Baseball’s Tragedy, Fear: the Bean Ball

Baseball’s unspoken fear is a fastball against the brain. It is a fear conquered, or no one could ever take a bat in hand. But the fear is real, a beast in the shadows. We see Danny Bautista of the Atlanta Braves take a fastball between the eyes. We see that and we think of Ray Chapman and Tony Conigliaro.

We think of Sandy Koufax, he of the hissing fastball and a curve that changed directions abruptly. He also would throw at a hitter, such as the day Lou Brock of the St. Louis Cardinals walked, stole second and third, and scored on a flyball.

Watching Brock do it, Koufax’s teammate and fellow pitcher Don Drysdale said to infielder Jim Lefebvre, “Frenchy, I feel sorry for that man.”

“Who?” Lefebvre said.

“Brock. Sandy doesn’t appreciate that sort of thing. Sandy gets mad enough when you beat him with base hits. But when you score runs without hits, look out.”

Next time up, Brock went down, hit in the back by a fastball. “You could hear the thud all over the stadium,” Drysdale said. “Brock trotted toward first base, not rubbing, pretending he wasn’t hurt. But he never made it. Brock just collapsed, and they had to carry him off on a stretcher.”

Koufax was a gentleman pitcher, criticized for his reluctance to pitch inside. Drysdale, no gentleman, believed he had a right to throw at hitters. Famously sharing that belief, the Cardinals’ Bob Gibson said his repertoire included nine pitches: “Two different fastballs, two sliders, a curve, changeup, knockdown, brushback and hit batsman.”

Gibson said you brush back hitters to let them know they can’t control the entire plate. If they don’t respect your right to have part of the plate for your own work, then go to the knockdown, which Gibson calls “a brushback pitch with an attitude.” If you fail to achieve respect with options 1 and 2, or need to retaliate for insults delivered to you or your teammates, a pitcher then is obliged to hit somebody.

But even as a pitcher knows he holds a fearsome weapon, he also knows there are limits. Gibson says, “I hit a few guys in the head, but not on purpose. If I hit somebody on purpose, my target was the body, where nobody really gets hurt.”

A baseball thrown 90 mph reaches home plate in four-tenths of a second. Blink your eyes twice. There it is.

Sometimes, a hitter is paralyzed by the sight of a ball coming at him. Infielder Terry Turner, who played for the Cleveland Indians from 1904 through 1918 and was beaned one day, explained it this way:

“You simply can’t get out of the way of the beanball, though you see it coming and you know it’s going to crash into your skull.

“I can still remember vividly how I was fascinated by seeing that ball coming toward my head . . . the ball looked as big as a house. . . . The ball crashed into me. It sounded like a hammer striking a big bell. Then all went dark.”

The Braves say Bautista may be back in a month. If so, a miracle. The bones around his left eye were broken. His nose was broken. Even as Bautista walked away, his face in a towel, memory called up an image from a generation ago when the prodigy Conigliaro stared from inside a macabre mask, its features swollen, everything in purples and blacks.

What a hometown hero Conigliaro had been for the team he grew up loving, the Boston Red Sox. Only 19, right-handed hitter with power, he had 24 home runs his rookie season. The next season he hit 32.

Henry Aaron hit 110 home runs in his first 579 games. Conigliaro, in his first 589 games, hit 124 home runs. Aaron hit another 645 home runs. Conigliaro hit 42 more.

The end began Aug. 18, 1967, when Conigliaro saw a fastball from the California Angels’ Jack Hamilton and couldn’t move. It broke his cheekbone, dislocated his jaw and damaged the retina in his left eye. As he lay by home plate, he thought, “I’m blind.” His injuries were so severe he couldn’t play in 1968.

In ’69 he hit 20 home runs, with 36 the next year. But in ’71 his vision deteriorated. So the Red Sox traded him.

“He was devastated,” says Rico Petrocelli, then the Red Sox shortstop, Conigliaro’s best friend. “All eyes had been on him in his comeback, to see if he’d stand on the plate again, and the first time up they knocked him down--and he stood on the plate again. Such a great comeback--and then they traded him.”

Conigliaro retired halfway through that season but couldn’t stay away. By 1975 he was back with the Red Sox, only to hit .123 in 21 games. He was sent to the minors and never again played in the big leagues. He was only 30.

Out of baseball, searching for a job, he had a heart attack in 1982 that left him with brain damage. He died in 1990, as much a victim of a fastball as of a bad heart. He was 45.

The day Terry Turner spoke of being hit in the head, Aug. 17, 1920--that was the day after his former Cleveland teammate, Ray Chapman, had been hit by New York Yankees pitcher Carl Mays.

“The ball sailed directly toward Chapman’s head, but he made no effort to move,” author Mike Sowell wrote. “He remained poised in his crouch, apparently transfixed as the ball flew in and crashed against his left temple with a resounding crack that was audible throughout the ballpark.”

Carried to the clubhouse, Chapman mumbled incoherently before telling trainer Percy Smallwood, “Katy’s ring, Percy, Katy’s ring,” repeated until the trainer fetched Chapman’s wedding ring and slipped it on the ballplayer’s hand.

Chapman never spoke again. At 4:40 a.m., Aug. 17, 1920, he died. He was 29.