It takes hard men to play hardball

Sporting News, The, April 7, 1997 by Michael Knisley

When it comes to throwing 97-mph pitches or standing in the batter's box trying to hit the, the timid need not apply

These are hard men who play this game. Bob Gibson, in spring training with the Cardinals to work with the pitchers, tells a story about Ernie Banks, baseball's best goodwill ambassador during the 1950s and and '60s. Gibson says he grew weary of hearing Banks bark at him one afternoon Wrigley Field, so he plunked Mr. Cub in the shoulder with a fastball and put an end to it. Banks didn't bark again.

T.J. Mathews of the Cardinals, a reliever, wakes up on the ornery side of bed one morning a couple of weeks back and decides he has heard enough from the Reds. Cincinnati thinks St. Louis is arrogant. St. Louis thinks Cincinnati should mind its own business. So Mathews plunks Bret Boone with a pitch and says, "I just felt like hitting somebody." (The Card's Tom Pagnozzi had been struck by a pitch an inning earlier in a day of unpleasantries.)

In the middle of March, Randy Johnson flings a 97-mph fastball into J.T. Snow's face, then goes back out to the pitcher's mound five days later to throw more 97-mph.

Snow's father, Jack was one held of a wide receiver in his day, first at Notre Dame and then with the Los Angeles Rams. He spent 11 years of his life running pass patterns in the NFL, which means he went over the middle and smacked full speed into a strong safety on a regular basis. But Jack Snow never smacked full speed into a 97-mph fastball from Randy Johnson and stepped back into a batter's box to hit live pitching again two weeks late, as his son did. That's harder.

It takes a hard man to play this game.

Snow never lost consciousness during the half-four he was on the ground over home plate, bleeding and yowling. His left eye socket was fractured. His eyelid needed stitches. Stitches in his eyelid! This is how he makes his living.

"I think the best thing to do is just get back in three and continue where you left off," Snow says of his return to regular duty with the Giants, which might come sooner than anyone expected. "I just look at this as part of the game. Anything can happen in this game. You can't go back up there scared or intimidated or have any fear."

Gibson says he never worried about hurting a hitter with a pitch. He says it is as much of the responsibility if the hitter to get out of the way of the ball as it is the responsibility of the pitcher to get the ball out of the way of the hitter.

Randy Johnson isn't like Bob Gibson. Johnston stayed with Snow at home plate until the ambulance arrived. Johnson worries.

"I felt extremely bad for him, he says. "I was kneeling in a puddle of blood and the guy was screaming. It alarms me when I throw that hard and I hurt somebody. I've known all along that you don't have to throw 97 miles an hour to hurt somebody out there. I don't know if people understand this. I don't throw inside very often. It alarms me quite a bit to have to throw inside. I do occasionally, but it's usually down toward the knees, or at the belt. And even then, I get a little leery about throwing inside.

"But I know I have to do that to be effective. If hitters knew I was never going to throw inside, they'd be on top of the plate. They would never be worried up there. And I don't ever want them to think that they don't need to be worried. They do need to be worried. Any time you can put a little fear in a batter before he even comes up to the plate ... I think that's the kind of scenario that people have with me. I throw hard and I can be a little erratic, so they come up to the plate and they're a little worried."

Brett Butler us a hard baseball man, too. Butler's hand was broken last September by a pitch from the Red's Giovanni Carrara. Anybody who comes back to the game at age 39 after a season of throat-cancer treatment and a hand fracture is a hard, hard man. But Butler isn't stupid. He will take himself out of the lineup if Johnson pitches against the Dodgers in an interleague game this summer. He is worried.

"If someone says, `Hey, you're gutless,' I'll says, `You know, you're right,'" Butler said to a Los Angeles newspaperman after he watched the videotape of Johnson's pitch to Snow.

That's how it works.

In the 1993 All-Star Game, Johnson unintentionally slipped a fastball to John Kruk a foot or two behind Kruk's head. It was a comic moment, thanks to Kruk's showmanship. Johnson was embarrassed by the pitch and didn't want to talk about it later. Kruk talked about it all night long.

On the next three pitches that night in Baltimore, Kruk struck out with swings like grandma used to take. That's how it works too.

A day or two after Mathews plunked the Red's Boone, the Cardinals play Houston in another exhibition. Mathews comes on in relief again. He doesn't feel like hitting anybody in this game, but the word is out. From the bench, the Astros ride him hard. They call him a "headhunter." It will stick, even though his pitch to Boone was a slider, not a fastball. He's a headhunter now. Hitters should worry. His career is boosted.