High Heat Read online

  Over the years, a few hitters have found inventive ways to get even. Jackie Robinson, for example, took a page straight out of Ty Cobb’s playbook. After being decked several times by the Giants’ Sal Maglie, Robinson bunted up the first-base line. The blow was perfectly placed—too far for the catcher to field and not so close to the bag that the first baseman could take it unassisted. Maglie had no choice but to field the grounder. As he did so, Robinson, who perfectly timed his dash to first, ran headlong into Maglie. Giants manager Leo Durocher called Robinson’s tactic “bush league,” and the incident went all the way up to the league president’s office, where Ford Frick assured everyone that umpires had things under control. Later, Maglie admitted that throwing at Robinson only “made him a more aggressive hitter.”

  Throughout his career, Maglie did more than enough to earn his nickname, “the Barber.” “I couldn’t stop throwing the knockdown,” he said. “That would be the same as if Marilyn Monroe stopped wearing sweaters.”

  Yet opposing pitchers soon learned not to throw at another Robinson, Frank Robinson. Head-hunting just seemed to rile him up, to the point that Phillies manager Gene Mauch finally decided to fine any of his pitchers $50 who dared challenge Robinson with a little chin music.

  “Pitchers did me a favor when they knocked me down,” Frank Robinson says. “It made me more determined. They say you can’t hit if you’re on your back, but I didn’t hit on my back. I got up.”

  Bill Bruton, a career .273 hitter, may have best summed up the dilemma most batters face when it comes to knockdown pitches and beanballs. After teammate Eddie Mathews hit three consecutive home runs in a game, Bruton reluctantly stepped up to the plate, knowing exactly what was coming. He was hit by the very next pitch after Mathews’s third homer. “What did he pick on me for?” Bruton wondered after the game. “I didn’t hit the home run.”

  Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes once asked Roger Clemens if he ever threw at a batter on purpose and the Rocket refused to consider the concept. In fact, he demonstrated a similar capacity for stonewalling when he testified before Congress about performance-enhancing drugs years later.

  “I don’t have to intimidate anybody,” Clemens told Wallace. “I don’t need it. I don’t need anyone to be fearful.”

  But in the next breath, Clemens said he did need to pitch inside at times.

  “That’s what power pitchers do,” he said.

  In the report, 60 Minutes detailed how Clemens once hit the Mets’ Mike Piazza in the head (“I tried to call him and apologize,” Clemens explained. “But I was shut down.”) and later threw a chunk of Piazza’s broken bat at him in an incident during the 2000 World Series.

  “Anytime somebody throws the ball at you, it’s scary,” says the Yankees’ Derek Jeter, who seemed to get routinely plunked by Clemens when they were on opposing teams.

  Joe Torre, who managed Clemens in New York, told the New York press that the hard-throwing right-hander was “an intimidator.”

  But with beanballs, what often goes around comes around. Maglie, the old Barber himself, perhaps played a role in Conigliaro’s tragedy. After his playing days were over, Maglie became a pitching coach, eventually with the Red Sox. In Boston, he turned “Gentleman” Jim Lonborg into another intimidator on the mound. After going 10–10 in 1966, Lonborg blossomed into a 22–9 Cy Young winner during the Red Sox “Impossible Dream” season. Under Maglie’s guidance, he wasn’t afraid to come inside on any hitter, and the buzz began that batters needed to be wary against Boston’s pitching staff.

  By that point Johnny Pesky had been let go as the Red Sox manager, but he still followed one of his all-time favorites. “The night [Tony] was hurt, I was devastated,” Pesky recalls. “The only way you can view it is as one of those tragedies in life that happens to everybody, sooner or later. I think of Tony often when I see a young hitter. But none have been as good as him. The closest one was Jim Rice.

  “You fall in love with players in this business. In a way, that’s what keeps you going. If I live to be 100, I’ll never forget Tony.”

  Mike Andrews was in his first full year on the 1967 Red Sox team. He was one of the first to reach Conigliaro after he had been beaned, along with several teammates and manager Dick Williams. By the time Andrews reached Conigliaro, the Red Sox slugger was motionless near the plate, his left eye almost completely shut. “Right then I knew that this was different than most injuries you see in baseball,” Andrews says. “His eye was already swollen up.”

  While others contemplate what might have been, Andrews finds it amazing that Conigliaro played baseball again. After missing the 1968 season and a brief comeback bid as a pitcher, Conigliaro was back in the batter’s box the following season. He hit 20 home runs and collected 82 RBIs in 1969, and he was considered by many to be the American League’s Comeback Player of the Year. In 1970, despite ongoing vision problems, Conigliaro had 36 home runs and 116 RBIs.

  Even though Conigliaro remained dogged about his comeback, routinely hitting 300 or more balls a day, he was now reluctant to be center stage with a bat in his hands. He liked to take batting practice in private, wanting to get his stroke perfect. Of course, his life would never be perfect again.

  “That showed what kind of competitor Tony was,” Andrews says. “He wasn’t the same Tony. Something was missing. But that didn’t stop him from trying. I learned a lot about tenacity and heart by watching him.”

  The night Conigliaro was beaned, his younger brother Billy and his parents were at Fenway. Billy had been playing for the Red Sox Single-A team in Greenville, South Carolina. But his season had ended prematurely with a torn hamstring.

  “I wasn’t supposed to be there that night,” recalls Billy, who played on the same team with his brother in American Legion and high school, as well as for two seasons later in Boston.

  From the family seats, behind the Red Sox dugout on the first-base line, the beaning didn’t seem that serious. Conigliaro had a habit of “being dramatic,” his brother says. “And from where we were sitting, we didn’t hear anything. It wasn’t until I got down to the clubhouse that I saw how serious this could be.”

  Before the game, a slumping Conigliaro had told his brother that he was going to move back up on the plate for this game, and start looking for something inside that he could pull. While Conigliaro was considered a streaky hitter, his brother also remembers his brother “as the best clutch hitter I’ve ever seen. A lot of players press in a tough situation. For some reason, Tony could relax at those moments.”

  Conigliaro’s clutch hitting helped set the tone for what became the Red Sox “Impossible Dream” season in 1967. Back on June 15, with a man on, he had battled back from a 0–2 count in the 11th inning against the White Sox. His two-run homer into the netting above the left field wall marked the night that many fans in New England began to believe in that magical team. But on that fateful night in August, Conigliaro hardly reacted at all when Hamilton’s pitch sailed high and inside.

  “Funny, you never go up there thinking you’re going to be hit, and then in a fraction of a second you know it’s going to happen,” Conigliaro later recalled in his autobiography. “When the ball was about four feet from my head, I knew it was going to get me. I knew that it was going to hurt because Hamilton was such a hard thrower.”

  To this day, Billy Conigliaro, whose birthday is three days before the anniversary of the beaning, hasn’t forgiven Hamilton, the man who threw the pitch.

  “No doubt that ball was thrown at his head,” the brother says. “No doubt.”

  We can love the brush with danger that high heat provides, the rush we feel when it teases, even momentarily frightens us. It can be the best roller-coaster ride in the amusement park that is the national pastime. But when a fastball bites, we’re quick to vilify the pitcher responsible. By then it’s too late to change what happened. All we can do is watch the impact of the incident ripple through the game and hope that some good comes of it. That’s how it was with Ray Chapma
n, still the only hitter at the major-league level to be killed by a pitched ball.

  Chapman made a name for himself with his legs, his ability to fly around the bases and snare many a hard-hit grounder in the field. Conigliaro, of course, hit the long ball, but despite the different styles of play, the two were similar in many ways. Both were handsome guys, matinee idols in the towns where they played, and both seemed to have a bright future in the game ahead of them. Regrettably, both became casualties of the game’s dark side.

  A history existed between Chapman and the pitcher on the mound that muggy Monday afternoon, August 16, 1920. “Carl Mays throws it so he’ll dust you off the plate,” Chapman is quoted as saying in The Pitch That Killed, “but I’ll stand right up there. He doesn’t bother me. He’s not going to intimidate me.”

  Everyone from Ty Cobb to Chapman’s teammates on the Cleveland Indians had become convinced that Mays routinely threw at batters to gain the upper hand. For his part, Mays wasn’t in any hurry to disperse any preconceptions.

  When Cobb once confronted him, asking Mays point-blank if he threw at hitters on purpose, the pitcher answered, “What do you think?”

  According to esteemed sportswriter Shirley Povich, when Cobb replied that his opinion wasn’t the point, Mays said, “Well, if you think I do, Ty, that makes me a better pitcher. As long as you’re feeling that way about it, I’m more effective.”

  One could argue that Clemens, Ryan, Randy Johnson, and any of the other top fireballers of the more recent past would have said pretty much the same thing. But there’s no getting around the fact that as the Yankees prepared to host the Indians that day at the Polo Grounds in New York, most batters in the game didn’t trust the submarine-style pitcher.

  But behind almost every tragedy there almost always lies seemingly innocent factors brought into play as if by fate—a chain reaction leading up to what in hindsight appears the inevitable. In the years leading up to the Chapman beaning, the lords of baseball had pledged to clean up the game. At the turn of the last century, it was a more violent sport and there was little question that the ball was often utilized as a weapon. Baseball historian Bill James calculates that about 91 batters were hit by a pitch for every 100 games played in that era. Giving things an added edge, the spitball was often in play despite early attempts to ban it. Putting foreign substances on the ball or scuffing it can make it fly in peculiar, unexpected ways. And as James points out, another result of lathering the ball up with saliva, tobacco juice, or licorice was that it discolored the ball. An offwhite ball, of course, is also much harder to see. When these factors are added together, it was only a matter of time before things went wrong.

  “By about 1910, a clean ball was never in play,” James wrote. Yet with the cost of a baseball rising (according to Sowell they doubled in price in the years before the Chapman incident), umpires were under pressure to keep every last one in play. In fact, Ban Johnson, founder and first president of the American League, issued a directive to the men in blue “to keep the balls in the games as much as possible, except those which [are] dangerous.”

  The final straw may have been Mays’s delivery. James calls Mays a “combination of Dan Quisenberry and Nolan Ryan” because his pitches were the result of an odd sidearm fling that put plenty of speed on the ball.

  “Carl slings the pill from his toes, has a weird looking windup and action that looks like a cross between an octopus and a bowler,” described Baseball Magazine. “He shoots the ball in at the batter at such unexpected angles that his delivery is hard to find, generally, until about 5 o’clock, when the hitters get accustomed to it—and when the game is over.”

  On the game day, Cleveland was in a slump, but it still held a narrow lead over the White Sox and Yankees in the standings. A light rain had been falling as the game began, but when Chapman stepped up to the plate in the top of the fifth inning the scattered showers had stopped, even though the skies remained overcast.

  As Mays went into his windup, delivering the first pitch of the inning, he thought he saw a slight shift in Chapman’s feet, like he was squaring around to bunt. Mays said many things in the aftermath of the incident, including the claim that his fastball, high and tight to Chapman, had gotten away from him. He also acknowledged that he had reacted the way any quality pitcher does when he sees a batter squaring to bunt. The proper response is to deliver the ball inside, so the hitter can’t get the bat on the ball. Whatever the reasoning that went through Mays’s mind at that instant, there’s no doubt that his next pitch sailed with stunning speed toward the inside part of the plate, directly at Chapman’s head.

  As Sowell details in The Pitch That Killed, incredibly Chapman just stood there, seemingly transfixed by the pitch’s velocity. He made no effort to get out of the way.

  “That’s the biggest riddle in all of this,” Sowell says. “Chapman was an experienced hitter. He was used to getting out of the way. But this time, for whatever reason, none of his talent, that experience of playing at this level, helped him in any way. He was riveted in place and the ball hit him square on.”

  In an effort to find an explanation, Sowell looked through hundreds of player quotations, many from the time period, trying to find an answer to why an experienced hitter put himself in that kind of situation. Finally, he found a possible explanation from infielder Terry Turner, who played 17 years in the majors, most of them in Cleveland.

  “I can still remember vividly how I was fascinated by seeing that ball coming toward my head,” Turner said. “I was paralyzed. I couldn’t make a move to get out of the way, though the ball looked big as a house. I imagine that a person fascinated by a snake feels much the same way, paralyzed and unable to dodge the deadly serpent about to strike.”

  Sowell sighs in agreement after the quote is read back to him. “That’s why I made it the first thing in the book,” he says. “What these guys face up at the plate, being transfixed by fear, is something we can all relate to. It happens every day, everywhere. You’re stunned by how things are suddenly turning out, how life can snap around on you, and you can’t get out of the way of what’s about to happen.”

  The throw by Mays struck Chapman in the left temple. This was well before batters wore protective headgear, whether it was a shield inside the cap or the helmets that are mandatory from Little League on up today. Medical inquiries would later determine that a fracture three and a half inches long extended along the left side of Chapman’s head nearly to the base of his skull. The blow had also caused the right side of his brain to hit against the inside of his skull, resulting in additional trauma.

  Witnesses that afternoon reported that a loud crack echoed throughout the ballpark when Chapman was hit. In fact, Mays fielded the ball and went to throw to first, believing that the pitch had somehow ricocheted off Chapman’s bat.

  Afterward the Indians’ shortstop was revived and began the long walk to the clubhouse, which was located past the center field fence at the old Polo Grounds. But approaching second base, he staggered and had to be accompanied the rest of the way by several teammates. Soon after arriving at the hospital, Chapman lost consciousness and died early the next morning.

  Four days later, an estimated 2,000 people attended his funeral at St. John’s Roman Catholic Cathedral in Cleveland. Player-manager Tris Speaker, who had been Chapman’s best man, and outfielder Jack Graney, Chapman’s roommate on road trips, were too distraught to attend. The rest of the ballclub, from players to frontoffice personnel, were there. The legendary fireballer Smoky Joe Wood, now an outfielder with the Indians, was a pallbearer in Graney’s absence. Also in attendance were American League president Ban Johnson and several members of the New York Yankees. Mays was not among them.

  In the aftermath of Chapman’s death, baseball issued a renewed vow to clean up its act. The spitball was outlawed. Baseballs that became discolored, scuffed, or stained were quickly taken out of play. It’s estimated that 20 or more balls are discarded in the average professional game today
—a direct result of that tragic day at the Polo Grounds. Other safeguards were much longer in coming, however. Days after the incident, a New York Times editorial urged that a helmet be developed and soon employed by batters. But such measures would not take effect for another 30 years.

  Pee Wee Reese was probably the first major-league batter to wear a helmet when he stepped to the plate in a 1941 spring training game in Havana, Cuba. Late in the 1952 season, Branch Rickey, who was the Pittsburgh Pirates executive, issued fiberglass batting caps to his entire team. “My dad, who was working for the Pirates back then, was one of the guys who stayed up late gluing in the protective foam,” says scout Mike Berger.

  Initially, the players weren’t very fond of Mr. Rickey’s protective gear. They were required to wear the helmets anywhere on the field, and some fans dubbed the players coal miners. Joe Garagiola recalls that kids bounced marbles off his helmeted head when he was down in the bullpen. Soon Rickey decided the ballplayers only needed to wear the newfangled helmets when up to bat.

  In 1956, batting helmets became mandatory in the National League, and the American League followed suit two years later. The only team that voted against the measure was the Boston Red Sox. Slugger Ted Williams didn’t like to wear a helmet.

  Today, according to Rule 8.02d of the rule book, umpires can eject any pitcher believed to be guilty of throwing at a batter. Usually this happens after the home-plate umpire issues a warning to both teams. Even though the bylaw asks umpires to be clairvoyant, in addition to calling balls and strikes, it’s likely made the game safer.