THE BASEBALL DIARY REVIEW OF BOOKS #1: THE BASEBALL CODES by Jason Turbow with Michael Duca

Review by Richard Rosen

For the past couple weeks I’ve been slowly working my way through The Baseball Codes: Beanball, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime, by Jason Turbow and Michael Duca (as you probably already realize, baseball is no longer "America’s pastime"—that title belongs nowadays to greed and violence—these guys are either living in the past, maybe 1940 or so, or hoping to pull some nostalgic wool over our eyes to sell more units).  I wouldn’t say it’s a great book, but it’s quite enjoyable in its own way IF you’re a baseball nerd or geek, which I sort of am (example: working on a recent New York Times Crossword Puzzle, the clue is "First name of outfielder Roush"; if you can immediately come up with the three letter answer, as I did, consider yourself a nerd or geek). The book has 23 chapters on such "unwritten rules" as sign stealing, running into the catcher (Buster Posey and Ray Fosse beware), and mound conference etiquette.  After reading about half the book, you get the impression that most baseball players are slightly more sensitive than 13-year-old girls (excuse me, ladies, for using this analogy, but I lived with a 13-year-old female for a year and I can say with authority it was far more challenging than the Terrible Twos, the Thankless Threes, the Frustrating Fours, the Fitful Fives, right on through to today, to the Know-it-All Nineteens).  With a baseball player or team, step one inch over the line, which is quite invisible to the average fan, and a retribution reminiscent of the Yahweh depicted in the oldest strata of the Torah (which the Christians mistakenly call the Old Testament) will rain down on the offender(s).  Sometimes it’ll happen later in the same game, sometimes in the next game the two teams play, but sometimes it takes months or years for the score to be settled. It seems that baseball players have elephant-like memories, which is to say they NEVER forget. 

Anyway, I have mlb.com on my iPad—for $115 you can watch EVERY game EVERY day through the playoffs.  (The only restriction is a black out of my local teams, the Giants and A’s.  I can understand blacking out home games, after all, decent seats at the Giants’ AT&T Park are only $75 a pop, so Giants games are quite affordable; you only need to fast for a week to save up.  But why do they black out away games?  Do they think I won’t go to, oh, Cincinnati or God forbid HOUSTON to catch the game if it’s on the iPad?)  My evening routine invariably includes reviewing the day’s action through the highlights posted for each game.  I always start out with the Yankees IF THEY WIN, losses are suppressed deep down where I keep relationship issues with my parents, embarrassing junior high school mishaps, which were legion, and of course Yankee World Series defeats going back to 1955, the first one I remember, and the painful loss to the Pirates in 1960, where obviously the better team lost.  I mean the only decent player on that team with the funny-looking uni tops was Roberto Clemente and ... oh, never mind, it might be time to let that one go after 52 years.  But 1960 was back in when the Series WAS PLAYED DURING THE DAY WHILE EVERYONE WAS IN SCHOOL. How cruel was that? If the teacher was cool he/she let the class listen on the radio, but if not, desperate measures were called for. Remember those little transistor radios, about the outside dimensions of an iPod but about 20 times thicker?  What you did was stick it in your pants waist and covered it up with a tucked-in shirt, then ran the earplug line up through your sleeve, and spent the class resting the side of your head in your palm to cover up the earplug.  Sometimes it worked.  Sometimes it didn’t.

But I digress. A couple of nights ago I was witness to a remarkable example of one of the unwritten codes during a crucial game between the first place Reds and the second place Pirates.  (Of course now that MLB has about 80 teams and 30 divisions, first and second place are pretty meaningless.  What’s needed is a system like the English soccer league: there would be two leagues with eight teams in each, as God intended, AND NO DH. No inter-league play, no "playoffs," leave that to that awful game called "basketball".  The first place team in each league then meets in the World Series.  Period.  All this comes right from the Burning Bush. BUT, the WORST two teams in each league get their butts RELEGATED, that’s what the Brits call it, down they go to lower leagues and the two BEST teams in each lower league get promoted for the next season.  Thus a World Series victory actually means something, and we don’t have the farce of a "wildcard," usually a mediocre team that gets hot and/or lucky near the end of the season, backing into the Fall "Classic" and cheapening the hallowed Series.  Course it’ll never happen.  Why?  Simple, the teams getting relegated will lose a ton of revenue, and the owners would never stand for that).

But I digress again.  Here’s the set up.  It’s the top of the ninth, Cincy leading 3-zip, and naturally they bring in their lights out reliever, Aroldis Chapman.  Ever seen this guy pitch?  His fast ball, which he throws almost exclusively—and why not?—tops out sometimes at 102 MILES PER HOUR.  Think about this for a moment.  Do the math.  A mile equals 5280 feet, so if you were driving in a car at a steady rate of 102 miles per, in one hour you’d travel 538,560 feet.  Now there are 60 minutes in an hour, and 3600 seconds. So in one second at 102 mph you’d travel about 150 feet.  The pitcher’s rubber is 60 feet, 6 inches from home, so at 102 mph it takes the baseball .4 second to go from the pitcher’s hand to the catcher’s mitt.  That’s POINT 4 SECOND, just to be clear.  That’s literally as fast as the blink of an eye.  That’s how much time a hitter has to decide whether or not to swing, WHEN IT’S A FAST BALL, which he doesn’t know if one’s coming or not, it could be a 95 mph, sharp-breaking curve that looks for all the world LIKE a fastball—the arm slot and speed have a fast ball throw appearance—but at the last minute the ball drops off the edge of a table and the hitter swings futilely, looking like a complete fool, which he technically is, at a pitch WAY out of the strike zone, missing by a country mile. Grab some wood, meat, as Mike Krukow likes to say.

Anyway first batter up for the Bucs is Andrew McCutcheon, leading the NL in hitting.  Aroldis, this big lanky Cuban defector, winds up and unleashes an off-speed pitch, only 100 mph, AND IT HITS ANDREW IN THE LEFT SHOULDER.  Now friends, I ask you—and of course I realize that most of you have never batted against someone like Aroldis—but think about it.  What’s the first thing you’d do if you were drilled like that?  Collapse in a heap?  Start crying?  Die of shock?  It’s really hard to say, but one thing I GUARANTEE you’d do, and that’s rub.  Ouchy, ouchy, ouchy, you’d use your left hand to rub and try and soothe the throbbing spot, which likely has an impression of the seams of the offending ball.  But ah, if you did this you’d be breaking one of the most honored unwritten rules in all of baseball, and that is: DON’T RUB. Don’t give the pitcher the satisfaction of knowing he put a hurt on you, even if he wasn’t throwing at you. And true to this code, ANDREW DIDN’T RUB!  He bent over, removed his hitter’s shin guard, fired it toward the Pirates’ bench, glared at Chapman for about 5 seconds, and trotted to first. The camera followed him down the baseline, all the way to first, and he DIDN’T RUB!  The camera even lingered on him as he took his lead, and still he DIDN’T RUB.  It was one of the most amazing exhibitions of the hidden game of baseball I’ve ever had the pleasure to witness.

I leave you with a song I was immediately reminded of, by Michael Martin Murphy, called Cowboy Logic:

That's cowboy logic, every cowboy's got it

It's in the way he lives his life and the songs he sings

That's cowboy logic, every cowboy's got it

He's got a simple solution to just about anything

If it's a job, do it. Put your back in to it.

'Cause a little bit of dirt's gonna wash off in the rain

If it's a horse, ride it. If it hurts, hide it.

Dust yourself off and get back on again.