectively becomes its own set of rules: Don’t expect outsiders to understand baseball’s world, or even give them the chance to form a wrong impression. To talk about the unwritten rules is to violate the pre-eminent one: Keep your mouth shut. Some things do leak out—not everyone possesses the same sense of insularity, and some people simply have trouble filtering their thoughts—but for many active players the notion of discussing most parts of the Code is tantamount to revealing state secrets. Take the following excerpt from an interview with All-Star pitcher Jason Schmidt, conducted in the fall of 2006:

  How does a pitcher or team know when it’s time to get someone?

  SCHMIDT: [Answer off the record, and not very revealing at that.]

  Has anything like that ever crossed your experience?

  SCHMIDT: No doubt. Totally.

  What was it?

  SCHMIDT: I don’t remember.

  Have you ever been ordered to hit someone?

  SCHMIDT: I wouldn’t say ordered. Sometimes you just know. You can’t say that in a newspaper.

  This is for a book.

  SCHMIDT: You can’t say it in a book.