The Art of Baseball: Clubhouse confidential

"When I was a kid, I thought the players all lived in the clubhouse. I never thought they had homes or wives or anything like that. I thought the game ended and they all went inside the dugout and back into the clubhouse, where they all lived together. ... Mickey Mantle went home after the game? Lived in a house? Come on."

— Joe Sambito, Former major-league pitcher, 1987.

Sambito was right. You can live in a clubhouse.

"Don Zimmer was born in a clubhouse," said Jim Bouton, former major-league pitcher — and just try to prove him wrong.

When he served as Mariners coach in 1979-80, Bill Mazeroski, a future Hall of Famer, indeed lived in Seattle's home clubhouse at the Kingdome, concluding that the facilities available there beat any hotel he could find.

"He used to tell me that there was a keg of beer on ice, cable TV, a full refrigerator of goodies, and a big lawn out there he didn't have to mow," said Dave Heaverlo, a former major-league pitcher who was a member of the Mariners in 1980. "What else did he need?"

With a true ballplayer's sensibility, Heaverlo captured the appeal of the clubhouse lifestyle.

"Where else can you run around naked, scratch, and play cards?" Heaverlo said dreamily. "It's our sanctuary."

A few years after Mazeroski, Mariners manager Rene Lachemann also lived part of the time in the M's clubhouse at the Kingdome. He was house-sitting in Enumclaw, facing an hour-plus drive home after games, so on late nights he often concluded it was easier to stay in the clubhouse.

"They had a nice couch in there, a whirlpool, showers, 10 TVs," he said. "I had everything. It was very convenient."

The clubhouse is baseball's biosphere, a self-contained world where players lounge, bond, fight, play, eat, kibbitz, give each other "hot feet" and occasionally knock over a table of food in fits of rage.

They spend more time in these confined quarters than they do on the field — more time, often, than they do in their own homes. One of the supreme compliments in baseball, thus, is to be "a great guy in the clubhouse," because more teams have been brought down by internal bickering than by poor fielding or untimely hitting.

"It's too long a season to be butting heads," said Fred Lynn, a 17-year major-leaguer. "The chemistry inside the clubhouse has to be good, or else someone has to go."

Lynn began his career in Boston in 1974, during an era when it was said of the Red Sox that 25 players left their clubhouse in 25 cabs.

As plush and well-equipped are the new wave of clubhouses, with more amenities than the ritziest resort, and a staff to cater to a player's every need, it's a wonder anyone wants to leave.

"The clubhouses today are like Club Med," said broadcaster Joe Garagiola Sr., who played in the major leagues from 1946 to '54. "It used to be two nails; that was your locker."

For a baseball player, who often shows up at 2 p.m., sometimes even earlier, for a 7 p.m. game and stays until midnight, the clubhouse serves as restaurant (two, sometimes three meals a day are served) and church (chapel services are held every Sunday).

It can be a health club (state-of-the-art weight rooms, saunas, even massage therapists are on site), a courtroom (kangaroo courts are a time-honored source of clubhouse camaraderie) and a living room (big-screen televisions, state-of-the-art sound systems and leather couches are ubiquitous).

Said former Mariners pitcher Roy Thomas in an e-mail: "It's like the holding tank prior to the lineup. Inside the sanctuary, you can behave as you wish, yet on the outside, you must 'toe the line.' It's like the den at home. You can sit around in your underwear and watch TV, spill Cheetos on the carpet, and 'mark' your fiefdom. Yet in the end you still have to go outside and mow the lawn."

The very name speaks volumes. Other sports have locker rooms; baseball players have clubhouses, with all that the title connotes — the opulence of a tony country club, and the goofiness of that treehouse you played in with your buddies.

"The clubhouse is one of the seductions of baseball," Reggie Jackson wrote in his autobiography, "Reggie," in 1984. "It is a place where you don't have to grow up."

But sometimes you have to wake up, whether you're relief ace Lee Smith, who would catch a few Z's in the clubhouse during the early innings of games, or Lachemann, who would routinely sleep in the clubhouse when he managed in the minor leagues.

That led to one memorable incident in Spokane when he was sound asleep on the clubhouse floor at Indians Stadium.

"I wake up, there's a cop standing there with a gun pointed right at my throat, and a growling German shepherd next to him, teeth bared," Lachemann said. "I had left the door open, and they thought someone was in there robbing the place."

Usually, the most dangerous occurrence in a clubhouse is some sort of hysterically diabolical prank, of which baseball players are the acknowledged masters. From the hot foot (lighting another's shoelaces aflame) to that revered classic, heating balm in the jockstrap, a player learns quickly he is never quite safe in the clubhouse.

Certainly not when a player or manager flies into a rage, as happens periodically during the course of a long, often frustrating season.

Dodgers pitcher Kevin Brown, a legendary snapper, once destroyed a toilet with a bat after a flush caused his shower to turn scalding hot.

Albert Belle was another short-tempered star, as Cleveland teammate Omar Vizquel discovered to his horror. In his autobiography, "Omar! My Life On and Off the Field," Vizquel wrote of Belle: "If he was struggling at the plate, you didn't want to be anywhere near him. He would come back to the clubhouse and just start trashing stuff.

"He'd take a bat to a nice spread of food ... to the thermostat on the wall ... to anything he laid his eyes on."

You see the darndest things in the clubhouse. Pitcher Frank La Corte of the Houston Astros was so upset by a performance that he came in and set his uniform on fire. Sparky Lyle of the Yankees was noted for sitting naked on top of birthday cakes.

Every season is sure to be enlivened by a clubhouse fight or three. Some of the pairings have become part of baseball legend — Rob Dibble and Lou Piniella, Goose Gossage and Cliff Johnson, Will Clark and Jeffrey Leonard, Chad Curtis and Kevin Mitchell.

Dodger stars Steve Garvey and Don Sutton tangled viciously in 1978 after Garvey read quotes from Sutton implying he was a phony — but that didn't stop Garvey from attending the ceremony years later when Sutton's number was retired by the Dodgers.

The Oakland A's of the early 1970s — one of the few teams in history for which bad clubhouse chemistry seemed to motivate, rather than destroy — were famous for their clubhouse brawls, including one between relief ace Rollie Fingers and starting pitcher Blue Moon Odom on the day before the World Series. It got to the point that players would barely look up when a fight broke out in the clubhouse.

The Mariners had their own memorable clubhouse scrape in 1998 when Randy Johnson became infuriated with the volume of David Segui's music (a common source of friction), and the two went at it. Segui wound up on the disabled list with a back injury.

Just as clubhouses can be places of intense anger, however, they can also be places of unfettered joy. When the Minnesota Twins won the World Series in 1991, they hunkered down for a night of revelry in their clubhouse, drinking champagne, singing songs, and smoking cigars until sunrise. A similar scene occurred in the Mariners' Kingdome clubhouse after their unforgettable victory over the Yankees in the 1995 Division Series.

"It seemed like we were there all night long," said Henry Genzale, the M's long-time clubhouse manager.

A certain code of conduct governs clubhouse life. Perhaps the grossest violation occurred in the spring of 2002, when the Yankees' Ruben Rivera was released after it was discovered he had stolen a bat and glove from the locker of teammate Derek Jeter and sold them to a memorabilia dealer.

"That's just taboo, an unwritten rule that can't be broken," Lynn said. "You've got to go to battle with these guys, and you have to trust them."

Clubhouses used to be dank, cramped places, with Spartan accommodations and rudimentary food service. Now, says, Jeremy Bryant, the Mariners' personal chef at Safeco Field, "Almost every night, we do Thanksgiving dinner." And the facilities, with the exception of the few remaining ballpark antiques, such as Fenway Park and Wrigley Field, are huge and impeccably appointed,

It's easy to pinpoint when it all began to change — in 1989, when the Toronto Blue Jays moved into the SkyDome, with the first of the expansive (12,000 square feet), luxury-laden clubhouses.

With the advent of Camden Yards in 1992, the opulence factor increased exponentially, and the world of clubhouses was never quite the same.

Since the ballpark boom of the 1990s, stadium architect Joe Spears told Sports Illustrated, the standard size of clubhouses has ballooned from 3,000 square feet for visitors and 6,000-8,000 square feet for the home team, to 6,000 square feet for the visitors and 15,000-20,000 square feet for the home team.

Some managers, in fact, fear that clubhouses have become too opulent for their own good, leading to periodic punishments such as that administered two years ago by Cleveland's Charlie Manuel, who ordered the Indians' ping-pong table and several cushy leather couches removed.

A prominent player usually has two, sometimes three, lockers for his personal use, and the superstars can take it much further, such as the black leather recliner that Barry Bonds has at his locker in San Francisco or Ken Griffey Jr.'s easy chair in Seattle.

Players have so much idle time in the clubhouse that they have come to covet the creature comforts. And the increased time in the clubhouse ideally leads to the forging of strong relationships. The clubhouse is really one of the most successful examples of human social bonding to be found, bringing together people of disparate racial, cultural and economic backgrounds into a more-or-less cohesive group.

"It's interesting — when you mix the personalities together, the nationalities, the backgrounds, how they grew up, where they grew up, in a lot of situations, the only thing they have in common with a teammate may be that they play baseball," said Sambito, now an agent.

"In real life, these are people you may never socialize with, but you're brought together because you happen to be excellent at the same thing, and told you have to travel and be with the guy for seven months of the year."

In that context, it's amazing clubhouses are as functional as they are. One bonding tool is undoubtedly the ability to unite against a common enemy — the other team, certainly; or, often, the media.

This is a peculiar element of clubhouses, one that distinguishes it from, say, your everyday ritzy health club. Though they are commonly viewed by ballplayers, as Sambito put it, as "our safe havens," each day they are infiltrated by an army of reporters who have access to players for 3-½ hours before each game, and again immediately afterward.

It can be a surreal sight — players going about their pregame business of reading newspapers, signing memorabilia, playing cards, doing crossword puzzles, chatting, watching television and the like, while reporters lurk around them, waiting for an opening to approach for an interview or informal chat.

And the numbers of reporters have grown exponentially with each decade. With the advent of electronic media, Internet reporters and the foreign press, it is not uncommon for reporters to outnumber players — sometimes by a 3-to-1 margin, or much higher in the postseason.

"It's a private place; but when they come in, it's no longer private," long-time Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda said.

Another important dynamic was added in the late 1970s, when a historic court ruling opened the clubhouse to women reporters. But what once sent players into a furor and caused cries of "Woman in the clubhouse!" to echo through the room is now, more than two decades later, scarcely noted.

"The worst part was trying to explain it to my wife," said Heaverlo, who played in the early days of female reporters in the clubhouse. "But most of the women were extremely professional."

One of the cherished codes of the clubhouse is expressed in a sign that used to be commonplace: "What we say here, what you see here, let it stay here, when you leave here."

That covenant was broken most explicitly, and unabashedly, by Bouton, who opened a curtain into the behind-the-scenes life of ballplayers in, "Ball Four." Not that he's in any way apologetic.

"I violated the sanctity of the clubhouse," he said. "Otherwise, the book wouldn't have been any fun. There's similar signs at the CIA, and those guys aren't shutting up because of it.

"If those meetings were not ever written about, there's a lot we wouldn't know about, and not just baseball. Old-boy clubhouses, political networks. Golf clubhouses. These are places that need to be violated."

Maybe so. But it's hard to deny that baseball clubhouses are nice places to visit — and you would want to live there.

Larry Stone: 206-464-3146 or lstone@seattletimes.com