(Pantheon Books)

www.pantheonbooks.com

BY FRED MILLS

I'm the father of a 2A Little Leaguer, and the other afternoon he got his first hit of the new season; two batters later, he was crossing home plate, and the grin that lit up his face when he spotted his daddy waiting for him at the dugout was worthy of a Christmas morning. This, coming from a naturally reticent kid who just a couple of years earlier had had a near-meltdown upon learning I'd signed him up for his first round of Teeball after he'd expressly told me that he "didn't want to play baseball." It's a horrible cliché to invoke the image of a dad living out his sports fantasies through the eyes of his child, but speaking as someone whose own pop took him down to the ballfield one fine spring day and told the coach for one of the local youth leagues to put me, all of six years old, in the game, well... suffice to say I suited up for the next nine summers, and even though girls and rock ‘n' roll eventually intervened, I never lost my love for the game. Seeing a similar love starting to unfold in my son is priceless.

The reason I bring up this sort of old-school notion is because The Baseball Codes, by veteran sportswriters Jason Turbow and Michael Duca, is a decidedly old-school look at a sport whose traditions and ethics have become, if not specifically eroded, at least diminished in the modern era. The book's double subtitle handily sums up its contents: "Beanballs, Sign Stealing & Bench-Clearing Brawls: The unwritten rules of America's pastime." It's a free-wheeling - at times rambling, due to its non-chronological structure, but always making very clear points - trek around the basepaths, over to the bullpen and back, down into the dugout and clubhouse, and sometimes even out to the area located directly behind the scoreboard, in search of anecdotes that prove the existence of this so-called Code. Which is very real; it's just veiled from public view, privy mainly to the practitioners of the game and those who follow it passionately.

The Code involves, as suggested, an approach to baseball that's essentially a semi-porous set of ethics, passed down by word of mouth, subject to generational tweaks of course, not to mention contemporary stresses applied by Money and Media (more on that in a sec), but always there to some degree, operating quietly in the background until some blatant infraction occurs to yank it colorfully (and even violently) into the foreground. Learn the Code and its subtleties and follow it, and you'll earn the respect of your teammates and the members of opposing teams; in the process you may avoid getting drilled in the back by a deliberately aimed fastball or getting flattened by a catcher at home plate. Ignore (or even be ignorant of) the Code, and watch out: retaliation may come in the next inning or the next game, or it may not get meted out until months or years from now; but it will come, one way or another. At the same time, the Code is a grey area creature, with some strictures considered inviolable and others prone to the vicissitudes of time (era, certainly), place and personality.

The Baseball Codes offers a litany of examples guaranteed to raise eyebrows and draw more than a few laughs from even the most seasoned sports fan. The book, though not ordered like a history lesson starting in the game's early years and proceeding to the present, is arranged roughly thematically, starting with a section titled "On The Field," followed by "Retaliation," "Cheating" and "Teammates." The first two sections are intertwined in classic cause/effect fashion. Take the etiquette of base-stealing. It's generally understood that if your team has racked up, say, a 12-5 lead by the seventh inning, decorum and respect for the other team means that you do not steal a base, as that would be tantamount to attempting to run the scoreboard and embarrass your opponent. But that's exactly what San Diego Padres outfielder Rickey Henderson, one of the sport's all-time stolen base leaders, did during a 2001 game against the Milwaukee Brewers. The Brewers' manager went ballistic, storming onto the field and informing Henderson that "he had just become a target for the Brewers pitching staff." After the inning was over the Padres manager took Henderson out, effectively preventing his star from getting "drilled" his next time at bat and also avoiding a potential conflagration on the playing field (Henderson maintained that he'd been told to steal, but not too many believed him). The funny thing, though, is that one team's "disrespect" is another's "insurance"; the authors interviewed a number of players about the Henderson incident and others similar to it, and opinions were mixed, with some respondents coming down on the side of the Code and others pointing out that they're paid to win games and in the sometimes upside-down world of professional baseball, a 12-5 lead with three innings left to play isn't necessarily a shoo-in.

Speaking of getting drilled by pitchers: those aren't always wild throws you see sending batters sprawling. The book is rife with examples of pitchers, either acting on orders or out of sheer intimidation, taking aim at the batter's back, arm, leg and shoulder - per the Code, deliberate headshots are a no-no; a 96-mph fastball can cause brain damage - in an attempt to send a message to the hitter while avoiding censure (or ejection) from the umpire. The intimidation factor seems logical enough. Poster child for this was hurler Nolan Ryan, whose dominance of the game was a combination of natural-born skill and a keen ability to mess with the minds of his opponents via brushback and duster pitches; "crowd my plate," he seemed to be saying, "and you'll be picking your ass up out of the dirt," and those who didn't take the hint would receive the proverbial and painful free trip to first base with his next pitch. Sometimes, however, a pitcher is simply delivering due process. It may take the form of simple tit-for-tat; one of Team A's batters gets drilled, and when Team B is up, one of theirs will in turn get drilled (typically, the first man at bat, or the Team B player having the equivalent field position of the Team A batter). Or it may be a direct response to a specific infraction; say Team A's guy is judged to be an overzealous baserunner when he knocks down Team B's second baseman - next time he bats, he's gonna get drilled. Or it may be an incredibly arcane transaction, as in the delightfully bizarre case of pitcher Tommy Lasorda knocking down slugger Buster Mayfield three times in a single game. Mayfield's offense? Years earlier, he'd refused to give a teenage Lasorda an autograph, and when Lasorda became a major league baseball player he set his sights on eventual revenge for the slight.

The book devotes a good number of pages to stories like these, including the complexities of team rivalries that lead to, more often than not, those "bench clearing brawls" the subtitle advertises. Among those that have passed into lore: an August 12, 1984 game between the Atlanta Braves and the San Diego Padres described as "the Desert Storm of baseball fights." Write the authors, "Total damage: six brushback pitches, three hit batters, four bench-clearing incidents, two full-on brawls that nearly spiraled out of control when fans rushed the field, nineteen ejections, five arrests, and a nearly unprecedented clearing of the benches by the umpires." (Somewhere on YouTube, we can only pray, an enterprising fan has posted clips of all this.)

The section on Cheating, though less colorful, has its share of juicy anecdotes, from tales of pitchers legendary for their prowess at hurling spitballs (or balls doctored with other substances, like K-Y Jelly or pine tar) and their ingenuity at hiding the substances in their gloves or on their persons; to sign-stealing and all its variants, which over the years have involved batters sneaking a peek at the catchers, a second-base runner with a clear view of the catcher picking up on the signals and transmitting it to the batter, and a team member positioning himself behind a gap in the scoreboard, armed with military grade binoculars aimed at home plate, and subsequently triggering a prearranged code via buzzer to the dugout so the manager himself can let the batter know what's about to be thrown. The question of steroid use in the modern era really isn't dealt with much in the book - probably a wise editing decision, since that's a huge can of worms all in itself. But the general consensus is that, while cheating is indeed cheating, there are gradations of it, and some forms such as sign stealing are even accepted as part of doing daily business in baseball. "If you're not cheating, you're not trying," goes the mantra, along with the dictum, "If you do get caught cheating, there probably won't be any retribution meted out as long as you stop" (for that game, at least). As with the base stealing/acceptable lead scenario above, opinions can diverge wildly. One fascinating tale involved a player who, due to his Christian-forged morals and ethics, absolutely refused to take part in any activity he deemed untoward, particularly cheating but also including retaliation, and he wound up getting traded after barely a single season because his personal Code didn't jibe with his team's. (The fourth section of the book delves into how franchises have their own unwritten rules, how they enforce them, and how rookies have to master them quickly if they want to survive.)

In conclusion, though, Turbow and Duca admit that the Code no longer wields the power it once did in baseball. "The unwritten rules," they writer, "are under a multi-pronged attack from forces that have become inextricably intertwined with the fabric of the game." Those forces include money (playing for the "love of the game" has been replaced by love of multimillion dollar salaries, which tends to relegate respect for the past and for tradition to the backburner); media (it's hard for unwritten rules to be self-policed away from the public eye when you have a hungry 24/7 news cycle that needs to be fed); and fundamentals (league expansions mean more and more young players never privy to a sit-down from a veteran who can pass along his accumulated knowledge).

Just the same, Turbow and Duca express optimism that as long as there is baseball, there will be some version of the Code existing to motivate and guide players. They quote player David Bell, who notes, "The name of the game is trying to win, but you have to keep it in perspective. Show people respect. You want to walk away from a game or a career saying, ‘I feel good about the way I treated people, about the way I competed.' It's nice to say you won, but I think, in the long run, those are the things that you are going to feel best about."

Funny - that's exactly what I was trying to get across to my son the other day when, after letting him excitedly blow off steam over his team winning their first game, I offered him the old saw about "it's not whether you win or lose - it's how you play the game." That may seem impossibly corny, but it's true. At least I still believe it.

And in a couple of years, I plan to pass along to the kid my copy of The Baseball Codes just to remind him of it.

Read an excerpt from the book here.