Kevin Towers did a lot of things with his weekly show on KTAR 620AM in Phoenix on Tuesday.
He showed why open discussion of baseball’s unwritten rules from an insider’s perspective can a bad idea.
He illustrated the gap between a normal response to a situation, and a baseball response.
And, in case any doubt remained, he proved conclusively that he holds some old-school opinions when it comes to this kind of thing.
In discussing the team’s lack of retaliation last season when provoked—on the same day that he fired D-Backs pitching coach Charles Nagy, no less—Towers intoned that he expected more from his pitchers when it comes to keeping the opposition honest.
“Come spring training, it will be duly noted that it’s going to be an eye for an eye and we’re going to protect one another,” he said. “If not, if you have options, there’s ways to get you out of here and if you don’t follow suit or you don’t feel comfortable doing it, you probably don’t belong in a Diamondbacks uniform.”
Towers referenced his team’s 8-1 loss to the Dodgers on Sept. 9, specifically the behavior of some Los Angeles players as they celebrated a six-home-run game in their dugout. It did not make him feel respected.
“I was sitting behind home plate that game and when it showed up on the Diamondvision of stuffing bananas down their throats, I felt like we were a punching bag,” he said. “Literally, if I would have had a carton of baseballs, I would have fired them into the dugout from where I was sitting behind home plate.”
Because, you know, in his sport, justice is meted out by throwing baseballs at a guy.
He went on to describe a moment later in the month when first baseman Paul Goldschmidt was drilled, but Arizona pitchers did not respond. Towers: “Goldy gets dinged, and no retaliation. It’s like, ‘Wait a minute.’ If Goldy’s getting hit, it’s an eye for an eye. Somebody’s going down or somebody’s going to get jackknifed.” (As noted by Hardball Talk, Wade Miley was the pitcher all three times Goldschmidt was drilled last season.)
It made for captivating radio. It also earned the GM national attention, and not in a good way. Yesterday he circled back to clarify that “going down” and getting “jackknifed” are distinct from getting drilled. (Which is true, even if it’s difficult to square with his personal inclination to throw baseballs at the Dodgers.)
“I’m not saying hit players on purpose,” he said in an MLB.com report. “I’m saying if our hitters are being made uncomfortable at the plate, we need to be the same way; we need to make the opposing hitters uncomfortable at the plate and pitch in with purpose and take that inner third away.”
He cited an instance in which the Padres retaliated for a batter hit by Arizona closer Heath Bell by throwing inside to Aaron Hill.
“The bat went up in the air and it knocked him off his feet,” Towers said. “I said, ‘You know what, that’s baseball.’ They weren’t trying to hurt Aaron Hill. They were protecting their player. It was pitched in with purpose to send a message. I applaud that, and that was from the other club. It’s the way baseball is played. He ended up getting him out on the outer half because he took away the inner half.”
Ultimately, it’s a stretch for an old-school baseball guy to expect that most people outside the game will understand his perspective on the subject (especially if he devolves into prattle about throwing knockdown pitches from the stands). One of Towers’ problems, of course, is that even the people within his own organization didn’t seem to understand him. He wasn’t pleased with Kirk Gibson’s lack of response when players were thrown at this season, and the topic played a role in his dismissal of Nagy.
The idea of retaliatory pitches can be debated all day and into tomorrow, but Towers’ comments planted him within the baseball mainstream. The unwritten rule he broke was in talking about it in anything other than platitudes to begin with.
Why Frank Francisco drilled Jayson Werth on Thursday is not yet clear. That it was intentional—and stupid—was obvious to at least three people: Werth, Bryce Harper and Mets broadcaster Ron Darling.
It came with no outs in the eighth inning, on a 3-0 fastball, after Francisco had already allowed doubles to the first two batters he faced, extending Washington’s lead to 5-2. (The Nats ended up winning, 7-2. At this point, frustration is as good a guess as any when it comes to pinpointing Francisco’s motivation.)
Werth knew it was intentional when it happened. So, apparently did plate ump Anthony Recker, who, despite the fact that Werth made no move toward the mound, grabbed the barrel of his bat as he lingered near the plate, staring at Francisco.
“Boy, was that obvious,” said Darling on the broadcast. “For you folks at home—and you hear me all the time say, ‘That wasn’t intentional’—well, this one was intentional.”
Darling was then asked by broadcaster Gary Cohen why Francisco would drill a batter in that situation.
Darling’s reply: “Because he’s a fool.” (Watch it here.)
Werth wouldn’t comment after the game, but handled things in the moment, taking out shortstop Reuben Tejada moments later with an aggressive slide at second base. Harper, who reached on a fielder’s choice, did something similar to second baseman Daniel Murphy.
(The idea was summed up by Bob Brenly in The Baseball Codes: “I’ve gotten on first base when I’ve been hit by a pitch and told the first baseman, ‘If there’s a ground ball hit I’m going to fuck up one of your middle infielders, and [pointing to the mound] you can tell him that it was his fault.’ That’s a way you can get them to police themselves. A pitcher drills somebody just because he feels like it, and if one of the middle infielders gets flipped out there he’s going to tell the pitcher to knock it off. Ultimately, that’s all we want anyway—just play the game the right way.”)
“That was total B.S. what Francisco did there,” said a scout in attendance, in a Washington Post report. “Almost got his shortstop’s ankle broken.”
Sure enough, Nationals pitchers never retaliated. If Werth’s slide wasn’t enough for them, they’ll have to wait until next year to address the issue, because the teams don’t meet again this season.
In the fifth inning in Milwaukee on Wednesday, Andrew McCutchen hit a home run to left. He didn’t get it all—it just cleared the fence—and he managed to lose it in the lights before he knew where it was ending up.
As such, he loitered in the batter’s box to try and get a read on it.
Ignore for a moment the horrific strategy of hedging one’s bet that a ball may not have left the ballpark by failing to leave the batter’s box. The pitcher who gave up the shot, Wily Peralta, either did not know about McCutchen’s confusion, or didn’t care. With his next pitch, he drilled Justin Morneau on the hand, near head-level. (Watch it here.)
“The catcher knew I was looking for the ball, the umpire knew—everybody knew it,” said McCutchen after the game, in an MLB.com report. “You could see the guys in the infield smirking as I was going around the bases. They know I’d lost the ball.”
Peralta offered up the standard denial of intent, saying “Yeah, you know, it wasn’t on purpose,” before detailing how he missed his spot while trying to go up and in.
“I know it looks bad, because right after a homer, you don’t want to hit people,” he said.
Unless, of course, hitting people is exactly what you want to do. Morneau reacted angrily, and even though he never approached the mound, benches cleared. After the game, Pittsburgh’s first baseman wasn’t ready to level blame with any degree of certainty.
“I think usually when a guy hits a home run, and they don’t like the way he reacts, they wait until the guy comes around [again],” he said in USA Today, questioning whether a more proper approach would have seen the Brewers waiting for McCutchen’s next turn in the lineup, rather than going after Morneau so quickly afterward. “It’s one of those things in that gray area. You don’t know if it’s intentional or not.”
Not to disagree too wholeheartedly with an experienced big leaguer or anything, but it seemed pretty intentional. Add the wrinkle that Morneau’s career was derailed and diminished by concussion-related symptoms, and the idea that Peralta came anywhere near his head in a misinformed fit of retaliation is unconscionable.
That was the final meeting between the teams this season so any personal retribution will have to wait, but there are no such constraints on the commissioner’s office, which may opt to hand down some discipline of its own.
The reason the unwritten rules dominate baseball like in no other sport is the space within the game for messaging. The idea that if somebody wants to communicate an idea through action, there is sufficient opportunity to do so—be it a well-timed stolen base, some styling to start one’s home run trot or an intentionally hit batter.
The thing about the latter category is that we are rarely certain when a batter has been intentionally hit.
On Sunday, however, we were offered about as much certainty as can be reasonably expected, short of admission from the pitcher. Boston’s Ryan Dempster, facing Alex Rodriguez in the second inning, threw a knee-high fastball behind the batter. He followed that with two waist-high inside pitches, then planted a fastball into A-Rod’s elbow. Not even a hint at subterfuge—Rodriguez was marked. (Watch it here.)
Which is where the messaging comes in.
The immediate assumption was that Dempster, an old-school red-ass if ever there was one, was making a statement about PEDs, expressing his displeasure both at Rodriguez’s usage and his subsequent refusal to accept the punishment handed down by Bud Selig. Just two days earlier, after all, Boston players John Lackey and Jonny Gomesdiscussed their displeasure with the fact that Rodriguez was being allowed to play while appealing his 211-game, PED-related suspension.
If that’s what Dempster was doing, he has some precedent. In 1990, Bert Blyleven hit Baltimore’s Phil Bradley because of Bradley’s hard-line stance in labor negotiations which, in Blyleven’s opinion, prolonged settlement of the 32-day lockout that delayed the start of the season. Blyleven was concerned about pension time, did not appreciate tactics which stood to cost him financially, and expressed his displeasure from the pitcher’s mound.
Would it be so peculiar for another pitcher to take a similar tack? Maybe not, but then we hear this, courtesy of Yahoo’s Big League Stew: A Canadian hockey writer says that Dempster had different priorities.
This may seem so much more petty than PED grandstanding, but it’s also more feasible—and it, too, has precedent.
One of Tommy Lasorda’s go-to stories is about how, as a star-struck 14-year-old, he approached New York Giants outfielder Buster Maynard after a game in Philadelphia and asked him for an autograph. Maynard brushed him off.
Eight years later, Lasorda was a promising pitcher with the Triple-A Montreal Royals, in the Brooklyn Dodgers chain, when to his surprise he found himself facing a fading former big leaguer trying to hold his job with the minor-league Augusta Yankees: Buster Maynard. Lasorda’s first pitch knocked him down. His second pitch did the same. When Maynard came up again later in the game, Lasorda decked him a third time.
This time it was Maynard waiting for Lasorda after the game, asking what the heck was going on. Lasorda told him the story of saving up his money to go to a baseball game, only to be ignored by his hero. He concluded the sentiment with, “I wish I had hit you, you busher!”
Joe Girardi: angry.
If this was Dempster’s motivation, it was not apparent from field level at Fenway Park. Yankees manager Joe Girardi lit into plate ump Brian O’Nora for not ejecting Dempster—he was upset that the pitcher was given four pitches with which to work—and then warning both benches, precluding retaliation. Soon, he was himself tossed. On his way back to the dugout he shouted toward Dempster, “Somebody’s going to get hit.”
(In the middle of this came a highly unusual moment, in which the Red Sox bullpen came streaming onto the field as if to fight, despite no indication that Rodriguez would do anything other than take his base.)
Dempster denied everything, of course, and Rodriguez ratcheted up the best possible response when he took Dempster deep for a sixth-inning homer at the center of a four-run rally that proved to be the difference in a 9-6 New York victory. (Watch it here.)
Rodriguez also provided the quote of the night, when asked about whether Dempster should be suspended for his actions. “I’m the wrong guy to ask about suspensions,” he said in the Boston Globe. “I’ve got a lawyer I can recommend.”
The teams play seven times in a 10-game span in September. If there’s more to be said about this, it’ll be said then.
It was a classic misdirection. With an 0-2 count on Miguel Cabrera to open the 10th inning on Saturday, Fernando Rodney sent a 100-mph pitch so outside the strike zone that catcher Jose Molina could not get a glove on it. Wildness thus established, he followed it up with a pitch near Cabrera’s head.
In many respects, the pitch was perfectly placed. It tailed in at the last moment, but was easily trackable by the batter and was never in danger of hitting him. Cabrera leaned back to avoid it, but it would not have made contact even had he remained still.
The strategy was also sound. The previous day, Cabrera had homered twice (and didn’t help matters by celebrating that game’s final out by performing what appeared to be an imitation of Rodney’s archer pose, which the closer strikes following saves). Cabrera leads the major leagues in batting average, RBIs and OPS, and is second in home runs. It was without doubt in Rodney’s best interest to make him as uncomfortable at the plate as possible.
And it worked. Cabrera flailed at the next pitch, a down-and-in changeup, for strike three.
Perhaps Cabrera’s displeasure was compounded by the result of his at-bat, but upon reaching the dugout he spent a considerable amount of time gesturing toward, and yelling at, Rodney. (Watch it all here.)
The pitcher was obviously not trying to hit Cabrera during extra innings of a 3-3 game. Even if he was, it is given wisdom that such a strike is far easier to execute when aiming at the torso than at the head, which is a smaller and more maneuverable target. Much more likely was that Rodney wanted to crimp Cabrera’s style—get him out of the dangerous space in which he’s resided all season—and either A) misjudged the height of his inside pitch, or B) didn’t care.
Cabrera didn’t comment afterward, but his manager, Jim Leyland, did.
“I don’t care about throwing inside but I don’t like it up there,” Leyland said in an MLB.com report, referring to Cabrera’s head. “We will not tolerate that. You can take that to the bank. We won’t tolerate that up to the head to anybody. … That will cause a lot of problems for people.”
It caused problems for Ben Zobrist on Sunday, when, with two outs and nobody on base in the first inning, Tigers starter Rick Porcello drilled him in the back with a 94-mph fastball. It was intentional and it was expected. Plate ump Vic Carapazza quickly warned both benches.
Cabrera got his own measure of revenge three innings later, when he crushed a homer into the Rays Touch Tank—only the second such blast in the ballpark’s history.
Despite Cabrera being “a little sensitive,” according to Zobrist, the Rays left it at that. Except of course, for the final explanation offered by Maddon for their lack of further response. Via Twitter:
To gauge it by the wisdom of the author of The Godfather, the Rays, apparently, will not forget this slight. Considering that they won’t face Detroit until next season (or in the playoffs), however, their memories will have to hold for a while.
On Tuesday, Jesus Guzman belted an eighth-inning, two-run, pinch-hit homer against Giants reliever Jeremy Affeldt to give the Padres a 4-3 lead. This excited him.
He watched the blast. He walked down the line. He held his bat. Eleven steps from the plate he spun 180 degrees, still moving toward first, and, with his back to the pitcher, bellowed toward his teammates in the first-base dugout.
Clearly, the Giants were not amused. How clear became evident during Guzman’s first at-bat on Wednesday, when Madison Bumgarner threw his first pitch waist-high and behind the batter. Guzman shouted toward the mound and pointed his bat at Bumgarner, all while taking the slow steps of a man with no intention of trading punches. (Bumgarner, however, veritably tore down the mound to establish a closer confrontation, and was restrained by on-deck hitter Yasmani Grandal and plate ump Tony Randazzo.)
Although dugouts emptied, each bench was warned and order was quickly restored. (Watch it all here.)
“I was enjoying the home run with my teammates,” Guzman said of his Tuesday night blast, in an MLB.com report. “I wasn’t trying to be disrespectful of their team.”
That may well be true, but even the greenest big leaguer, let alone a guy with four years’ experience—who, by the way, came up with the Giants in 2009 and was a teammate of Affeldt’s—should realize that such a display will almost inevitably be taken poorly.
Bumgarner’s response—a warning shot across the bow, as it were—got the point across: Think for a moment before doing something like that against us again. (Bumgarner, for his part, left his postgame response to the phrase, “There’s no need to comment on that.”)
Ultimately, however, it was Guzman who held the retaliatory trump card. Leading off the seventh against Bumgarner in a 1-1 game, he crushed a home run deep down the left field line. (Watch it here.)
This time he faced the appropriate direction, and ran every step of the way.
It’s almost as if the commissioner’s office was warming up for Dodgers-Diamondbacks fallout from Tuesday night’s throwdown at Chavez Ravine.
On Wednesday baseball suspended Giants reliever George Kontos for three games, and manager Bruce Bochy for one, following an incident in Pittsburgh on Tuesday in which Kontos hit Andrew McCutchen with a pitch after benches had been warned.
With the Giants down 8-2 in the eighth inning, Kontos threw a ball behind Starling Marte. It was likely a response to an incident an inning earlier, when Marco Scutaro was knocked from the game (and, as was found out later, from the lineup for an extended period) by a Tony Watson pitch, and was enough to draw a warning from plate ump Wally Bell.
The lack of contact may not have been enough to satisfy the pitcher, who drilled McCutchen in the backside two hitters later. With warnings in effect, Bell didn’t hesitate to toss him. (Watch it here.)
It was a reasonable response by the umpire. Then again, the pitch in question was a tailing sinker that drifted right, hardly a laser-guided bullet. From MLB.com:
The genesis of McCutchen’s plunking occurred one inning earlier, when he singled leading off against Kontos.
“First pitch of the seventh inning, he put a really good swing on it,” Kontos said, “and they were hacking early and out over the plate, so I was trying to pitch inside. A sinker got away from me a little bit.”
(To add to Kontos’ woes, he was sent to Triple-A Fresno after the game; he’ll serve his suspension upon being recalled. Also, it was his 28th birthday. Still, wrote CSN Bay Area’s Andrew Baggarly, it could have been worse: Kontos tore his elbow ligament while pitching on his birthday four years ago.)
It’s difficult to fault Bell for his decision, though it’s fair to ask whether Kontos’ actions were suspension-worthy. Ultimately, it’s irrelevant: Between this incident, the one in Los Angeles on Tuesday and Monday’s Red Sox-Rays dustup, MLB must be freaking out just a little bit, and responded accordingly.
Some will blame baseball’s unwritten rules, the sport’s ingrained system of on-field justice, for last night’s disgraceful display at Chavez Ravine. They will decry the eye-for-an-eye mentality, the brutal delivery of fastballs and the ugly results of the punch-throwing scrum in the seventh-inning.
What they will not acknowledge is that baseball’s unwritten rules exist precisely to avoid this kind of confrontation. Because Tuesday night’s throwdown between the Dodgers and Diamondbacks was a study in what not do during the course of a baseball game as it pertains to baseball’s Code.
Retaliation for an incidental drilling—especially one so incidental that it required umpire intervention to confirm that it even happened—is simply not necessary. This was the state of affairs after Cody Ross was grazed by a Zack Greinke pitch in the fifth inning.
Even if what happened next was retaliation for Ross, it would at least give Ian Kennedy a reason for his actions, no matter how insufficient. In the sixth inning, the D-Backs right-hander ignored the tenet mandating that one never drill a batter intentionally above shoulder level, and hit Yasiel Puig in the nose with a 92-mph fastball. Puig remained on the ground for several minutes while trainers attended to him. (Watch it here.)
Greinke responded an inning later by hitting Miguel Montero between the numbers. Usually, when catchers are hit in a retaliatory fashion, it is because they called for the pitch that made the retaliation necessary in the first place. In Montero’s case, had Kennedy’s pitch to Puig hit the catcher’s glove it would have ended up below the knees. (Watch it here.)
Regardless, that blow should have ended hostilities. Kennedy drilled a Dodger in a wildly inappropriate manner, and Greinke responded according to the Code. It wasn’t enough to settle Kennedy down, however. In the bottom half of the seventh, he threw his first pitch to Greinke—another 92-mph fastball—directly for the head. Greinke ducked and the ball glanced off his upper shoulder.
Usually, benches clear when an aggrieved hitter—somebody who has just been hit or knocked down—takes issue with the pitcher. Ron Washington once described the situation this way, back when he was the third-base coach for the A’s and Frank Thomas, the team’s designated hitter, had been drilled by Ted Lilly. “We all saw what happened, but Frank took it calmly, so we took it calmly,” he said. “If Frank had taken it with an uproar, we’d have taken it with an uproar. We have to wait for the reaction of the guy who it happened to. If Frank had charged him, there would have been a fight. If Frank had raised some hell going down to first base, we’d have raised some hell. But Frank took it calmly and went on down there, the umpire checked everything, and we played baseball.”
On Tuesday, Greinke did take it calmly. It was his teammates—led by Puig—who escalated things from that point, racing from the dugout and quickly getting physical. (Watch it here.) The rest of the action was described succinctly by Nick Piecoro of the ArizonaRepublic:
Reliever J.P. Howell charged at Diamondbacks assistant hitting coach Turner Ward and nearly flipped him over a railing near the on-deck circle. Puig appeared to land a tomahawk swing on Diamondbacks’ bench player Eric Hinske. Dodgers hitting coach Mark McGwire looked apoplectic as he exchanged words with Diamondbacks manager Kirk Gibson and third-base coach Matt Williams. Even Dodgers manager Don Mattingly got in on the action, wrestling Diamondbacks bench coach Alan Trammell to the ground.
Only two things happened as they should have. First was Dodgers catcher Tim Federowicz jumping in between Montero and Greinke after the former was drilled in the seventh. (It was the inability of the Dodgers’ other catcher, A.J. Ellis, to do that very thing that allowed Carlos Quentin to reach the mound during the April brawl that ended with Greinke’s collarbone broken.) The other was Greinke, on first base after being drilled, responding by trying to take out Arizona shortstop Didi Gregorius with a hard slide at the front end of an attempted double-play—just like they used to do in the old days. (Greinke ended up getting a no-decision in the Dodgers’ 5-3 victory. Watch it here.) Ultimately, the primary takeaway from this unfortunate state of affairs was that Ian Kennedy threw two pitches at opponents’ heads in a two-inning span. The guy has already proven willing to harbor ill-will against the Dodgers, throwing two pitches at Clayton Kershaw last season in response to a year-old grudge. Even more pertinent is the fact that he seems to enjoy this kind of thing. Last year he led the National League with 14 hit batters, even with otherwise good control—he walked only 55 over more than 200 innings. The Dodgers will get theirs, at some point. In the interim, MLB will certainly step in and get some of its own. Had the unwritten rules worked as intended, none of it would have been necessary.
As soon as John Lackey drilled Matt Joyce in the back with a 90-mph fastball in the sixth inning of Monday night’s game, people were already speculating how far back the antagonism ran.
Did it date back to the second inning, when Joyce connected for a mammoth foul ball to right, then dropped his bat—“styled,” in the words of MassLive writer Evan Drellich—as if he’d just homered?
Did it date back to the first inning, when Joyce actually did homer?
Lackey did some yelling toward the Rays dugout after Joyce’s second-inning pimp show. After being hit, Joyce pointed toward Lackey amid a slurry of what is safe to assume was epithets, then got into a pushing match with Jarrod Saltalamacchia when the catcher cut off his path to the mound. That was when benches emptied, although no punches were thrown. (Watch it discussed on MLB Tonight, complete with clips.)
Joyce actually thought that it was none of the above.
“As far as I understood, he was pretty upset that I dropped my bat on that 3-0 swing,” Joyce said in a Tampa Tribune report, describing the count when he pulled his second-inning ball foul. There is indeed an unwritten rule about restraint from swinging at 3-0 pitches, but it only applies late in blowout games—never in the second inning.
In case there was doubt about Joyce’s personal view of possible impropriety, it was cleared up by what he said next: “I was actually pretty upset myself I had such a good pitch to hit and missed it. I usually never drop the bat.”
In a close game (the Red Sox would win, 10-8, in 14 innings), Tampa Bay settled for a low-impact response—in the seventh inning, reliever Joel Peralta threw his first pitch, to Dustin Pedroia, high and tight. (Even that is up for interpretation; it was a 79 mph curveball.)
Beyond that, Lackey denied intent and was alternately defended by one manager (his own) and criticized by the other.
While the easy answer is that hostilities started with Joyce’s second-inning swing, the reality is that whenever something happens between these teams it’s almost expected. Their relationship over the last decade-plus has been testy enough to have inspired an entire section in The Baseball Codes; between 2000 and 2008, it seemed like every one of their meetings added another chapter to their collective book of spite, and things have hardly slowed from there. A condensed excerpt:
* August 2000: Boston’s Pedro Martinez hits Gerald Williams on the hand with his fourth pitch of the game. Williams charges the mound, shoving the much smaller Martinez to the ground and lands a glancing blow to his face. Benches empty, during which Boston’s Brian Daubach dives into the scrum, where Tampa players accuse him of taking cheap shots. The commissioner’s office eventually rules that Daubach acted appropriately, but by the time the game ends, Daubach has been thrown at by a succession of Devil Rays pitchers, starting with Dave Eiland—who wants to hit him so badly that, with two on and nobody out in the third inning, he sends his first pitch spinning toward Daubach’s head. The hitter manages to avoid that one, but can’t get out of the way of Eiland’s next pitch, which drills him in the body. Shortly therafter Eiland hits Nomar Garciaparra and is tossed from the game. His replacement, Cory Lidle, is himself ejected after throwing a pitch behind Daubach. Lidle’s replacement, Tony Fiore, lasts all of two pitches before finishing the job, drilling Daubach with his third offering and spurring another confrontation between the teams.
* September 29, 2000: Tampa Bay eliminates the Red Sox from the AL East race with an 8–6 victory. From the mound, Rays closer Roberto Hernandez waves a sarcastic bye-bye to the Tropicana Field visitors’ dugout.
* 2001: Over the course of the season, Devil Rays pitchers hit eleven Boston batters; Red Sox pitchers tag nine Tampa hitters.
* May 5, 2002: Devil Rays pitcher Ryan Rupe hits both Garciaparra and Shea Hillenbrand in the first inning, a day after each was instrumental in helping Boston overcome a 5–2, ninth-inning deficit. Boston’s Trot Nixon lets go of his bat on a swing, sending it flying toward the mound. Red Sox pitcher Frank Castillo responds by hitting Tampa’s Randy Winn. Both Castillo and Nixon are suspended.
* July 18, 2002: The day after Manny Ramirez scorches the Devil Rays with a home run and a double, he’s hit by Tampa starter Tanyon Sturtze. Boston’s Frank Castillo hits Tampa Bay second baseman Brent Abernathy in the third, and reliever Tim Wakefield hits him again in the fifth. In the ninth, Devil Rays reliever Esteban Yan just misses Ramirez’s head as the slugger ducks, and the ball glances off his shoulder. “You can’t act like what happened never happened,” says Derek Lowe in the Boston Herald. He also says, “Every year, why is it always this team?”
* September 9, 2002: Lowe keeps wondering after being ejected for hitting Devil Rays shortstop Felix Escalona with a pitch. The following night, Tampa Bay reliever Lee Gardner, pitching in the eighth inning of an 11–1 Boston runaway, is ejected for hitting second baseman Lou Merloni.
* September 27, 2004: Red Sox starter Bronson Arroyo keeps relations testy by hitting both Aubrey Huff and Tino Martinez in the third inning. Devil Rays pitcher Scott Kazmir retaliates by hitting Manny Ramirez and Kevin Millar in consecutive at-bats an inning later, emptying the benches. Kazmir is ejected.
* April 22–24, 2005: Five batters are hit in the first two games of a three-game series between the teams. In the third game, Arroyo hits Huff—7-for-10 lifetime against him—for the second time in as many seasons. An inning later, Devil Rays reliever Lance Carter throws a pitch behind Ramirez’s head, eliciting warnings for both benches. One pitch later, Ramirez belts a home run. Carter then throws at the head of the next hitter, David Ortiz, who has to be restrained by catcher Toby Hall. Dugouts empty, and Carter, Trot Nixon, Tampa Bay manager Lou Piniella and pitcher Dewon Brazelton are ejected. In the seventh, Arroyo hits leadoff batter Chris Singleton on the thigh, earning his own ejection. In a radio interview on WEEI after the game, Boston pitcher Curt Schilling blames Piniella: “Players on that team are saying, ‘This is why we lose a hundred games a year, because this idiot makes us do stuff like this.’ ” A day later, also on the radio, Piniella says, “I have forgot more baseball than this guy knows.”
* March 27, 2006: After tagging out Tampa’s Joey Gathright at the plate during a spring-training game, Boston reliever Julian Tavarez stands on the baserunner’s arm, he says, so that Gathright couldn’t “throw a punch at me right away.” Tavarez then hits Gathright in the jaw while the outfielder is down on one knee. Gathright later says that Tavarez “hits like a woman.” Devil Rays outfielder Carl Crawford subsequently challenges the pitcher to a post-game fight in the parking lot.
* June 5, 2008: The highlight of five hit batters on the night is Boston outfielder Coco Crisp’s charge of the mound after being drilled by right-hander James Shields of the Rays, who by this time have dropped the “Devil” from their name if not their attitude. Shields is responding to Crisp’s hard slide into second baseman Akinori Iwamura the previous night, which was itself a response to Tampa Bay shortstop Jason Bartlett using his leg to block Crisp’s headfirst slide into second. Shields misses with a roundhouse right, and Crisp— with 17 knockouts to his credit in 17 amateur boxing matches as a youth—is able to land one shot of his own before being overwhelmed by a scrum of Rays, primary among them Crawford and Johnny Gomes, who shower blows upon him. (After the game, Crisp says that the Rays were like “little girls, trying to scratch out my eyes.” Shields had already hit Dustin Pedroia in the first inning, and Boston’s Jon Lester responds by hitting Crawford, then Iwamura. Tampa Bay reliever Al Reyes closes the festivities by drilling Kevin Youkilis in Boston’s final at-bat.
* October 10, 2008: In Game 1 of the ALCS, Rays reliever Grant Balfour sends a fastball toward the face of Boston outfielder J. D. Drew, which catches the slugger’s shoulder as he spins to avoid it. Barking ensues, and the seven-game series is so tight that even four more hit batters (two from each team) over the remaining games do little to raise the tension.
Things hardly ended there. There were the three times Tampa Bay’s Luke Scott was hit by Boston pitchers over a three-game span in 2012—the last of which ended up in a brawl. (Red Sox reliever Franklin Morales threw a fastball behind Scott’s back, then two inside, then finally drilled him in the leg. Earlier, Pedroia had been drilled, and a pitch thrown over Daniel Nava’s head.)
There were words last March, when Alfredo Aceves drilled Sean Rodriguez in the shoulder, one at-bat after he had homered.
All of which gives some context to Monday night’s dustup. Just another day at the office, it seems.
When a pitcher clearly has no intention of hitting a batter, the act is unlikely to draw much in the way of rebuke. When it happens three times in the same game, however, to the same batter, you better believe that an eyebrow will be raised.
On Tuesday, Cardinals second baseman Matt Carpenter hit the trifecta against Arizona. More appropriately, Arizona hit the trifecta against Carpenter. None of the pitches came close to looking intentional.
* First time: Seventh inning, St. Louis trailing by one run and a man on first with one out. Not a situation for a pitcher to make a statement, not to mention that the ball hit Carpenter’s hand as he was squaring to bunt.
* Second time: Ninth inning, one out in a tie game. Again, not a situation for a pitcher to make a statement.Carpenter was hit on the forearm with a pitch that darted inside at the last moment.
* Third time: This looked like the most intentional of the bunch, but drilling somebody on purpose in the 13th inning of a tie game is simply not done. (Watch them all here.)
There was no lingering disagreement between Carpenter and an angry D’Backs pitcher, because each of his HBPs came against a different guy. For each of the pitches the catcher was set up inside.
“That’s what they wanted to do to me and a couple of other left-handers,” said Carpenter, who was hit three times all last season, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “I wouldn’t expect anything different. You miss in two spots. Either you miss over the plate or you miss and hit somebody. It’s just the way it is when you pitch inside.”
Still, a three-pack of HBPs is a three-pack of HBPs. The Cardinals, however, were walking a fine line when it came to payback on Wednesday. St. Louis already had a short bullpen due to a doubleheader last week; the 14 innings on Tuesday added additional strain. Also, Yadier Molinadropped his suspension appeal following his recent ump-bumping incident (itself laden with unwritten rules) and sat out Wednesday (which he would have done anyway, following Tuesday’s marathon).
All of which is to say that St. Louis, already undermanned, could hardly afford to have a pitcher or a catcher tossed in the name of fulfilling retaliatory expectations. Were there going to be payback, it had to be subtle.
And it was, right there in the first inning. When Carpenter’s second-base counterpart on the Diamondbacks, Willie Bloomquist, came up for his first at-bat on Wednesday, he was buzzed—a fastball came in just under his armpits—not drilled. The Cardinals left little doubt that they were paying attention.
Cardinals broadcasters Dan McLaughlin and Ricky Horton (a former big league pitcher himself) summed it up nicely on the telecast:
DM: There’s someone from Arizona who needs to properly, professionally get one in the ribs or the back, because Matt Carpenter was hit three times last night.
RH: I think that we just saw it.
DM: That’s not enough if I’m Matt Carpenter. What did that prove? You pitched inside. So what?
RH: Well, he came in way inside, with the idea. I think the message was sent. There was no pain to it, if that’s what you’re looking for.
DM: I want pain. [Laughs]
RH: I thought that’s where you were headed with that.
DM: Pain, Rick.
RH: Well you have the message and you have pain, Dan. You’ve sent the message and maybe you were a little light on the pain.
McLaughlin clarified that he was kidding about the pain, Horton added that a subtle message worked just fine in this situation, and everybody appeared to be happy to move on.
(St. Louis pitchers did hit Bloomquist in the seventh, and shortstop Didi Gregorius twice, but all seemed to lack intent. Gregorius was hit by a 74 mph slider with a runner on second and nobody out in a one-run game, Bloomquist was hit later that inning with two men on in a tie game, and Gregorius was hit again in the eighth with a splitter.)
Questions about delayed payback were answered on Thursday, when the Cardinals faced a 12-2 deficit in the sixth, and opted not to drill any Arizona hitters.
It all adds up to a lot of thought devoted to a series of unintentional events, but that’s the way the game is played.
Serious thanks to Cards fan Chris C. for the heads-up and broadcast transcription.
Kevin Towers did a lot of things with his weekly show on KTAR 620AM in Phoenix on Tuesday.
The Baseball Codes 