Words Can Be Weapons in Baseball

We hear the crack of the bat, the din of the crowd. We hear rock music between innings and Harry Caray during the seventh-inning stretch.

Above all of this, major-league baseball players hear each other.

They hear their teammates, shouting encouragement. They hear their opponents, chatting at home plate and yapping on the bases.

They even hear, Dave Parker of the Milwaukee Brewers said, “some little wimpy guy who’s probably a utility player, sitting down at the end of the dugout yelling.”

They hear so much that boggles the mind that, on June 24, Oakland Athletics pitcher Dave Stewart heard razzing from an opposing dugout for the first time in his major-league career.

“I had just given up a home run to (Dan) Pasqua, then I threw a pitch that was called a ball, and I said to the umpire, ‘Hey, don’t let the guy duck the pitch,’ ” Stewart claimed. “And their dugout hollered, ‘You throw a strike, you’ll get a strike.’ I thought the timing was pretty bad. Never in 10 years have I heard anything like that.”

Parker said there’s a reason for that.

“That’s the stuff you see in knothole games -- you don’t see that up here,” he said. “I mean, frankly, if somebody yells at a Dave Stewart, he’ll break the hitter’s ribs, OK?”

It may come to that during this week’s three-game series that began Monday night in Chicago. The White Sox, you see, broke the first commandment of ballpark chatter. They hollered at a martial-arts aficionado who throws very hard.

That commandment? “Remember whom you’re talking to.” How big is he? How hard does he throw? What is the likelihood that he’ll be back home in Mississippi the next time your team plays his? What is the likelihood that he could break your ribs?

Two years ago, Stewart heard fans near the Boston bullpen heckling him about an old Los Angeles misdemeanor, and immediately increased his velocity by 5 to 10 mph. Four years ago, he decked Cleveland Indians coach Pat Corrales with one punch when Corrales dared visit him on the mound. This is not a man you talk to on the diamond, other than to say, “Hi, how are you? Can I get you something? A cup of coffee? A new BMW?”

No doubt about it, though, talk is a big part of the game that starts and pauses and thinks, and then resumes.

Lips move constantly. If we could read beyond the familiar F-word, they would surprise us and enlighten us and, mostly, make us laugh. Conversations, even the mundane “hey, batter, batter” dugout chatter, seem to be the favorite pastime of the participants in America’s favorite pastime.

Some of the game’s best and, more important, biggest on-field talkers have let us eavesdrop on some of their more memorable conversations. As they did, more commandments followed:

-- Say anything if you’re big.

The list of legendary bench jockeys seems to start, even in the National League, with Don Baylor, the former Oriole-Athletic-Angel-Yankee-Red Sox-Twin, now a coach with the Milwaukee Brewers.

Baylor tops the list with good reason. Said the Dodgers’ Mickey Hatcher, “When you’re as big as Baylor, you can say anything you want.”

Baylor is 6 foot 1 and about 220 pounds. That’s big enough.

“He could back up whatever he said,” A’s second baseman Mike Gallego said. “I really think the reason he got hit so much (a major-league-record 267 times) was that people were trying to aim the ball, be too sharp and not hit him.”

And he said a lot, even when he failed.

“Guys got you out, but I never accepted that,” Baylor said. “I’d come back to the bench and holler, ‘Stay out there. Don’t go anywhere. I’ll see you the next time.’ ”

Baylor said that most of his talk was intended to intimidate the opposing pitcher, sometimes even the whole staff. He remembers being hit in back-to-back games in Boston, one day by Al Nipper and the next day by Steve Crawford.

“I went to the mound and said, ‘You guys are on warning. That’s the last time. I’m telling you, and I’m telling the rest of your pitching staff.’ ”

Then Baylor told Red Sox manager John McNamara, “Your pitchers are on warning.”

Four hundred feet away, Red Sox reliever Bob Stanley leaned over the railing of the home-team bullpen to ask Yankees reliever Dave Righetti, “Do you think he meant it?”

Righetti told Stanley, “Without question, he meant it, and I wouldn’t try it if I was you.”

Stanley didn’t.

Parker, at 6-5 and 245, enjoys intimidation tactics, too.

He said he’s pretty quiet, unless he gets a brush-back pitch.

Then his voice rises.

“The plate is right here! You’ve got better control than that! Let’s GO. Get it down so I can beat on it!”

Should a home-run trot follow, he will torture the unfortunate pitcher along the way.

Hatcher remembers the ultimate in big-man articulation.

“When I first came up, there were Reggie Smith and Dusty Baker, up on the top step of the dugout, hollering until the pitcher would look over,” Hatcher said. “That was intimidation right there.”

-- Conversation begins at home.

Catchers say they take their cues from the hitters when it comes to chats at home. Some hitters -- George Bell, Carlton Fisk -- just want to go to work without even saying hello. Others -- Hatcher and Detroit catcher Mike Heath plead guilty -- are talking from the moment they step to the plate until the moment they walk or run away.

Dodgers catcher Rick Dempsey said he no longer speaks unless spoken to.

“I think it’s more intimidating to say nothing at all,” Dempsey said.

Imagine, then, Dempsey luring Rickey Henderson into a discussion at the plate some years ago.

“He’d talk to me about getting on base and get me distracted, and then the pitcher would throw a fastball by me,” Henderson said. “He did that a few times until I caught on. Then, when I caught on, I started conversations with him just to get a fastball.”

Dempsey said, “That was just a fad, minor-league stuff we did back then. Cliff Johnson used to throw dirt on the hitter’s shoes before the ball came. It distracted the hitters, but it also made them mad. Al Bumbry stopped a game once and threatened to hit him over the head with his bat if he did it again. He was so mad -- and there’s a lot of size difference between Al Bumbry and Cliff Johnson.”

Johnson was about 6-3, Bumbry 5-8. But, as a corollary to Commandment No. 2, you can say anything if you’re holding a bat to someone who isn’t.

-- Say anything if you’re desperate.

Words can become tactics, especially when nothing else is working.

“A lot of times, I’ll go to the plate saying, ‘I can’t remember the last time I got a hit, things have been so bad,’ ” Hatcher said. “I’m hoping the catcher will think, ‘Gosh, he’s in a slump,’ and maybe they’ll throw one down the middle.

“One time in the Metrodome, I was going really bad, probably 0-for-30, and I said to the catcher, ‘Man, I’m going bad. Anything can happen here.’ And the dome collapsed. The catcher said, ‘Man, you really are going bad.’ ”

Watch Parker on second base someday when a ball is hit to shortstop. His mouth opens, but no words come out -- just “Yaah!” and “Aah!”

“A lot of times, it makes the shortstop boot the ball, gets him a little nervous,” Parker said.

Hitters often will join forces to try to upset an opposing pitcher. This used to work on occasion with Joaquin Andujar, the former St. Louis Cardinals and A’s pitcher. Sometimes, it fired up Andujar and made him better. Other times, he made him try too much harder.

“I saw one pitcher so upset by comments one time that when I went out to the mound to talk to him, he couldn’t talk back because he was foaming at the mouth,” Dempsey said.

A’s reliever Dennis Eckersley is a popular target for bench jockeys and chatty hitters -- partly because he asks for it.

“We used to yell at Eck all the time for his mannerisms, the way he’ll stare,” A’s catcher Jamie Quirk explained. “We’d yell, ‘We’ll let you know it’s a strike.’

“It didn’t work. He thrived on it.”

Eckersley’s favorite reply?

“Come on, your turn’s next.”

-- Mind your manners.

A’s manager Tony La Russa said Miss Manners couldn’t write a very long book on ballpark-chatter taboos.

A paragraph, maybe.

“Well, I don’t think you should say anything about somebody’s mother,” La Russa said. “Or wife. Or children.”

Players, however, said they would stop short at other subjects.

Girlfriends, for instance.

A’s infielder Mike Gallego, who might be the “little wimpy guy who might be a utility player” of whom Parker spoke, said Margo Adams, Wade Boggs’ former mistress, is off-limits when Boggs is batting.

“That’s a low blow,” Gallego said. “Players won’t get on another player like that.”

Baylor remembers a time when Royals outfielder Jim Eisenreich was with Minnesota, struggling with a disease that caused him to twitch uncontrollably. Boston fans broke Baylor’s rules that day.

“With me, everything pertained to baseball -- no personal, off-the-field stuff,” Baylor said. “The fans in Fenway Park almost drove Eisenreich out of baseball. And I heard some players join in.”

Miss Manners might have to arbitrate the baseball etiquette on Nolan Ryan, however.

The name of the Texas Rangers’ 300-game winner repeatedly surfaces in discussions about the propriety of yelling to distract a pitcher.

“Nolan Ryan’s throwing at 100 mph,” Baylor said. “I’m going to yell at him like another guy who’s throwing 65 or 70 or 80. Didn’t matter who the guy was, you could yell, ‘Throw harder. You’re not throwing hard enough.’ ”

Quirk sets different standards.

“With Nolan Ryan going for a no-hitter, you don’t want to scream, ‘Hey, we’re going to get your ass,’ ” Quirk said. “It’s non-professional to a professional. You get on people who aren’t professional or who you think might be rattled.”

Ryan has managed to coax a few words out of Quirk this season. One night in Arlington, Quirk went down looking at a 3-2 breaking ball. Ryan growled, “Swing the goddamn bat!” Quirk replied, “It was a ball. Why should I swing at it?”

-- You can’t hide personality.

Ever notice that some people are born chatty? Ballplayers notice. “Sometimes I go too far,” the Tigers’ Heath said. “Carlton Fisk told me just the other day, ‘Just let me hit.’

“But I definitely like talking to the guys up there, finding out what’s going on.”

“He will talk forever,” Quirk said.

Giants reliever Jeff Brantley has a talent that busies him during games.

“I do commentating on the game, play by play, in an announcer’s voice, from the bullpen,” Brantley said. “Some of the guys seem to like it a little bit. It’s my voice, but it sounds like an announcer’s voice -- even better than some of theirs.”

-- Know when not to listen.

Hitters seem to have stories of a pitcher or catcher who told them what pitch was coming. Invariably, this bit of helpful information fouled them up.

“Tony Pena was the type of catcher who’d sit behind the plate and say, ‘It’s a fastball,’ ” Parker said. “Then the pitcher throws a fastball, and I’m taken by surprise, because this guy’s telling me what pitch is coming and you know you don’t believe the opposition, right?

“He actually broke some of my hot streaks like that when I was with Cincinnati and we went to Pittsburgh. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not, and it was weird, but it worked. I used to love playing Pittsburgh, used to beat up on them, until he started telling me what was coming.”

Quirk remembers catching John Candelaria for the Yankees in a Subway Series game with the Mets. Candelaria threw a pitch in the dirt to Darryl Strawberry, with a runner on third, and had to cover home plate while Quirk scrambled for the ball.

Candelaria, nose-to-nose with Strawberry at the plate, hollered, “I’m going to throw you a (bleeping) fastball.”

Quirk watched the wheels turning in Strawberry’s head: Is he or isn’t he?

“I didn’t know, either,” Quirk said. “So I put the fastball down, and Candy threw it right by him.”

Baylor said former pitcher Luis Tiant always told him, “I’m going to throw it right there.”

Baylor’s wise reply: “Sure, you are.”

-- Say anything if you’re in charge.

Most managers expect vocal contributions from their benches.

With the Dodgers, Dempsey said, “That’s Mickey Hatcher and my jobs, to keep the vocal tempo of the game up. We might decide to take a night off, but then Tommy (Lasorda) comes down to find out why we’re not down there hollering and stirring things up.”

The answer may be any combination of factors -- sore throat, fatigue of a road trip, or a long bench stint. Hey, this is a job, too. Sometimes the manager has to make his own noise.

In most cases, he’s rooting for his own team. But, every now and then, a manager finds himself sparring verbally with an opponent.

With Earl Weaver, it was Lou Piniella of the Yankees who pumped up the volume. Piniella would call Weaver “Mickey Rooney” to get the show started. Weaver would suggest, in unprintable terminology, that Piniella get into the batter’s box and hit. When Piniella did hit, he looked into the Orioles’ dugout for more bait from Weaver.

Whitey Herzog wasn’t known for screaming at opposing players, but one day he saw Parker, wearing a gray Reds road uniform, hit a bloop single in St. Louis.

“How can a big elephant hit a ball that soft?” Herzog wanted to know.

The next day, Parker homered and gave Herzog a recognizable elephant imitation as he crossed home plate.

La Russa said he refrains from baiting players, unless “I think the pitcher or player has done something to our club that requires a response, or if somebody does something that you think is unprofessional, acting like a jerk.”

This season in Kansas City, La Russa thought he saw Royals third baseman Kevin Seitzer making fun of his A’s in a Royals victory.

“He looked like he was spoofing us,” La Russa said. “I just yelled at him, ‘It’s not always that much fun.’ ”

Said Gallego, “Whatever Seitzer was doing, he didn’t do it again.”

-- Know the cliches.

Certain expressions make the rounds over and over. Some people think they ought to be retired.

Saying “Throw harder” to an opposing pitcher is one.

Said La Russa, “I would prefer to tell our hitters, ‘Swing slower. Wait longer.’ ”

Or, “Challenge somebody, meat,” from a hitter who has struck out on a series of junk.

“That’s probably one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard in the game,” Hatcher said.

Maybe someday a few of these lines will be inducted into the Hall of Fame. Chances are, they’ve been uttered by most of the players who are there already.