Them's Fightin' Words

-- TAKE ME OUT to the brawl game. Charge the pitcher. Clear the benches. Violate baseball's unwritten rules on conduct, and tempers can erupt. But the fights that have become an unofficial fabric of the sport often produce more comedy than KOs.

When Rex Hudler was playing for the St. Louis Cardinals, his team wound up on the field mixing it up with the Pittsburgh Pirates over some long-forgotten grievance.

It was a typical baseball fight, heavy on posturing and light on real fisticuffs, and at one point Hudler found himself on the bottom of a huge scrum, pinning down bulky Pirates catcher Mike LaValliere but unable to move because of the 10 people piled on top of him.

LaValliere began screaming, "Get off me, you're killing my shoulder."

Hudler, whose head was conveniently immobilized next to LaValliere's ear, kept whispering to him, "You're going to take it, Spanky, and you're going to like it."

Thus it is with baseball fights, that strangest, yet most strangely compelling, of baseball rituals. As comical as they can appear from afar (and as occasionally brutal as they can be from within), they serve an undeniable role in the often dysfunctional social milieu of baseball. The sound and fury really does signify something.

Baseball is a game that has, over its century-plus of existence, built a complex code of behavior that would send Miss Manners screaming for the hills. Fights are baseball's way of enforcing perceived violations of that murky etiquette, whether it be over the legitimacy of an inside pitch, the appropriateness of stealing a base with one's team holding a large lead, or the exaggerated slowness of a home-run trot.

(Perception is the key word. As Mariner catcher Tom Lampkin said, "Those unwritten rules are unwritten for a reason. Some people think they should be like that, some don't. One reason there are fights is, people have different interpretations of those unwritten rules.")

Another vital reason, as spelled out by Mariner pitching coach Stan Williams: "In the old days, my era, pitchers owned the plate. Today, hitters think they own the plate. I think what causes a lot of the problem is dispute over territory. Just like world affairs."

And we all know how easy those are to unravel. So even though baseball's power barons will pontificate every so often about reducing fights (or, as they are inevitably referred to in the newspaper, bench-clearing brawls), in the end, the brass find themselves as pinned down as LaValliere. They take it, and if they do not exactly like it, they haven't figured out a way to stop it.

This season has been no different. In April, the Mariners found themselves in the middle of a classic brouhaha in Anaheim when Angel catcher Todd Greene charged the mound after being hit by a pitch from Mariner rookie Brett Hinchliffe, who presumably was responding to the fact that Ken Griffey Jr. had been hit earlier in the game, which no doubt had something to do with an incident the day before, which might have dated to an earlier fight in spring training - which might have dated to the Pleistocene era.

"Sometimes it's hard to trace the root of these things," said Bob Brenly, a former major-league catcher. "The grudge can date back to the minor leagues, or even college."

Another typical fight occurred this year in Cleveland when Jim Thome charged Boston pitcher Rheal Cormier, the aftermath of a beanball war earlier in the game involving Darren Lewis and Jaret Wright. It turns out that Thome and Cormier are hunting buddies, and after the game Cormier spotted Thome and his wife, Andrea, standing outside Fenway Park waiting for a cab. Cormier offered a ride, and on the way back to the hotel, the two made up.

That's another typical aspect of baseball fights. With notable exceptions, the protagonists are the ones most likely to walk away unscathed, because they are the quickest to be restrained. There's an old joke that the safest place to be in the middle of a baseball fight is in the fight itself. The bystanders and peacemakers are a whole other issue.

"It's dangerous, because guys are big and strong, and the most dangerous element is that guys are wearing steel cleats," said Dan Plesac, Toronto relief pitcher. "You fall, another guy falls, and inevitably you get in the way of someone's foot. You get your face cut or your fingers cut. It can be serious."

Dodger outfielder Carl Furillo was leading the league in hitting in 1953 when he broke his hand in a fight with the New York Giants, ending his season. Bill Lee was never the same after the Red Sox pitcher's left shoulder was injured when Graig Nettles dropped him during a brawl with the Yankees. Mariner pitcher Chris Bosio reinjured a broken collarbone during Seattle's memorable 1993 melee with the Orioles, sparked by Mike Mussina hitting Bill Haselman.

But the fighting itself often resembles the description given by Ron Fairly, a 21-year major-leaguer, of a slap fight between Maury Wills and Dick Schofield: "a bad waltz . . . both dugouts started laughing. It was too entertaining to stop."

Bill Rigney has been observing baseball for more than 50 years, which means that he has seen hundreds of enactments of the bench-clearing brawl. The pugilism still amuses him.

"Baseball players are the worst fighters I've seen in my entire life," said a laughing Rigney, who played for the New York Giants, managed the Giants, Angels and Twins, and now is an advisor to the Oakland A's. "The guy charging the mound is thinking, `What the hell do I do now that I'm here?' "

Plesac still laughs about the aftermath of one Brewers fight, when catcher Charlie O'Brien was critiquing the video in the clubhouse. O'Brien was mocking teammates who had been pushed down when all of a sudden the video showed O'Brien getting shoved airborne by an opponent, landing ingloriously right in the middle of the pile. "We didn't let him hear the end of it," Plesac said.

Jim Bouton, in his classic book "Ball Four," describes baseball fights as "20 or 30 guys mostly just pulling and shoving each other. The two guys who started it have so many guys piled on top of them, they couldn't reach for a subway token, much less fight."

During one fight between Bouton's Seattle Pilots and his former team, the Yankees, he describes how he hooked up with a good friend, Yankee pitcher Fritz Peterson, to stage a phony battle.

" `How's your wife?' I said. `Give me a fake punch to the ribs.'

" `She's fine,' he said. `You can punch me in the stomach. Not too hard.' "

Hudler definitely belongs to the Bouton school of fistic indifference. "Brawls are serious things, but when you're an off-center character like me, you grab one of your buddies and fake fight," he said. "I was a lover, not a fighter."

Occasionally, though, the outcome of brawls will be brutal, and the image lingers over time, as when Juan Marichal attacked John Roseboro's skull with a bat, or Andre Dawson, dripping blood from an Eric Show pitch that broke his jaw, went after Show with malice aforethought before Show retreated, sprinting into the safety of the Padres' clubhouse.

Said Mariner pitcher Jamie Moyer, a teammate of Dawson's with the Cubs, "Andre was a very soft-spoken man, a gentleman, but I'll tell you what: If he had gotten hold of Show, I don't know what would have happened."

More often, the description that applies is that of Williams, who was involved in more than a few scrapes as a fabled knockdown pitcher for the Dodgers and other teams in the 1950s and '60s: "Most of them are dances, where guys go out and hug each other."

Most of them. Sometimes, they escalate out of control, as did the legendary 1984 melee between the Padres and Braves that former San Diego outfielder Kurt Bevacqua called "the Desert Storm of baseball fights." Twelve players, both managers, two coaches and five fans were ejected, and Padres Manager Dick Williams was fined $10,000.

"When all that testosterone starts flying," Moyer said, "it can get crazy."

In the Braves-Padres fight, Bob Horner was in the center of it, which wouldn't be unusual, except that Horner had been on the disabled list for weeks, and was dressed in street clothes in the press box when the game started. After the first of several incidents, he hurried down to the clubhouse to pull on his uniform, highlighting one ironclad rule of brawling: Everyone participates (or at least pretends to).

"You see guys slip on their uniform pants over their underwear, pull their jacket on and go running out with cleats and no socks," Brenly said. "In that huge Padres-Braves fight, Ed Whitson came out of the training room with shorts and shower shoes. He still had ice on his shoulder, and he wound up going after a fan."

Ask Hudler about flying testosterone. During one brawl, he was acting as a peacemaker, trying to pull Astros catcher Craig Biggio off the back of Expos teammate Spike Owen, who had charged the mound.

"I was hanging on to the straps of Biggio's chest protector, going `Heave ho, heave ho,' trying to get leverage," Hudler recalled. "It was like a rubber band fully stretched, and finally it broke. He came off the pile, and because of the momentum, I threw him over my head and body-slammed him. I said (to myself), `Hud, that's awesome. Let's do it again.' It was a blast."

Within the brawl itself exists an honor code of its own. When the Giants and Phillies went at it last year - a fight sparked by Barry Bonds stealing a base with the Giants holding a seven-run lead in the fifth inning - Giants second baseman Jeff Kent called it "a pretty professional brawl, as these things go."

He meant there weren't any cheap shots, no blind blows from behind. There is, after all, honor among thieves, and the protocol was blatantly violated last year by Royals rookie Felix Rodriguez, who sucker-punched Angel infielder Frank Bolick in the face. Rodriguez was immediately demoted to the minor leagues and hasn't been seen since.

"There's a certain etiquette within the brawl," Royals Manager Tony Muser said afterward. "If you're going to hit somebody, you'd hope that person's eyes are on you."

Rigney recalls a game in the 1940s in which Brooklyn's Dixie Walker sucker-punched the Cubs' Lennie Merullo at Wrigley Field. Weeks later, the two teams played at Wrigley Field, and a ring of Cubs surrounded Walker and Merullo.

"They wouldn't let anyone else in," Rigney said. "They said, `You wanted him, Dixie, here he is.' "

Sal Maglie, the former Giant known as "The Barber" for throwing inside pitches close enough to "shave" the hitter's chin, always claimed that throwing at the head was his own attempt to be honorable. "I threw at the head because I knew that a batter could see a pitch up around the face better than he could see a pitch to any other spot," he once said.

Along the same lines, even the nastiest knockdown pitcher observes the unwritten rule that you don't throw behind a hitter's head because his first instinct is to move back, a potentially lethal situation.

Another established fighting rule is that coaches serve as peacemakers, not instigators. Peace was on the mind of Don Zimmer of the Cubs one day in the 1980s, when he sprinted out of his third-base coaching box toward pitcher Mario Soto of the Reds. Soto was sprinting angrily toward an umpire to challenge the allowance of a home run he thought was foul.

"Zimmer tackled Mario with the idea of protecting him from being thrown out of baseball," Williams said. "Well, Soto popped Zimmer. Everyone came out, and it really was a mistaken thing."

Another rule generally observed during a fight is that superstars are off limits. "Star players get protected quickly, by their own team and the umpires," Brenly said. "Baseball brawls are bad enough; nothing good ever comes of them, but if superstars are involved, it's a black mark on the game."

That's why it was so jarring to see Robin Ventura charge Nolan Ryan a few years back (the resulting image of 46-year-old Ryan lassoing Ventura and hammering away at his head is in the Basebrawl Hall of Fame). It's why the Rangers were so aghast when rookie pitcher Danny Leon, asked to even a score against Orioles first baseman Glenn Davis, got Baltimore's players mixed up and hit Cal Ripken Jr. instead.

The latter incident illustrates a basic tenet of baseball policing: an eye for an eye. In the old days, players expected to be knocked down, their own pitcher responded in kind, and often that was the end of it.

"The only time they threw at me was when I was doing something to irritate them, like driving in runs," said Fairly, now a Mariner broadcaster. "The thing I didn't want to do was charge the mound. If they threw at me, I knew my guys would throw at them - and they threw harder than your guys. I had Koufax, Drysdale, Larry Sherry and Stan Williams on my side."

These days, baseball's rules of etiquette are subject to continual alteration. With pitching as weak as it is, for instance, the ban against stealing with a big lead is fading, because leads evaporate so fast. And home-run theatrics are no longer cause for an instant beanball, although Todd Stottlemyre spoke up for pitchers in castigating Sammy Sosa's post-homer bowing.

Again, perception is paramount: Is the player trying to show up the other team? If so, he gets a ball in his ear. Brenly was playing in a game against the Cubs when Keith Moreland, mired in a horrible slump, hit a home run. As he neared the Chicago dugout, the ecstatic Moreland did a full-scale cartwheel.

The Giants laughed along with the Cubs ("Knowing what went into it, it didn't enter our mind to retaliate in any way," Brenly said). But the Brewers felt differently when Deion Sanders, as he crossed the plate after his first major-league home run, stopped to tie his shoe, his posterior pointing out to Milwaukee pitcher Bryan Clutterbuck.

"The repercussions now aren't as bad as they used to be," Williams said. "There were unwritten rules you followed, and it was also unwritten that retribution was automatic."

And usually unquestioned. As Bob Gibson once said, "When I knocked a guy down, there was no second part to the story."

Drysdale, who ranks up with Gibson for nastiness, claimed that only one player ever charged him on the mound. It was Johnny Logan of the Braves - but not after Drysdale hit him with a pitch. Logan did it when Drysdale subsequently hit him with a pickoff throw to first.

"To me, fighting is not the answer," Moyer said. "The answer is the same way Anaheim retaliated after I hit (Troy) Glaus. The next guy hit a grand slam. If that's not enough retaliation right there . . . I mean, that's rubbing it in our face."

And the Mariners had no choice but to take it.