Matt Capps
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
At Don Drysdale's funeral, an emotional Bob Uecker began telling the assembled mourners about "the first time Don touched me." Then, he interrupted himself.
"Well, here, I can just show ya," the former catcher said. "See this mark right here?"
Yeah, that's where Drysdale drilled him, right in the neck. Fastball that "got away."
Drysdale hit 154 batters in his brilliant Dodgers' career, very, very few of them by accident.
The alleged relevance of all that is only a modest attempt at dragging some historical pitching perspective to the situation regarding Pirates reliever Matt Capps, who now finds himself facing a four-game suspension for stinging Milwaukee slugger Prince Fielder with a pitch Saturday night in Wisconsin.
Though both were ejected, Capps and Pirates manager Jim Tracy are now on record as saying Capps was not trying to hit Fielder with the pitch.
Well, I'm sorry to hear that.
Fielder should have been purposely and purposefully plunked, as the Brewers were well into a third night of a series in which their hitters were imperceptibly less comfortable than in batting practice. When opposition hitters are happily digging in with impunity, consistently putting violent, measured strokes on pitches like the one J.J. Hardy launched for a three-run homer off Capps to build a 6-2 lead, that's the time when someone needs to be spun with a pitch.
It happened to be Fielder.
Though it now gets feverishly debated and ridiculously adjudicated, this kind of behavior used to come under a simple heading. I believe it was, umm, baseball.
(Capps' suspension, for the record, is ludicrous. Would baseball suspend a starting pitcher for 20 games for the same transgression? That's the impact of a four-game suspension on a top reliever.)
From the standpoint of sheer competitiveness, the only thing more deflating than the notion that Capps hit Fielder accidently, at least from the Pirates' perspective, is that the Brewers did not retaliate in Fielder's name. That calls for the inference that Milwaukee manager Ned Yost found the Pirates so non-threatening as a competitive entity that there was simply no point in defending anyone's honor.
Maybe this is what comes from being so far removed from a winning summer, a lingering unfamiliarity with the winning's more subtle dimensions. More likely, what we saw in Milwaukee is just another example of the way the primary dynamic between pitcher and hitter has changed over the years. The primary dynamic used to be fear.
"You have to make the batter afraid of the ball, or anyway, aware that he can get hurt," Sal Maglie told Roger Kahn for his book, "The Head Game." "A lot of pitchers think they do that by throwing at a hitter when the count is two strikes and no balls. The trouble there is that the knockdown is expected. You don't scare a guy by knocking him down when he knows he's going to be knocked down. A good time is when the count is two and two. He's looking to swing. You knock him down then and he gets up shaking. Now curve him and you have your out."
Maglie pitched in the '50s and earned the nickname "The Barber" for the close shaves his pitches offered. A generation later, while hitters might no longer have "expected" the knockdown, a pitch that created substantial discomfort was still a highly useful method of intimidation.
In the 1980 World Series, with the Kansas City Royals leading Game Four, 5-1, and fully capable of leveling the tournament at two games each, Philadelphia Phillies' reliever Dickie Noles screwed American League batting champion George Brett into the Missouri dirt with a high fastball of obvious intent.
1954 Bowman
Seventy-two hours later, Phillies manager Dallas Green, analyzing the first world championship in the history of the franchise relative to unheralded Dickie Noles, said, "All I know is that after that pitch, the Royals only scored four runs in [the remaining] 22 innings [of the series]. You figure it out."
Today, of course, hitters are a lot harder to intimidate.
Barry Bonds, already built like a guest house through highly dubious means, was seen getting ready for a pinch-hit appearance on Sunday Night Baseball this week by strapping on enough armor to make him an extra in Braveheart II. Body armor is common among batters, as is the movement toward the plate in mid-swing rather than toward the mound. Today's hitter is highly insulted by the inside pitch, which doesn't mean that a well-placed insult isn't occasionally called for. This Pirates' pitching staff, to its detriment, remains annoyingly polite.
(Gene Collier can be reached at gcollier@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1283.)
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