It seems so obvious for pitchers: Don’t telegraph what type of pitch you’re about to throw, or hitters will jump all over it. (Matt Morris, for example, once had the habit of pointing the exposed index finger on his glove hand straight up when delivering fastballs, which allowed the opposition to pounce . . . until he affixed a flap to cover the finger.)
We saw the phenomenon (or at least reports of it) last month, when A’s pitcher Ben Sheets went through a stretch in which he gave up 17 runs in seven-plus innings over the course of two starts. Once he emerged from the mini-slump, there were reports that his problem had stemmed from the fact that he did something to give away his curveball before throwing it.
Sheets insisted that his problem was strictly mechanical; either way, he fixed it fairly quickly.
This week, however, another tale of a tell has surfaced—this time with Johan Santana.
Writes Bob Klapich in the Bergen Record, the Mets’ ace was unknowingly tipping his devastating changeup, which cost him dearly against the Twins, who elicited 41 first-inning pitches while swinging and missing at exactly one pitch. They scored five runs in six innings against him.
Writes Klapich: “Turns out the give-away was the action of Santana’s glove as he began his windup: the fingers would flare as Santana dug into the leather to grip the change, which required him to make an A-OK configuration with his hand. The glove, however, remained still as Santana prepared to throw the fastball.”
Once they caught on, the Mets instructed Santana to lower his glove to belt level, which better hid his pre-pitch mechanics.
The results: In Santana’s most recent start he threw a complete-game, three-hit shutout against the powerful Reds, and has given up only one run given up over his last 16 innings.
Pitchers don’t generally like to talk about (or admit to) any tells they might suffer, but even though Santana’s silence, it’s incredible how much difference one small adjustment can make.
Dallas Braden takes these things seriously. When he first called out Alex Rodriguez in April for running across the Oakland Coliseum pitcher’s mound, many—especially those who knew nothing of him—assumed that the outspoken young pitcher was merely a hot-head, looking for attention.
Now: not so much.
The A’s, looking to capitalize on the mound controversy in advance of the Yankees’ return to Oakland on Monday, printed T-shirts for sale in the Coliseum, reading, “Get Off My Mound,” with the silhouette of a left-handed pitcher that can be assumed to be Braden.
The A’s were no doubt hoping that the shirts would be hot sellers while raising some ire in the visitors’ clubhouse. What they didn’t figure on was catching heat from the home team.
It was Braden himself who found the shirts most offensive.
“I think we all understand where they are coming from, but it’s just a serious, gross, lack of tact,” Braden told Jeff Fletcher of FanHouse on Monday. “At the end of the day, I hope I do not become associated with that kind of approach.”
Braden said that his opinion on the shirts was not solicited, and that the Major League Baseball Players’ Association twice denied approval for them.
For Braden, the issue was about respect—of the league’s highest-profile player on the league’s highest-profile team overestimating his ability to take liberties on a baseball diamond, especially against a little-known pitcher on the small-market A’s.
The T-shirt has nothing to do with that.
Secondly, Braden and the rest of the A’s understand the meaning behind the cliché “let sleeping dogs lie.” The issue had faded, if not disappeared entirely once it became apparent that the injured Braden would not pitch against the Yankees. The shirt brought it roaring back to headlines around the country.
“That’s probably not smart,” said Oakland’s Jack Cust in the San Francisco Chronicle. “We don’t need to fuel anything with A-Rod, not with his ability.”
“There isn’t a guy in this locker room that wanted those T-shirts made,” added A’s reliever Brad Ziegler in the FanHouse report, reiterating the fact that it’s rarely in a team’s best interest to unnecessarily incite the opposition.
Braden took things a step further, sending an assortment of memorabilia from his perfect game to Rodriguez, including a ball, a T-shirt and a poster, inscribed, according to the Chronicle, “Dear Alex, here’s the poster you requested. I think you’re right, it will look great over your mantel. … I know you realize it’s all in fun.”
Still, the Yankees took notice of the T-shirt (the one made by the A’s, not the one delivered by Braden). Although A-Rod said all the right things—joking that he hoped for a cut of the profits, and that one of his teammates went so far as to put one on—the fact that the shirt permeated the New York clubhouse only increases the possibility that it could be used as extra motivation against the A’s.
That’s something even Oakland’s marketing department probably wouldn’t appreciate.
For those of you in the Detroit area (or if you’re in surrounding states and are particularly motivated), I’ll be reading at Borders in Birmingham, Michigan (34300 Woodward), at 7 p.m. on Thursday, July 8. Hope to see you there.
The recent series between the Angels and Royals put the power of retaliation on full display. It also illustrated the downside of the practice. While a well-aimed fastball can bring a measure of satisfaction to an angry pitcher, it can also bring longer-lasting pain to his teammates, courtesy of an injured box score.
For an example of this, look no farther than Ervin Santana.
If Santana holds no grudge against Kansas City’s Billy Butler, he hides it well. In the first inning of Saturday’s game, with two out and a runner on second—first base open being an ideal situation for a pitcher wanting to drill a batter—he hit Butler with a fastball.
Then in the eighth, he did it again. Butler—who angrily ripped off his batting glove and delivered several withering stares toward the mound—ended up with bruised ribs, but the Royals ended up with a game-winning rally. By drilling Butler, Santana loaded the bases, and Jose Guillen’s ensuing two-run single proved to be the difference in a 4-2 Kansas City victory.
If the double-drilling is more than a coincidence, and insider grumblings say that there’s something behind it, the source is inconclusive. The last time Santana faced the Royals was May 31, and he won, 7-1. “That’s the best I’ve seen Santana,” an effusive Butler said in the Kansas City Star after that game, “and I’ve had quite a few at-bats against him.”
Still, Butler has been known to anger the occasional pitcher. Just last week against Jake Peavy, he slammed his bat to the ground after hitting a flyball in his second at-bat, eliciting a verbal barrage from the pitcher (which might also have had to do with the fact that Butler homered off Peavy in his first at-bat). It ended there, however, as Peavy not only failed to hit Butler later in the game, he passed up the perfect opportunity to do so when he intentionally walked him in the fifth.
The Royals benefitted from Santana’s miscue, then set out the following day to illustrate how retaliation should be properly executed.
On Sunday, Kansas City starter Anthony Lerew hit Bobby Abreu in the first inning with two outs and nobody on base, a clear response to Santana’s manhandling of Butler. Umpire Jim Joyce demonstrated an appropriate understanding of the situation, allowing two inside fastballs to go unchallenged before finally issuing a warning once Abreu was drilled.
Lerew retired the next hitter, Torii Hunter, to escape the inning, and set down Los Angeles in order in the second. While the Angels’ four-run rally in the third—highlighted by Hunter’s three-run homer—wasn’t a direct result of Abreu’s being hit, the moment might have served as inspiration.
“When Bobby got hit—we saw him trying to hit him, three pitches inside, he definitely tried to hit him—I think it kind of woke up the sleeping dogs over here and the guys started swinging the bat,” Hunter said on the Angels’ Web site.
The Angels ultimately won, 11-0, which made Butler’s revenge the likely highlight of the day for Kansas City. Coming up on Friday: Royals-White Sox, just in case Peavy yet has a message to convey.
In honor of Kirk Gibson’s ascension to the Diamondbacks’ managerial office, I offer two tales of the unwritten rules, featuring the former All-Star at their center.
The first spans the borderline between respect and superstition, mandating that players refrain from bragging about any success they might be having against a particular opponent. After all, the jinx factor is always at play, and one never knows when things might turn sour.
During Game 5 of the 1984 World Series, with Detroit leading three games to one, Goose Gossage got into a discussion with fellow Padres reliever Tim Lollar about his track record against Gibson, dating back to Gossage’s years in the American League. “I think he has one hit off me lifetime,” Gossage said, according to Buddy Bell’s Smart Baseball. “He’s lucky to have that one. It was a broken bat single. I own the guy.”
It doesn’t take much imagination to guess what happened next. In the eighth inning, Gibson came up with two on with his team leading 5-4, and Gossage on the mound, trying to keep things close. San Diego manager Dick Williams ordered Gibson intentionally walked, a decision that spurred Gossage to wave Williams out for a meeting, during which he pleaded his case for facing the slugger. Williams eventually acquiesced.
Gibson hit Gossage’s second pitch into the upper deck for an 8-4 lead. The Tigers won the championship minutes later.
The second incident has to do with keeping things loose. Most teams boast a balance of clubhouse personalities, ranging from clubhouse jokers to battlers with tunnel-vision, who have no time for anything but preparation for victory.
Not to say that Gibson was no fun to be around, but he was closer to the latter category than the former.
Don Drysdale describes a moment in Once a Bum, Always a Dodger, shortly after Gibson had joined Los Angeles.
Jesse Orosco, a relief pitcher for the Dodgers, put some eye-black in the sweatband of Gibson’s cap before an exhibition game. It was a harmless prank, but when Gibson put his hat on, he just came apart. It didn’t fit into his game plan or his sense of humor, and he just took off. He left the ballpark. Gibson was in effect saying, “If that’s the way this team operates, then maybe the Dodgers made a mistake signing me.”
It might be just the type of focus the Diamondbacks need.
Just as players have a set of unwritten rules, so too do general mangers. Sometimes, those rules intersect.
We saw an example of that recently, when the Dodgers placed Carlos Monasterios on the disabled list.
Los Angeles had claimed the pitcher from the Phillies in the Rule 5 draft, meaning that if he didn’t stay on the big league roster all season, they had to return him to Philadelphia. Monasterios, however—who lasted all of six and two-thirds innings over his previous two starts combined, giving up 10 runs in the process—was making that proposal difficult.
To judge by appearances, Los Angeles didn’t want him pitching in the major leagues, but didn’t have the leeway to send him to the minors. The solution: DL. The cause: a blister and a split nail on his pitching hand.
Such a move, should it be bogus, would be illegal. According to the Los Angeles Times, it was questionable:
How’s the blister?
“It doesn’t affect me,” Monasterios said.
What about the nail?
“There’s nothing wrong with the nail,” he said.
It’s not the first time this sort of maneuvering has happened this season. The Mets used the disabled list in a similar fashion, but for far different reasons.
When New York placed Oliver Perez on the DL, they claimed it was due to patella tendinitis. To many outsiders, however, it was because Perez was pitching too putridly to risk using. (The team would perhaps have a need in “extra innings or something like that,” said manager Jerry Manuel in the New York Post at the time, “but it’s going to be tough to find spots for him.”)
Perez had contract leeway to refuse a minor-league assignment. The Mets were unwilling to eat the $20 million they owe him over the next three years. (Said an unnamed Mets player in the Post: “At some point you have to cut bait. You owe him a lot of money, but for what?”)
So they did the next best thing—they stashed him on the DL (and not for the first time), or at least it appears that way. As with the Monasterios situation, this would be illegal were it true.
The commissioner’s office stepped in to review the situation, and Perez ultimately decided to accept a stint in the minors, albeit as a rehab assignment rather than as a demotion.
Sound shady? Of course it does. Just like the pitcher who denies intent after hitting a batter, the teams in question paint themselves as virtuous and true—at least according to their own PR.
Take Dodgers manager Joe Torre, who defended the Monasterios move. “Is it there or is it not?” he asked in the Times. “It’s not like I’m making up something. It’s there.”
On April 16, Dodgers right-hander Vicente Padillabroke Aaron Rowand’s face with a pitch, putting him out of action for two weeks. Some feel that a hit batsman, even an unintentionally hit one, merits retaliation, because points must be proved about topics such as willingness to take whatever it is an opponent wishes to dish out, or not.
Padilla’s strike may well have been unintentional, but that doesn’t alter the fact that he holds the distinction of being the game’s preeminent headhunter. That, by itself, is reason enough for suspicion.
The Giants had an opportunity to retaliate that day. Padilla came to bat the very next inning, Los Angeles led 9-2 at the time and there were two outs in the inning. A perfect set-up.
Instead of drilling Padilla, however, Giants reliever Waldis Joaquin pitched to him, getting him to ground out to end the fifth inning. Dodgers manager Joe Torre pinch-hit for Padilla the next time he was scheduled to bat.
Discussion around the Bay Area mounted a number of theories as to why the Giants chose not to retaliate. It could have been that Joaquin, just 23 years old and with fewer than 15 innings of big league experience, simply didn’t know any better, and hadn’t received specific instructions.
It could have been that the Giants’ braintrust wanted some time to assess the situation, knowing that they’d have other chances during the season to attack their nemesis.
To complicate matters, Padilla broke an unwritten rule after the fact by failing to call over to the Giants dugout to check on the guy he’d seriously injured. By itself, said some, that was justification for a retaliatory pitch the next time San Francisco saw him.
Well, San Francisco saw him yesterday for the first time since the incident and … nothing.
Padilla’s first two at-bats came with a runner on base and nobody out; the score was 0-0 the first time, and the Dodgers led 2-0 the second. Giants starter Jonathan Sanchez can hardly be faulted for his desire to minimize the damage each inning, rather than extend it.
When Padilla came up in the seventh, however, the Dodgers led 5-1. Giants reliever Santiago Casilla apparently attempted to send a message, throwing a fastball behind Padilla that failed to hit him. The intent behind the pitch—whether he wanted to hit him, or to send a message at all—is unknown, as Casilla stuck to the Code afterward, blaming the pitch’s location on a faulty “delivery point.”
It was enough, however, for umpire Tom Hallion to warn both benches, and put an end to Casilla’s endeavor. Padilla skated unscathed, eventually striking out. If there was a message sent, it was a mild one. After the game, Rowand refused to discuss anything that had to do with Padilla.
Interestingly, this exchange signaled a pattern—not with the Giants, but with Padilla himself. It was Padilla, after all, who instigated the series of events that led to White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen berating rookie pitcher Sean Tracey on the Comisky Park mound in 2006.
From The Baseball Codes:
Guillen quickly identified Texas’s Hank Blalock as a target for retaliation after 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 (a span extended by his service in World War II), 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 take 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 neces¬sary steps to intentionally hitting someone growing surprisingly involved.
Santiago Casilla can attest to that much.
San Francisco next sees the Dodgers on July 19. The Code says that the Giants had their shot, and they blew it, so the slate should be wiped clean. That’s not always the way things work, however.
It seems so obvious for pitchers: Don’t telegraph what type of pitch you’re about to throw, or hitters will jump all over it. (Matt Morris, for example, once had the habit of pointing the exposed index finger on his glove hand straight up when delivering fastballs, which allowed the opposition to pounce . . . until he affixed a flap to cover the finger.)
The Baseball Codes 