Trouble in Triplicate : Red Relievers Are Controversial, but They Have a Hit on Their Hands

At first sight, the Cincinnati Reds’ clubhouse appears to be a quiet, peaceful place. There’s a large waiting room outside, spacious quarters inside, allowing everyone to move about freely.

Then, on closer inspection, a visitor sees three bizarre lockers. Their occupants arrive, and suddenly, it becomes obvious that this is not a typical baseball clubhouse at all.

In one locker, there are State Patrol hats, complete with authentic badges, one for every city in the National League except Montreal. This locker belongs to the man they call “the Officer,” Rob Dibble.

Next door, football shoulder pads sit atop the locker. Inside, there’s a laser gun, a camouflage hunting bow and a picture of a sports car with the caption, “Life Begins at 150.” There are also alumni letters from Rice. The resident is “the Genius,” Norm Charlton.

And across the way is a locker that seems better suited for a war zone. There are hand grenades, knives, daggers, ammunition boxes and Soldier of Fortune magazines. This gentleman’s nickname is “Mr. Mellow,” Randy Myers.

Their common bond: Each has a black cross in his locker, bearing the inscription, “Bad to the Bone.”

The Reds’ officials maintain that this trio certainly does not reflect the temperament of the rest of the team. Their teammates will tell you that they are certifiably crazy, with Dibble even having the paperwork from the National League office to prove it. But they indeed are the soul of the Reds’ bid for the National League West title.

“Don’t get me wrong, they’re good guys, and everything,” right fielder Paul O’Neill said. “But whenever they have a bad game, they’re capable of blowing up half of Cincinnati.”

Grab your weapons and say hello to the three-man battalion, the self-described “Nasty Boys.”

The Nasty Boys have become the biggest craze in Cincinnati since a local inmate named Pete Rose set the all-time hit record. Walk into the official Cincinnati Red gift shop and you’ll find on sale everything from used bats, baseballs, authentic stadium seats, Schottzie dolls and baby bibs to whatever you might possibly want with the Reds’ logo imprinted.

But, as store manager Roberta Moore can tell you, there’s nothing more valuable in this shop than the genuine Nasty Boys T-shirt, which is impossible to keep in stock. It features caricatures of Dibble, Myers and Charlton with smirks on their faces.

Those are the same expressions hitters see when they step to the plate and face any of the three relief pitchers, each of whom throws at about 95 m.p.h., with Dibble having been clocked at 100. And they laugh when recalling some of the looks on hitters’ faces, who appear to be wondering if it might be safer dodging bullets than their pitches.

“You know the thing I enjoy the most is that hitters usually know what we’re going to throw, and they still can’t touch it,” Dibble said. “Nothing’s better than gripping the ball in my glove, actually showing them what I’m going to throw, and just letting loose, like, ‘Hey, it’s me and you, let’s see who’s better.’

“You should see Norm out there. I’ve seen him actually yell at guys, ‘The fastball’s coming. The fastball’s coming. Try to hit it. Here it is, here it is.’

“Then they swing and miss so hard, me and Randy are falling off the bench laughing.”

It would be nice to say the Nasty Boys’ reputation is built solely on their pitching. Shoot, nothing wrong with a good old-fashioned fastball, just like the one Nolan Ryan has used the last 23 years to rack up 300 victories. The folks in New York like making major league baseball promotions out of that kind of stuff.

But the legendary tales of the Nasty Boys really do not have as much to do with pitching as with their wild personalities and emotional outbursts. Throwing at hitters, firing bats at backstops, driving motorcycles in clubhouses, breaking up clubhouses . . . well, that’s not quite the image baseball wants to portray.

“When you watch the three of us, it looks like we’re the last three guys you’d want to have for a Little League demonstration,” Charlton said. “Let’s face it, the perception we’ve got is that we’re arrogant asses.

“I think people think we’re making $5 million a year, live in mansions, and tell the guards to shoot kids who come to our door asking for autographs.”

Said Dibble: “Yeah, I know with me, people see what I do on the field, and they think I go home after losses and trash my car, or at least break the windshield. Well, I’ve done that once, but nobody knows about it.”

Said Myers: “I don’t know what people think of me. All I know is that the guys in here think I’m crazy. Come on, after watching Rob and Norm, how can you say I’m the crazy one?”

The Reds knew all about Myers, a.k.a. “Psycho,” long before he joined them in December in a trade for another bullpen stopper, John Franco. Myers is the guy who shot up the New York Mets’ clubhouse with a BB gun one night. He was so hated while with the Mets, Charlton said, that they tried to ignore him at spring training.

They found out quickly, just by watching him unpack his belongings in camp, that Myers was even more unusual than they imagined. He came in with a wardrobe from an Army surplus store, complete with camouflage shirts, hats and pants. His reading material included gun and weapon magazines, Foreign Legion books and a guide on how to kill people 109 different ways.

He later dragged a half-dead water moccasin out of a pond behind the Reds’ clubhouse in Plant City, Fla., and carried it into the building, scattering his teammates. One day, he commandeered a minibike and drove it inside the clubhouse at breakneck speed. Another time, he stole a small loader from a construction crew and tried to drive inside, then cursed when it wouldn’t fit through the clubhouse doors.

“There’s a lot of people who really think he’s crazy,” Dibble said. “I’m serious. They think he’s going to kill somebody.

“I mean, he is crazy, but not crazy crazy. I can’t see him going down the street just wiping out people with a machine gun or something. Not really. There’s just a lot of craziness in him.

“It’s like living with Rambo every day.”

Myers is the most guarded among the Nasty Boys when it comes to reporters.

He doesn’t understand why it’s anyone’s business that he disappeared from civilization for several weeks during the off-season, not knowing that the lockout had ended until a friend parachuted in with the news.

He doesn’t find it odd that he earns $875,000, the most of the Nasty Boys, and still drives a beat-up, 13-year-old family car.

“You know, I could leave baseball tomorrow and it wouldn’t bother me a bit,” Myers said. “I’d just as soon work as a machinist or an auto mechanic.

“But as long as I’m in baseball, what I do off the field is my private life, and I don’t like talking about that.”

Myers, in fact, guards his privacy so closely that he was outraged when a Cincinnati newspaper columnist recently described the items in his locker. He refuses to talk to that columnist.

Otherwise?

Well, come on, he says, the hand grenades are only used as paperweights. They’re disarmed, or so he says. The ammunition boxes are used only to store his fan mail--there aren’t any shells in there. Oh, and that knife that’s jammed into the wood of his locker has an eight-inch serrated blade, making it a perfect hat rack.

So, uh, what would happen if someone reached into your locker and took a few things just to show around the room for laughs?

“Try it and see,” he said, without the slightest hint of a smile.

Dibble is easily the most outspoken of the Nasty Boys. He’ll comment on anything and everything. There’s one little problem, though. He also has the nastiest temper this side of Moammar Kadafi.

He no longer speaks with Cincinnati reporters, who he says have crucified him for his failings. And anyone from Cincinnati who dares to publish a quote by him will be punished, as Michael Paolercio of the Cincinnati Enquirer learned when he had a 10-gallon bucket of ice water poured over his head a few weeks ago.

“I admit, I lose my temper too easily,” Dibble said. “But I’ve been pretty good this year, I’ve only been fined once. Hell, with the way things were going last year, I thought I was going to have to get an incentive put in my contract to cover my fines and suspensions.

“I’m not as crazy as I used to be.”

Dibble actually boasts about his good behavior this season. The only time he has gone berserk, he said, was between games of a doubleheader against the Mets on July 12, after he got hit for three runs, turning a 3-3 tie into a 10-3 defeat.

He entered the clubhouse, snapped his prized hockey stick in half and stuffed it into a trash can, walked to the bathroom and began shaving one side of his head.

“It made me feel better,” he said. “But my hair was so screwed up that I had to shave off the other side, making it into a Mohawk. But it was like, after I did it, guys said, ‘Oh, he’s back. He’s back to being the bad boy again.’

“Hey, everyone loses it once in a while.”

Of course, Dibble certainly has had more than his share, having been suspended or fined five times last season.

It all started after he gave up a home run in a spring game. He marched to the area behind the clubhouse, destroyed some picnic tables with his bat, then tossed folding chairs into an alligator-infested pond.

Then the season started.

--On April 18, 1989, Dibble threw a fastball two feet behind the head of Dodger second baseman Willie Randolph.

He not only was fined, but further implicated himself by saying, “If he wants to do something about it, he knows where I am and can come and get me.”

--On May 24, 1989, after giving up a run-scoring single to Terry Pendleton of the St. Louis Cardinals, Dibble was so incensed that he picked up Pendleton’s bat and threw it against the backstop. He was suspended for two days by the Reds and for another three days by the league.

“I know I was wrong but that was like murdering someone and getting the electric chair twice,” Dibble said.

--On July 8, 1989, Dibble was suspended for three games after inciting a brawl against the Mets when he hit Tim Teufel in the back. He then retreated to the clubhouse and telephoned the Mets’ clubhouse, asking for Teufel. Darryl Strawberry answered the phone, and when he refused to get Teufel, Dibble said, “Well, then you come outside; I’ll kick your . . . too.”

--On Aug. 5, 1989, Dibble was fined $50 by the club for throwing baseballs into the stands in Atlanta.

“I still don’t understand that one,” he said. “Everybody did it.”

Said Charlton: “Yeah, but you were the only one stupid enough to get caught.”

--On Sept, 22, 1989, Dibble ignored a bunt sign and was fined by interim Manager Tommy Helms, who also threatened to suspend him.

“Like that cost us the season,” Dibble said.

Remarkably, the only time Dibble has been fined this season was after throwing a brush-back pitch to Jim Presley of the Atlanta Braves, knocking him to the ground.

“You know, I was hoping this year to really calm my image,” Dibble said. “But with this Nasty Boys stuff, it’s just getting worse. It’s almost like people come to games just to see me explode and show my emotions. It’s like, ‘Come on, bring your family, watch Rob Dibble erupt.

“I have to be on edge to be effective. I played center field in high school, and I still find myself looking for my name on the lineup card.”

If Dibble has his way, he’ll be looking at a lineup card with new teammates next season. He has said he’s going to request a trade at the end of the season to become a team’s bullpen stopper. It’s not that this is such a bad gig, but being a setup man is not where the money is, either.

“I’ve seen some of the stoppers around this league, and some of them are jokes,” Dibble said. “I know I can do better than a lot of them. I’m tired of wallowing in obscurity as a setup man. My idea of going three weeks without a save is not a whole lot of fun.”

And just what does Dibble plan to do with the extra bucks he would make as a bullpen stopper?

“I got kicked out of Florida Southern after six months because my grades were so bad, so I think I might just get myself one of those college degrees,” he said.

Oh, go back to school?

“No, with the money I’ll have, I’ll just buy a diploma.”

There was time that Charlton was considered the sane member of the group. After all, this is a guy who graduated from Rice University with a triple major--political science, religion and physical education.

Sure, his temper can also be ignited, but never had he done anything that could be construed as crazy on the field--until the night of June 24.

Charlton, still seething from being hit by a pitch earlier in the game by Dodger Mike Hartley, was standing on first base when it happened. Joe Oliver lined a double into the left-field corner, and when Charlton headed toward third, Sam Perlozzo, the third-base coach, put up the stop sign. No need taking chances, Perlozzo reasoned, when your team’s winning, 8-4.

Charlton, however, ignored the sign and continued running. There was Mike Scioscia waiting at the plate, with the ball coming his way. Charlton didn’t even hesitate. He plowed into Scioscia, throwing an elbow toward his neck and knocking him flat while scoring the run.

It was billed as the greatest hit by a baseball player at Riverfront Stadium since Pete Rose knocked over Ray Fosse in the 1970 All-Star game. The next day, a banner hung from the rafters: “Norm Knows Football.”

Charlton said: “Scioscia was blocking the plate, like he always does, so it was either, ‘You knock him over or he’ll bury you.’ And I wasn’t going to be the one who was buried. I ran right over him.

“It wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever done in my life. My arm is much more important to this team than one run. But I think we got our point across. The stuff you see from us, you just don’t see from other pitchers.

“Just like the time I charged the mound in Philadelphia (against the Phillies’ Dennis Cook). Who expects that from a pitcher? And if someone on our team gets hit on purpose, I guarantee you we’ll take care of it. Somebody’s going down, and they’re going to pay the price.”

It’s Charlton’s aggressiveness that has made the past three weeks so difficult for him. You see, his charter membership in the Nasty Boys was revoked when he made the starting rotation because of starter Danny Jackson’s shoulder injury. And, boy, has this put him in a foul mood.

“He’s an absolute mess right now,” said Dibble, who also has been his road roommate for the past five years. “He’s just bouncing off the walls. He can’t stand going four days without having anything to do between starts.”

Said Charlton: “Guys keep trying to tell me that I’m not part of the Nasty Boys anymore, but that’s bull . . . . I hit with them during batting practice. I sit in the bullpen every chance I get. And when I’m on the bench, I sit at the other end from the starters. I don’t even want to be close to them, because I’m a reliever, not a starter.”

Yes, being a Nasty Boy really is an honor.

“The only trouble with it is that people think we’re complete idiots, and we’re not,” Charlton said. “It’s unfair for people to think we act that way off the field, too. You don’t see us driving 200 m.p.h. in our cars. You don’t see us getting into fights in bars. You don’t see us going into drug rehab centers.

“The only trouble we get into is on the field.”

And, of course, in the sanctity of their clubhouse.

“Really, it’s nice having these guys around,” said Jackson, who once was so incensed after a defeat while pitching for the Kansas City Royals that he emptied his locker and burned all of his belongings.

“You know, if I did that today, I don’t think anybody would even give it a second look.

“Not with these guys around.”