The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, sign stealing, & bench-clearing brawls

 

The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, sign stealing, & bench-clearing brawls by Jason Turbow with Michael Duca

As I write this review, the baseball community is still in a bit of shock after the Houston Astros cheating scandal that was revealed by a former player that caused two managers and a general manager to be fired.  Sports commentator Stephen Smith brazenly proclaimed that the Astros should have their World Series championship title stripped away from them.  Quickly to rebut Smith are celebrity athletes such as former NBA ballplayer Charles Barkley.  “All. Ballplayers. Cheat.” Barkley asserts.  Rather crass, and possibly unbelievable.  All ball players cheat?? Really??  Well, sadly this book by author Jason Turbow leads the reader to believe this sad fact about Major League Baseball is, in fact, true.

This book was written seven years prior to the Astros championship, and I think that if every fan had read a copy of this book before the accusations started flying, the Houston ballclub might not have been viewed with quite as much scorn.  That’s not to say that this behavior should be encouraged, let alone tolerated, but when a sport has existed well over a century with a certain “code” that everyone is expected to follow, stopping such events isn’t as easy as flipping off a light switch.

Let’s say you’re a young pitcher in the Major Leagues and your manager doesn’t like a player on the other team.  The reason? Something stupid like the guy hit a home run against your team three months ago.  So the manager instructs you: “Hit them hard with a pitch”.  Well, what would YOU do?  Refuse your manager? If so, have fun being demoted to the minor leagues.  Bring this accusation to the attention of the higher authorities of the sport?  Well, you might as well kiss your career in the big leagues goodbye.

Now, this book isn’t only about cheating in the big leagues, but rather the many codes that exist and are followed just because these codes have always existed.  Does the pitcher have a no-hitter going past the 5^th inning?  If so, you better make sure NO ONE on the bench says the word “no-hitter” out loud. In fact, don’t even talk to the pitcher at all.  God help you if you violate this code.  Such idiotic “codes” have always been in-place, and rarely do you encounter a testosterone-filled jock that will speak against the code and say something like “Isn’t this all kind of stupid?”

So the author gives us plenty, almost too many, anecdotes throughout the game’s long history of these codes and who the main perpetrators have always been – both the enforcers and the code breakers.  It’s quite a harsh book, but perhaps I’m naïve.  Let’s just say I have lost a lot of respect for such Hall of Famers as Don Drysdale and Nolan Ryan after reading such accounts.  Most fans probably remember the Nolan Ryan / Robin Ventura altercation where Ventura charged the mound.   Did Ryan hit him with a pitch on purpose? Yep. Why?  Well, Ventura has the nerve to hit a home run off him.   You may ask: “Well isn’t that his job???”  We also read about how Nolan Ryan could be particularly nasty if any batter tried to get on base by bunting off him. You want to say “Gee. Nolan. That’s kind of what they’re supposed to do.”  Sad when we find out our heroes are made of clay.

After reading a whole book of incidents like this, I can’t help but be rather turned off by such barbaric accounts. Some of these stories were brutal in the reflections. And yes, baseball teams (not individual players, but entire teams) were stealing signs long before the Houston Astros were banging on trash cans.  Remember the guy behind the outfield wall who updated the score by placing the numbers in the slots? You could always see him behind the scoreboard through one of those empty slots. Well, what the home teams used to do is to get the guy involved in the cheating, even though he’s not even a player.  If the pitch coming up will be a fastball, the guy is instructed to recline one of his feet on the ledge of a vacated slot.  Curveball? Both feet.  Change up? No feet at all.

Although this is an interesting book that keeps your attention, someone like me felt disgusted quite a bit.  If you’re a pitcher ticked off at a hitter because he bunted against you, shouldn’t you avenge yourself by, say, striking him out as opposed to hurling a fastball at his head?   Well, I guess some will continue to insist that boys will be boys.

For someone like me, the one thing that gives me a bit of hope is that the game as started to become stricter concerning these incidents.  Now that teams spend tens of millions of dollars on a player, they’re not going to damage their investment. They’re not going to let a cranky infielder on the other team slide hard into their shortstop trying to break up a double play by grinding his filed shoe spikes into the shortstop’s calf.  I find such refinements refreshing, but for a lot of old school players who have hobbies such as eating raw meat, these new restrictions come across to them as something that is “ruining the game”.

As a kid I always fantasized about being a major league baseball. After reading this book, a huge part of me is glad that my dream never came true.