In lieu of actual baseball, I’ll be posting snippets that were cut from The Baseball Codes as a way of amusing myself and, hopefully, you. Today’s theme: intimidation.

“If I’m really trying to hit a guy, I’ll aim for the armpit right below the rib cage,” Curt Schilling said in the Los Angeles Times in 2002. “It’s an impossible spot to get out of the way. But I’ll throw above a guy’s shoulders and inside too. If you don’t knock a guy on his [rear] or break his bat when you throw inside, you’ve done nothing.”

Randy Johnson took a slightly different approach. “I have to be able to pitch inside,” he told the New York Times. “For me, though, the intimidation is not in hitting a guy. It’s the fear of it, the not knowing. Once you hit someone, it’s not about intimidation anymore. When you do what Clemens does, people get ticked off. They feel they have to retaliate. The point of what you were trying to do is lost.”