I was devastated to hear the news yesterday about Vida Blue’s passing. He’d been ill for some time, having shown up to the A’s recent reunion of the 1974 championship team needing a wheelchair and cane to aid his diminished mobility, with people close to him now saying that he was holding on as tightly as he could specifically to make that event.
Photo by Doug McWilliams, Nat’l Baseball Hall Of Fame / Library
Vida was a towering figure during my preteen Giants fandom in the late-1970s and early ’80s, shepherding their ascent from laughingstock to respectability. I was too young at the time to understand just how impactful the man had been on baseball’s landscape prior to his arrival in San Francisco.
Now, having written Dynastic, Bombastic, Fantastic, about the Swingin’ A’s of the 1970s, I now know better. Vida played an outsized role on those three-time champions, having taken the baseball world by storm in 1971, butting heads with Charlie Finley during a ruined 1972, and rebounding to place three top-10 Cy Young finishes over the next four years amid whirling rumors of being traded or sold outright, and watching the rest of the roster depart at the dawn of the free agency era while he was left to languish in Oakland.
I’ve spoken to Vida at ballparks, at symposiums and in classrooms. He even took to calling me on occasion to fact-check some conversation he was in the middle of having (usually, it seemed, with a date he likely wanted to impress). The four hours I spent with the man over lunch at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley back in 2015, however, while researching Dynastic, was the most concentrated and wonderful dose of Vida one could hope for. That’s where he gave me the line that I chose to head the book’s epilogue: “We were the team everybody wanted to come see: the freaks with the mustaches, with the long hair, that took batting practice in black shoes but came out to play in white shoes.”
He also noted the A’s primary colors during his run with the team: Wedding Gown White, Fort Knox Gold, Kelly Green and Vida Blue.
Photo by Doug McWilliams, Nat’l Baseball Hall Of Fame / Library
Although Vida ended up having a nice career, he proved unable to sustain his early dominance. There are many reasons for this, including overuse during that 1971 campaign and his subsequent holdout in 1972. None are more prevalent than a spiraling drug problem that saw Blue not only suspended for the 1984 season following a cocaine conviction, but serving three months of jail time at the beginning of that year. He rejoined the Giants in 1985 and hung on for a couple more seasons.
Blue’s career was one of what-ifs. Nobody was more aware of this detail than Vida himself. “I blew it …” he told The Washington Post in 2021. “I can honestly, openly say I wish I was a Hall of Famer. And I know for a fact this drug thing impeded my road to the Hall of Fame … so far.”
That’s not how I like to remember him. I prefer to consider the young, cheerful wunderkind who took the American League by storm in 1971. To that end, I offer an extended excerpt from Dynastic:
The real story of 1971 was Vida Blue. Six feet tall and 190 well-packed pounds, the left-hander threw devastatingly hard and with disarming ease. His windup featured a uniquely high leg kick that brought his right knee almost to his chin, and a delivery in which he reached so far back with the baseball that his knuckles nearly scraped the dirt. He’d made his debut as a 20-year-old call-up the previous September, and pitched a one-hitter against Kansas City in his second-ever big league start. Blue couldn’t throw anything but fastballs, but that was enough—the ones that didn’t drop like bowling balls exploded so ferociously upon reaching the plate that hitters swore they saw them rise. Two starts after baffling the Royals he no-hit the Twins. “We never even saw the ball,” marveled Minnesota’s Harmon Killebrew afterward, “but we sure heard it good.”
Blue’s marvelous September earned him the nod to pitch the Presidential Opener in 1971, but the magic didn’t last. The young lefty surrendered four runs in one and two-thirds innings, and Oakland lost, 8–0. Things, however, would quickly improve.
In Blue’s second start of the season he set a franchise record with 13 strikeouts over six shutout innings of a rain-shortened game. His third start was a two-hitter over Milwaukee. His fourth start was an 11-strikeout victory over the White Sox. Vida, who had spent his winter working on a curveball, was somehow even better than he’d been the previous September. Following his disastrous opening assignment the lefty won 10 straight, compiling a 1.03 ERA while spinning nine complete games in 12 starts.
“There are some guys you go hitless against and it doesn’t bother you,” noted Baltimore outfielder Paul Blair. “What you tell yourself is, Well, I got a piece of him, or at least I fouled one off. But this guy makes you go 0-for-4 and you feel humiliated. He doesn’t give you a single thing. He strips you naked right there in public. Trying to hit that thing he throws is like trying to hit dead weight.”
By early May the country was paying attention. Sports Illustrated compared Vida to Sandy Koufax. (“That’s funny,” responded Blue, “I don’t look Jewish.”) Soon he would grace the covers of Time and Newsweek, publications that didn’t ordinarily cover sports, and hold down guest spots on NBC’s Today Show and The Dick Cavett Show. Talk began in earnest about his chances of winning 30.
On May 28, more than 35,000 people crammed into Fenway Park (capacity: less than 34,000; average: 16,000) to watch Vida pitch. On June 1, he attracted more than 30,000 to Yankee Stadium for a game that would have otherwise drawn about 12,000, and the A’s suffered through a pregame clubhouse so crowded with media that Dick Williams called a team meeting just to clear the room. Back home 47 percent of all Bay Area TVs tuned in as Blue won his 12th, another complete game. By that point Charlie Finley was seeing dollar signs in everything his young star touched. Vida, scheduled to pitch only once during an eight-day homestand, was given Catfish Hunter’s slot on June 17, which served the dual purpose of providing Blue with an extra home date and knocking him from his previously scheduled spot ten days hence, which corresponded with Bat Day at the Coliseum. “We didn’t want him to pitch on a promotion day,” Williams explained. “He’s enough of a promotion himself.”
Vida’s sheer exuberance could not be suppressed. During games in which he didn’t pitch he sat in the dugout and listened to Williams rant about on-field mistakes, then would approach the skipper, a smile on his face, to say things like, “I’m going to tell Greenie [second baseman Dick Green] what you all said about him. I’m going to tell him as soon as he gets off the field.” Reggie Jackson called the pitcher a “dugout instigator, like the rest of us, but always in an innocent way.” Vida wore a Joe Namath–model New York Jets jersey while tossing footballs with clubhouse kids before games, then proceeded to run them ragged. “George, you my man, get me a soda pop,” he’d call out. “Steve, how ’bout wringing out my shirt here? Chuck, get me a dry sweatshirt.” Chuck, of course, also went by Mr. Dobson and was at the time of the request the starting pitcher for that night’s game. The right-hander politely declined. “Oh,” said Vida. “I knew I’d go too far.”
…
By the middle of July 1971, Blue’s 17-3 record and majors-leading totals in wins, shutouts, strikeouts, and ERA earned him the starting nod in the All-Star Game. Every one of his victories had been a complete game. Even his no-decisions were spectacular: on July 9, Blue struck out 17 Angels over 11 shutout innings, but the A’s didn’t win until the 20th. Said Jackson, “You can even get the Babe out of his grave and he’d look at Vida and say, ‘The man’s too much.’”
Photo by Doug McWilliams, Nat’l Baseball Hall Of Fame / Library
Blue’s 18th win was a one-hit shutout of the Tigers in his first start after the All-Star break. It was also his 18th complete game of the season, and the innings were taking a toll. The lefty exceeded his career-high of 171⅔ innings by the second week of July, and two weeks later he passed 200. In Blue’s first attempt at his 20th victory, on July 30, he gave up four earned runs in six innings—only the third time all season he’d allowed that many—and lost. “I’ve never been more tired,” he complained afterward.
The pitcher, at first delighted by the accolades, grew overwhelmed by them. His attention was drawn taut by the national media, then segmented to slake the public’s thirst, one feature story at a time. “I wake up and then I’m at the ballpark,” Blue said, head spinning. “I’m pitching. Then it’s all over. I’m back in the dressing room and writers are all around me. Then I’m on an airplane. I’m in a hotel. I’m at the ballpark. Now I’m back in Oakland. Now Mr. Finley is giving me a car, and my mother and my brother and my sisters are there. Now lights are flashing. Now I’m pitching again.” No one ever said being a phenom was easy.
Blue’s roommate, Tommy Davis, took to screening calls for him at home. Vida signed so many autographs that he began using his right hand in order to save his left one for pitching. Over the course of the summer he went from “I want to sign ’em all . . .” to “You got to sign, you just got to . . .” to “You don’t got to sign. You don’t got to do nothing but die.” Still, he signed. By August, Vida was lamenting that “I sometimes feel like I’m going to crack up mentally.”
The interview Blue gave to reporters following his 20th victory, on August 7, was so dour as to be described as “hostile” by one reporter. Somebody asked whether the win would help Vida remove the monkey from his back, and the pitcher gripped his head. “There was no monkey on my back,” he yelped. “There just was the pressure, that pressure.” Somebody brought up the specter of 30 wins, and Vida snapped. “There you go again,” he yelled, slapping a table. “There’s that’s damn pressure.”
Vida won his 22nd with 10 starts left in the season, and though he’d have to succeed at an absurd pace to reach 30, people still held out hope. By the end, however, he was just a gassed pitcher trying to get by. Blue was blasted out of starts earlier than ever and won only twice more, ultimately finishing second to Detroit’s Mickey Lolich in victories.
Still, the kid had been spectacular. Vida’s final line: 39 starts, 24-8 record, 1.82 ERA, 24 complete games, eight shutouts, 301 strikeouts, and 88 walks in 312 innings pitched.
***
In the process, Vida became the youngest player ever to win the Cy Young or MVP Award, let alone both in the same season. He was the jolt of fresh, young energy that baseball needed, but burned too bright, too fast, and could not sustain it.
None of that diminishes the man’s place in baseball history, nor will it make him any less missed. The sport is already poorer without him. RIP, Vida.
What with all the celebrations on baseball fields over recent years, you’d be excused for thinking that we’ve entered a new era of the sport’s unwritten rules. Turns out you haven’t seen anything yet.
Since The Baseball Codes came out in 2010, I’ve been faithfully documenting the evolution of this part of the sport, which has changed more in the last decade-plus than during any other point in baseball history. Yesterday put a cap on all of it.
In football and basketball, taking one’s foot off the gas late in blowout games means resting the starters. In baseball it means stop trying to score quite so aggressively via bunting or taking extra bases. The topic is so prevalent and contentious (how big a lead is enough? What inning is late enough?) that I devoted the first chapter of The Baseball Codes to it.
Yesterday, Giants manager Kapler addressed the issue and turned the entire paradigm on its head.
The setup: With San Francisco leading the Padres 10-1 in the second inning, Steven Duggar stole second base. With the lead 11-2 in the sixth, Mauricio Dubon bunted for a leadoff single—a play, he told Padres first baseman Eric Hosmer, that was signaled from the dugout.
There is an argument to be made that the second inning is too early to call off the dogs, but by the sixth, with the Padres on their fourth pitcher of the game, things were different.
San Diego was upset. Manager Bob Melvin barked from the dugout. Third base coach Mike Shildt had some words for the Giants, which led to the ejection of first base coach Antoan Richardson. (At least one positive development came from the exchange.)
Phil Garner once told me that during his days as a freewheeling manager, his approach to this kind of situation was simple: “It’s your job to stop me. If you can’t stop me, then I’m playing until I feel comfortable. And if I don’t feel comfortable with a ten-run lead, then by God I’m running.”
Until now, this was a standard response from the don’t-stop-playing camp. Kapler took it to another level.
Kapler, of course, is the famously analytical former player who helms the famously analytical Giants. Which is precisely how he approached this situation. In offering support for Duggar and Dubon, the manager laid it out for reporters after the game.
“Our goal is not exclusively to win one game in a series, it’s to try to win the entire series,” he said. “Sometimes that means trying to get a little deeper into the opposition’s pen. I understand that many teams don’t love that strategy, and I get why. It’s something we talked about as a club before the season. We were comfortable going forward with that strategy. It’s not to be disrespectful in any way. It’s because we feel very cool and strategic that it’s the best way to try to win a series. By ‘cool’ I mean calm. We’re not emotional about it. We’re not trying to hurt anybody. We just want to score as many runs as possible, force the other pitcher to throw as many pitches as possible. If other clubs decide that they want to do the same thing to us, we’re not going to have any issue with it.”
Gabe Kapler says he supports Mauricio Dubon's decision to bunt in the sixth inning despite the Padres' objections pic.twitter.com/6yFiJeDwMf
Kapler’s sentiments have merit, mostly because he’s right. Baseball is in a different place than it was when he played in the 2000s, which itself was in a different place than when Garner managed the Brewers in the 1990s. If forcing an opponent to burn through a couple extra bullpen arms gives you an advantage tomorrow, well, that’s good strategy. And if the Giants can send their division rival on to its next series with a pitching deficit, that’s even better strategy.
Even as on-field celebrations became the norm, baseball maintained one inviolable aspect of enforcement: Respect. As long as you’re celebrating with your guys and not against their guys, you’re okay. As long as you play with the notion that your opponent is worthy and that, when the tables are turned, you’re content to absorb whatever you’ve just dished out, at least nobody can call you a hypocrite.
Hell, Kapler said as much during his press conference, but there’s more to it than that. He laid out a sound statistical argument that in the modern era, with a revolving door of gas-throwing relievers at the bottom of every staff, running up the score is your best bet to assure long-term success. He also noted that Dubon is playing for a roster spot, and the more he can exhibit a well-rounded offensive repertoire, the better his chances.
You don’t have to agree with any of it, but no matter how one approaches the topic, even sceptics must admit that there’s nothing at all disrespectful about those sentiments. This is just the beginning. Welcome to the new world.
The Cardinals believed that Mike Yastrzemski was stealing signs from second base yesterday. Yastrzemski knew this because the pitcher, rookie right-hander Johan Oviedo checked the card in his pocket to make sure that he was on the same page with catcher Andrew Kinzner. Then he checked it again. And again.
At that point, Yastrzemski decided to play the part, shifting and shuffling in ways that could easily be construed as signaling the hitter. Which was the point. Oviedo, thoroughly rattled, finally spun and yelled at Yastrzemski to “shut the fuck up.”
Thanks to the Astros, baseball has dealt with a lot of sign-stealing drama over the last couple of years, but nobody, then or now, has taken too much issue with a guy at second picking up whatever he can from his unique vantage point.
The great part about this is that Yastrzemski denied everything, saying that he figured that the Cardinals were getting paranoid, and so played it up.
“I didn’t want it to get to that extent,” said Yastrzemski in his postgame press conference. “I just wanted him to throw a fastball down the middle so [the hitter, Wilmer Flores] could hit a homer.”
Sure enough, Oviedo threw a fastball about as down the middle as a pitch can be. Flores flied out to end the inning.
“You just got to sell it sometimes,” Yastrzemski said. “We’re in the entertainment business. It’s just another way you can impact the game.”
Mike Yastrzemski said he figured the Cardinals thought he was stealing signs so he played it up on second base.
Whether or not Yaz was actually stealing signs, this is wonderful. It’s reminiscent of Gaylord Perry fidgeting like mad on the mound, going to his cap, to his sleeve, to his mouth, to his collar and to his cap again, pitch after pitch, even when he wasn’t trying to load up the baseball. Perry knew that every ounce of energy a hitter devoted to figuring out whether or not he was reaching for some grease was an ounce of energy not devoted to an optimal hitting approach. And damned if it didn’t work.
It worked for Yastrzemski, too. Sort of. Oviedo lasted four innings and the Giants won the game.
A stunning autumn of terrible baseball news, lowlighted by the passing of Hall of Famers Tom Seaver, Lou Brock, Bob Gibson and Whitey Ford, just got worse. Joe Morgan has died at age 77.
Morgan is best remembered as the sparkplug for Cincinnati’s unstoppable Big Red Machine, which won back-to-back championships in 1975 and 1976 behind Morgan’s back-to-back National League MVP Awards. He was small (5-foot-7, 160 pounds) but strong, hitting 289 homers while stealing 689 bases over a 22-year career. Remarkably, Morgan’s reputation was cemented prior to the time when on-base percentage was truly appreciated, even though that was a key part of his offensive game. Morgan batted better than .300 only twice in his career, but topped 100 walks eight times and led the league in OBP four times. To judge by Baseball Reference’s WAR statistic, Morgan’s 1975 season was among the 20 best campaigns of any player ever, at any position.
Speaking personally, growing up as a Giants fan in the early 1980s, I got to see up close what a guy like Morgan could do for a foundering ballclub. The Giants of the late 1970s, when I achieved baseball consciousness, were more or less terrible until Morgan joined the team as a free agent in 1981. This was awesome for 11-year-old me; I’d been imitating his back-arm batting-stance flap for years, and was excited to see it in orange and black.
In 1982, his second season in San Francisco, Morgan kept the Giants in contention until the schedule’s final week. They wouldn’t win, of course, because back then the Giants never won. For me, Morgan’s lasting impact came on the season’s final day. I wrote about the moment just last week for the Pandemic Baseball Book Club.
The Giants-Dodgers rivalry is among the best in sports, but from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s it was a decidedly one-sided affair. The Dodgers were a much better team, frequently in the playoffs and occasionally winning it all, while the Giants seemed to be perpetually in fifth place.
Really, all we Giants fans had was beating the Dodgers, and even that did not go well. In 1980, The Sporting News ran an entire feature about the Giants having won only 15 of 60 against LA to that point since Tommy Lasorda took over as Dodgers manager in 1977. Willie McCovey once said that he’d rather lose to a college team than to the Dodgers. One can only imagine his particular anguish.
Then came ’82. Even after the Giants dropped out of the race, they were in prime position to affect the outcome. The Dodgers, battling Atlanta for the division title, closed their season with three games at Candlestick Park. We Giants fans were ready to play spoiler.
So what happened? The Dodgers roared into town and won the first two games by a combined score of 19-2. That put everything into play for the season’s final day, when, with the Braves losing to San Diego, the Dodgers needed one more victory to force a divisional tie.
I was 12 years old, at the stadium with my father, sitting in the grandstand along the left field line. I remember how packed Candlestick was—a rare occurrence for a stadium used to hosting fewer than 10,000 fans at a time—and how the energy was downright palpable. It was my first real taste of meaningful baseball, even though, win or lose, San Francisco’s season would end that day.
Giants starter Bill Laskey, wrapping up his rookie campaign, gamely matched Fernando Valenzuela into the sixth, each pitcher giving up a pair of runs. (Even then, the teams’ methods of scoring seemed to represent the franchises as a whole, the Dodgers scoring on a two-run homer by Ron Cey while the Giants leveraged a bases-loaded walk and a double-play grounder.)
This is where the magic happened. This is where Joe Morgan happened.
The seventh inning started hopefully, with Bob Brenly singling and Champ Summers doubling him to third with nobody out. On the broadcast, Vin Scully called Candlestick Park “a chamber of horrors.”
Then Greg Minton, the Giants closer who was for some reason already pitching in the seventh inning, was allowed to hit for himself. He struck out. Of course he struck out. Then Jim Wholford also struck out. It was turning into a very Giants inning in every imaginable way … until Morgan stepped to the plate.
Reliever Terry Forster worked the count to 1-2, and then hung a slider that Morgan pummeled over the right field fence for a three-run homer. We fans at Candlestick lost our damn minds. The seemingly insane move of letting Minton bat with the winning run at third paid off when Moon Man held LA to two hits over the final two innings, cementing a 5-3 win and ending the Dodgers’ season.
That home run—Morgan’s home run—is my first meaningful baseball memory, an event for which I can firmly place the date and situation. It is what I recall first when thinking about prime baseball moments early in my life. It showed me what a truly great player, even one at the end of his career, can bring to a ballclub.
Joe Morgan was only a Giant for two years, but those years were utterly influential in cementing me as a baseball fan, and for that I am grateful.
As a community, Los Angeles hasn’t seemed particularly happy about baseball this year. Sure, they have the best team in the sport—which was true even before Mookie rolled into town. And yeah, championship aspirations leave a nice tingle in the back of one’s esophagus. However, for a good long while this off-season seemed to be mostly about the championships of 2017 and 2018, which, given the unseemly proclivities of the Astros and Red Sox, many Southlanders feel should be retroactively awarded to their hometown nine.
It’s enough to put a ballclub on edge.
Or at least it makes for a decent introduction to what happened yesterday, when Justin Turner, LA’s third hitter of the game, was drilled by Johnny Cueto. (Okay, maybe “drill” isn’t the right word. The pitch hit Turner in the hand, near his knuckles.) Never mind that Cueto is still coming back from Tommy John surgery in 2018; of all the guys in the Dodgers’ lineup, Turner is the one about whom they are most sensitive when it comes to this type of thing, given that he broke his wrist on an HBP in a spring training game in 2018.
So when Clayton Kershaw plunked Rob Brantley the very next inning—after striking out the frame’s first two hitters, no less—it looked bad.
San Francisco Chronicle beat writer Henry Schulman wrote that neither pitch looked intentional, but whatever Kershaw’s purpose, there’s no denying that a pitcher’s perfect revenge scenario involves getting two quick outs before dotting a guy, ideally with a low-in-the-order hitter to follow. Which is exactly what happened.
Giants third base coach Ron Wotus noticed. As Kershaw returned to the dugout after whiffing No. 8 hitter Yolmer Sanchez to end the frame, Wotus lit into him, and the pair engaged in a brief shouting match. Umpires quickly warned both benches—something Cueto later said he’d never seen in a spring training game.
Clayton Kershaw with the crazy curve, and then exchanges words with the Giants dugout 👀 pic.twitter.com/UeiWXHnmDK
Ultimately, Kershaw’s revenge—intentional or not—paled in comparison to Turner’s response.
In the third inning, Turner pummeled the first pitch he saw from Cueto into the left field pavilion to give the Dodgers a 4-0 lead, which they never relinquished. (Kershaw did okay for himself as well, giving up two hits over three shutout innings.)
Just because the Giants no longer have Madison Bumgarner doesn’t mean they can’t get into it with their rivals to the south. It portends to be a long season in San Francisco, but at the very least, this kind of thing will help keep things lively.
What with all the brouhaha surrounding the Astros’ banging of a trash can to alert hitters to upcoming pitches, I’m continually reminded about stories I researched for The Baseball Codes. One of them provides a cautionary warning even for teams who recognize when their signs are being illicitly pinched. That’s because no matter how precautious a team might be, they can only take as many preventative measures as their pitcher will allow.
Somehow, Giants ace Sam Jones—who finished second in the Cy Young voting in 1959—got lit up every time he pitched in Chicago that year. Against the rest of the league that season, Jones was 21-12 with a 2.54 ERA, and struck out a batter every 1.25 innings. At Wrigley Field he was 0-3 with an 8.53 ERA and struck out a batter every six innings. It wasn’t long before San Francisco players identified what was behind the discrepancy.
“We just got wise and looked up, and sure enough, in the scoreboard there was a big empty square,” said Giants pitcher Mike McCormick. “Same scoreboard they have today, where they hand-place the numbers. There was somebody sitting up there in an empty square—one foot in the window was a fastball, two feet was a curveball, no feet was a changeup. You let a major-league hitter know what’s coming and he might not hit it all the time, but it certainly makes him a better hitter.”
That somebody was Cubs traveling secretary Don Biebel, who earlier that season had been installed as the man in the center-field scoreboard. Armed with binoculars, he signaled hitters by sticking his shoe into an open frame used to post scores. Contrary to McCormick’s recollection, it was the placement of his foot, not the number of feet, that bore a message. To the left of the square meant fastball, to the right a curve. Just an inch or two of sole was all it took.
This system particularly affected Jones, who had trouble handling anything but the simplest signs. This kept Giants manager Bill Rigney from making the signals more complex in an effort to stymie would-be thieves. So he had to deal with it another way.
At age 42, Giants outfielder Hank Sauer was the oldest player in the National League and had spent almost seven of his 15 years in the big leagues as a member of the Cubs. He knew the sort of things that went on at Wrigley Field, and, at 6-foot-4 and 200 lbs., was one of the last guys a traveling secretary hidden in the scoreboard wanted to cross. As the Cubs continued to batter Jones, Rigney sent his slugger to the scoreboard to get some answers.
“Between innings, I saw (first base coach Wes) Westrum and Hank Sauer and Bill Rigney get over in the corner of the dugout, and they were chatting,” said Biebel. “Sauer went out of the dugout and up the ramp, and I told the groundskeeper, who was in the scoreboard with me, ‘You better lock that thing up—I think we’re going to have some company.’ About 10 or 15 minutes later, well, here comes Sauer along the back fence of the bleachers. He walks all the way out there and he starts pounding on our little door, shouting, ‘Let me in!’ He pounded for awhile, but when he finally knew he wasn’t going to get in, he turned around and left.”
Part of the reason that the Cubs were able to get away with something so blatant, reasoned Biebel in an MLB.com report, was that “Everybody knew we were getting the signs and we still finished in fifth place.”
The Astros are another story. Two World Series in three seasons will do that for a club. Every day brings new revelations about just how far they’ve been willing to go. Now we just wait for reaction from the league office.
For many years, Madison Bumgarner has cultivated an image of being extremely attuned to the unwritten rules of his sport, serving as baseball’s hardline arbiter of on-field behavior. Flip a bat against the cow-punching North Carolinian and you’ll hear about it. Same if you run too slowly around the bases.
At Oracle Park on Sunday, however, MadBum revealed a bit too much. Today’s headlines are all about the left-hander’s response to Max Muncy taking him deep (plus Muncy’s response to Bumgarner, which we’ll get to in a bit). Muncy’s homer hurt: he plays for the hated Dodgers, he hit it as the second batter of the game, and the blast carried all the way into McCovey Cove. Before Muncy could even make it to first base, Bumgarner was all over him, chirping about taking too long in the batter’s box. Muncy responded as he circled the bases, and the feud was on.
The main problem with Bumgarner’s red-ass was that there really wasn’t much to get red-assed about, to the point that even Giants broadcaster Mike Krukow, while trying to explain the situation, could describe the hitter’s post-homer steps only as “that little walk.”
After the game, Bumgarner gave a light-hearted recitation for the media about what happened. His comments included snippets like, “I can’t even say it with a straight face, but the more I think about it, I should just let the kids play—but I just … I can’t,” and, in response to a question about the game changing, “They want to let everybody be themselves, then let me be myself. That’s me.”
Bumgarner was asked about his exchange with Muncy after the game. He was adamant that he's not changing:
It’s a continuation of the conversation we’ve been having all year about pitchers who might not be entirely on board with the modern era of officially sanctioned on-field celebrations.
That, though, is not what this post is about. The detail that many reports overlook is what immediately preceded Muncy’s blast. Against Kike Hernandez, the game’s very first hitter, Bumgarner got into a shouting match with plate umpire Will Little about the strike zone, which grew heated enough to draw Little toward the mound. Following some chirping from the Giants bench, the ump issued a cross-field explanation that can easily be read as an informal warning.
This was clearly on Bumgarner’s mind when he missed wide with his first three offerings to Muncy before leaving one up, in the slugger’s wheelhouse.
Baseball history is littered with the corpses of players whose weakness has been discovered by the opposition and subsequently exploited. Perhaps this is Bumgarner’s. Pitching in the ninth inning of the World Series doesn’t seem to faze him nearly as much as some perceived slight by the opposition. This has long viewed by outsiders as a motivational tactic—something to keep the pitcher’s competitive instincts honed. (Lord knows, it’s happened before.) This is supported by the fact that Muncy’s homer was the only run MadBum gave up as part of a fabulous performance. If the pitcher needs swagger to succeed, then swagger he shall deliver.
Still, Bumgarner was done in by his momentary lapse, one disastrous pitch serving as the difference in a 1-0 ballgame.
In the big picture, yelling at a guy is preferable to drilling him, especially for something like this. Also in the big picture, if Bumgarner can figure out a way to keep things a bit more contained—just enough to avoid the occasional slip on a day when he’s clearly dominant—it’d be better for everybody.
Then again, had MadBum been a little less mad, we would never have gotten Muncy’s response: “If you don’t want me to watch the ball, you can get it out of the ocean.” It doesn’t actually make sense, but at least it sounded pretty good in the moment.
"If you don't want me to watch the ball, you can get it out of the ocean." 😂@maxmuncy9 on his 1st inning HR off Madison Bumgarner. pic.twitter.com/lBSkGADMQd
As if we didn’t already know it, Madison Bumgarner reminded us over the weekend that it’s probably best just to let him mutter like an insane person on the mound when he pitches. That’s because if you dare question his mutter-and-fussing, he will quickly transition from old-man-yelling-at-neighborhood-kids-from-his-porch to old-man-throwing-baseballs-at-neighborhood-kids-from-his-porch.
Just ask Ryan Braun.
In the sixth inning of Sunday’s game against the Brewers, MadBum threw a couple up and in to the former MVP. Given that Braun had already hit an RBI double against the lefty and sent another one to the wall in center, Bumgarner was in no mood for a response. When Braun suggested that the pitcher “just throw the ball,” it was more than enough motivation for Bumgarner to do just that.
His next pitch nicked Braun on the elbow. Message sent, I guess.
Pretty good sequence in the Brewers Giants game.
Bumgarner throws high and inside. Braun takes his time then says "throw the ball bud"
Bumgarner hits him with a 2-0 pitch. Benches clear. warnings and ejections given. Next batter, Schoop, hits a go ahead grand slam off Bum pic.twitter.com/cigNv6hcBy
Then again, that message loaded the bases for the next hitter, Jonathan Schoop, who unloaded them with a grand slam. Given that the Giants led 2-1 before Braun’s at-bat, this was not an ideal outcome for Bumgarner. As the Brewers spilled from the dugout to greet Schoop, many of them took the opportunity to yell at the pitcher and had to be shooed off the field by ump Dan Bellino.
It was, of course, classic Bumgarner. (For previous examples of his exquisite red-assery, look here, here, here, here, here, here or here.)
The pitcher’s irascible farmer act is likeable, I guess, if you’re a Giants fan … except that I am a Giants fan, and this kind of thing rips me up. Stand your ground. Take no guff. Defend teammates. But when a pitcher has to invent conflict in order to motivate himself, and that conflict comes back to bite him and his team, it’s awfully hard to swallow.
Bumgarner’s act can play when he’s an ace. But when the velocity of his four-seamer has dropped nearly two miles per hour, and the pitch has gone from one he uses more than 40 percent of the time to one he uses .1 percent (that’s point one percent) of the time, and the spin rate has plummeted across his repertoire, and he’s given up 11 earned runs over his last two starts … well, when all that happens, these kinds of meltdowns don’t inspire much love from the base.
Pitch to Braun, not at Braun. Win baseball games, not arguments. Be a badass, not a bully. There is success to be found there, if only Bumgarner chooses to look.
Bobby Thomson vs. Ralph Branca it ain’t, but this thing Yasiel Puig has going on with the Giants sure makes for some compelling theater. Up till now it’s mostly been beefs with Madison Bumgarner. On Tuesday, catcher Nick Hundley got involved. The theme, however, seems consistent: The Giants apparently want Puig to play the game the right way.
With two outs and nobody on in the seventh inning, and the Giants nursing a 1-0 lead, Puig fouled off a 1-1 slider from lefthander Tony Watson. Spinning from the batter’s box, he angrily snatched at his bat, clear frustration over missing a pitch—which, indeed, came in flat and hittable—that he felt he should have handled. A curse word was uttered.
Hundley didn’t like it. According to Puig, the catcher told him to “stop complaining and get back into the box.”
Puig did not take kindly to the sentiment, Hundley did not take kindly to Puig’s lack of taking kindly, Puig shoved the catcher, and benches emptied. A couple of Puig slaps to Hundley’s mask was about it for the physicality (excepting Hundley’s dramatic, if inadvertent, takedown of Dodgers coach George Lombard), but given the participants, none of it came as too much of a surprise.
It got interesting between the Dodgers and the Giants tonight between Yasiel Puig and Nick Hundley, both ejected: pic.twitter.com/7MtVU7jwnQ
Could Hundley have let the display go? Of course. Puig’s action wasn’t in any way directed toward the Giants. He spun away from the mound and was clearly talking to himself, not the opposition.
Could Puig have reacted a bit more calmly to the catcher? Let his own postgame statement—“When I got into his face he told me to also get out of his face, so that’s when I got upset”—answer that question.
More pertinently, the question raging this morning involves the notion that the Giants have somehow become baseball’s one-stop fun-police shop for play-the- right-way baseball. Maybe this is true, but up until yesterday it was almost entirely a Bumgarner-driven affair. Hell, just a night earlier the pitcher appeared to take exception when Puig offered a similar display of frustration in the batter’s box. Perhaps this is why Hundley was particularly sensitive to it on Tuesday. “It doesn’t happen with other teams, and it doesn’t seem to happen when we’re in San Francisco,” Puig told reporters after the game. “It usually seems to happen when we’re here, and I’m not going to let them act like that in our house.” (Puig might be right, but MadBum has had plenty of issues with plenty of other guys, too.)
Maybe it’s Puig himself. Maybe the most polarizing guy on the Dodgers, the King of the Bat Flippers, has simply become a personification in San Francisco of the Giants’ most bitter rivalry, a stand-in for the concept of Dodgerdom at large. Bumgarner aside, San Francisco players don’t seem to be a particularly uptight bunch, so perhaps Puig is just a straw man who the Giants (or some among their ranks) have propped up to help focus their competitive nature.
Whatever it is, it certainly hasn’t hurt—with a 2-1 victory, San Francisco has now taken two straight in Dodger Stadium, and sits only three games back of LA, and five out of first place. The teams play again tonight, then close the season with three games in the Bay Area.
This is what it looks like when retaliation goes wrong. Or maybe it’s what it looks like when a guy takes things too seriously. Or maybe it’s just what it looks like when one of baseball’s premier chowderheads is allowed to let loose his inner id at multiple touchpoints between mound and clubhouse.
We’re speaking, of course, about the Giants and Marlins, specifically of San Francisco’s chowderheaded closer Hunter Strickland. To get into any of it, of course, necessitates a review of the recent history between these teams.
It may have started with Miami pitcher Dan Straily breaking Evan Longoria’s finger with a pitch on June 14, but that seems specious given that Hunter Strickland does not need external motivation like teammate injures to come completely unhinged. He does that plenty capably on his own. In the ninth inning of that very game, Strickland blew the save when Marlins rookie Lewis Brinson—batting .172—tied things up, 3-3, with a sacrifice fly. (The Giants ended up winning in 16, 6-3.)
The closer didn’t like that. The next time he faced Brinson, four days later in San Francisco, he buzzed the rookie’s tower with an up-and-in fastball. Brinson responded with a game-tying single, making him directly responsible for both of Strickland’s blown saves in the span of three appearances. Brinson gave a take-that flip of the bat as he motored toward first, and the Marlins ended up scoring three times against the closer to erase a two-run deficit and win, 5-4. That should have effectively been that.
It wasn’t, of course. Strickland was yanked after giving up three hits and two walks to the six batters he faced, and shared some thoughts with Brinson as he departed the field. Then he proceeded to into a fight with a clubhouse door … which he lost. Strickland, with a broken pinky on his throwing hand, will be out for up to eight weeks.
Because Baseball Men stick up for each other, and because pitchers’ fraternities are strong and frequently mystifying, the following night, Tuesday, Giants starter Dereck Rodriguez drilled Brinson. Maybe we should have expected this, given the proclamation from reliever Mark Melancon that Brinson “was disrespecting the game.” More pertinently, Rodriguez is not only a rookie looking to gain acceptance from his veteran teammates, but is the son of a Hall of Fame catcher who no doubt called his fair share of intentional HBPs. The guy was raised on old-school lessons about how to approach this very kind of scenario.
The thing about old-school approaches, of course, is that they frequently elicit equal-and-opposite responses. So in the process of protecting a hotheaded teammate whose actions toward Brinson (or his own damn pitching hand) were in no way justified, Rodriguez reignited what should have by that point been a dormant feud. This led, an inning later, to Straily drilling Buster Posey. (Frustration could also have played a factor. With one out in the second inning, Straily had allowed more baserunners—six, via two walks, a single, a double and two home runs, one by Posey himself—than outs he’d recorded.)
Since the umpires had issued warnings following Rodriguez’s HBP—to which Marlins skipper Don Mattingly took exception, given that his own pitchers weren’t given a chance to respond—Straily was tossed (as was Mattingly). Giants broadcasters Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper speculated on the air (as per The Athletic) that after Brinson was drilled, Mattingly emerged from the dugout, pointed at Posey and declared, “You’re next.” (Posey later denied that such a thing happened. Watch most of it here.)
The Giants, of course, denied any sort of intent behind Rodriguez’s pitch (which couldn’t have looked more intentional), but denial is part of the game. Just ask Joe Musgrove, who was recently docked $1,000 for admitting to just such a tactic in a game against Arizona.)
That Posey absorbed the blow and the Giants won help obscure the not-insignificant detail that San Francisco’s best player was thrown at for reasons that could have been avoided entirely had his team not opted to respond on behalf of a meathead pitcher who’d artificially escalated tensions in the first place. Had Posey been injured, a hefty portion of the blame could have been put on the Giants themselves.
There is much to admire about baseball’s old school. There’s even a place for appropriate response when an opponent’s recklessness puts somebody into physical peril. But the tactic of defending a teammate who merits no defense—while well-established through baseball’s annals—is one tenet that could stand to be revisited.
The closer didn’t like that. The next time he faced Brinson, four days later in San Francisco, he buzzed the rookie’s tower with an up-and-in fastball. Brinson responded with a game-tying single, making him directly responsible for both of Strickland’s blown saves in the span of three appearances. Brinson gave a take-that flip of the bat as he motored toward first, and the Marlins ended up scoring three times against the closer to erase a two-run deficit and win, 5-4. That should have effectively been that.
The Baseball Codes 