“If the old-fashioned Headhunter wanted you hit on the thigh, he’d hit you on the thigh. If he felt like buzzing one near your ear (but not actually hitting you), then your ear would be buzzed.”
Don Drysdale is dead – literally and figuratively.
Drysdale died in the literal form in July, 1993, suffering a fatal heart attack in a Montreal hotel room. Right smack in the middle of yet another baseball season that he was broadcasting.
But Drysdale, I submit, is now dead in a more abstract way.
Big D was among the last of the Headhunters. His was a breed of pitcher who exacted vengeance and was just crazy enough to make sure a cloud of fear hovered over the batter’s box.
Orlando Cepeda may have said it best about Drysdale.
“The key to going against Drysdale,” the man known as The Baby Bull once said of his National League nemesis, “is to hit him before he hits you.”
And there’s this, from Mike Shannon, another fellow NLer back in the 1960s: “Drysdale looked at the intentional walk as a waste of three pitches. If he wanted to put you on base, he’d just hit you, using one pitch instead of four.”
Pitchers like Drysdale, and fellow Dodger Stan Williams, and a lefty named Ray Sadecki, and right-hander Dick Radatz, whose nickname was, oh-so-appropriately, “The Monster”, didn’t just take the mound – they claimed it. And, while they were at it, they annexed some of the batter’s box, too.
There were a bunch of these Headhunters back in the day. They were like the enforcers in hockey; just about every club had one on its roster. Their job was to keep the hitters honest. If one of their teammates got brushed back or knocked down, the Headhunters were expected to swing into action. And everyone knew it. In Drysdale’s case, he wasn’t shy to advertise his intentions. Those intentions resulted in 154 hit batsmen – the most in big league history.
The Dodgers and Giants have always been fierce rivals, but perhaps never more so than in the fabulous sixties, when Drysdale, Williams, and Johnny Podres wore Dodger Blue, and Juan Marichal, Gaylord Perry, and Sadecki toiled for the Giants.
“My rule is ‘Two for One’,” Drysdale made sure to say when everyone was listening. “For every Dodgers teammate of mine that goes down, two Giants are going down. And they won’t be .220 hitters, either.”
These were the Giants that Drysdale was talking about, and these were Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, and Cepeda, The Baby Bull. Not a .220 hitter in that lot. And it was they – the Giants’ biggest stars – to which Big D ominously referred.
There wasn’t much being said from the Giants’ hitters about Drysdale’s Two For One Special.
That’s because it was accepted. Some men hunt deer. Drysdale hunted hitters.
The Yankees, in the early-1960s, employed a relief pitcher named Ryne Duren. Duren was half-blind, and a drunk. He’d amble in from the bullpen, with his Coke bottle glasses, and it was anyone’s guess if he was still tipsy from the night before – or from between games, if this was the second contest of a doubleheader.
Duren, at the urging of his teammates, would sometimes throw his first warm-up pitch as fast as he could – about 15 feet over the catcher’s head. The inference was clear and deliberate: “I have no idea where the ball might be going today, my friend.”
Drysdale: batter, look out!
The Headhunter – the anointed one in charge of metering out justice, frontier style – is no longer. Today’s beanballers are raw, inexperienced, rogue versions of the kind who deftly determined when and where and how hard a hitter should be plunked. So precise was their motives, so well-timed, that the ball they hurled that was destined for the brim of the helmet or the hip or the knee was called “the purpose pitch.”
There is no Drysdale anymore. No Early Wynn, who bragged that he’d knock down his own grandmother if she was crowding the plate. No Dizzy Dean, who was once so incensed by a hitter’s determination in digging his spikes in the batter’s box that Dizzy yelled to him, “Dig yourself a nice hole, son – cuz ole Diz is gonna BURY you in it!”
There isn’t any pitcher today who truly has a reputation of being his team’s policeman when it comes to “purpose pitches.” The Tigers, who have a roster filled with about as many nice guys as you’ll ever see assembled in the big leagues, don’t have anyone even remotely in the vicinity of Headhunter. Randy Johnson, the behemoth lefty, was once feared – but that was as much for his involuntary wildness, if not more so, than because of some sort of planned madness.
Something else that made the Headhunter a breed apart was that those types were rarely, if ever, charged at by an enraged hitter. If someone like Stan Williams, who was as mean of a son of a bitch as anyone who ever stood atop a pitcher’s mound, pasted a baseball on your flexor, well then that was just tough. Stan had himself a reason – a “purpose” – for such aggressive behavior, and the hitter pretty much just trotted to first base, bruised but with his on-base percentage increased.
So long ago was the heyday of the baseball Headhunter that gone are even those who taught that skill at the low minor league level. By the time the pitchers of today reach the bigs, some fancy themselves as self-taught Headhunters, when they are merely rank amateurs instead. If the old-fashioned Headhunter wanted you hit on the thigh, he’d hit you on the thigh. If he felt like buzzing one near your ear (but not actually hitting you), then your ear would be buzzed. I wouldn’t place such trust into the hands of today’s wannabes, for they are like Ryne Duren, sans the shtick: they truly have no idea where the ball is going.
“Facing Don Drysdale,” Pirates infielder Dick Groat once said, “is like making an appointment with a dentist.”
The analogy is apt. For dentists and Headhunters both drill you.
Apologists for the “brush-back” make me sick! They are apologizing for assault with a deadly weapon. Greg Eno is one such sicko. He actually bemoans the lack of “head hunters since Don Drysdale retired. Back when men were men, “If the old-fashioned Headhunter wanted you hit on the thigh, he’d
hit you on the thigh. If he felt like buzzing one near your ear (but not actually hitting you), then your ear would be buzzed.” Drydale who hit 154 players while in the major, was viewed nostalgically. He was the enforcer. “For every Dodgers teammate
of mine that goes down, two Giants are going down.” “Some men hunt deer. Drysdale hunted hitters.”
I played baseball for a long time, from the 4th grade through College. Not once did I see anyone hit in the head by a pitcher. As a catcher, I would not have ever considered it right to call for a pitch deliberately high and inside. None of my pitchers
ever threw such a pitch, and I played with and against quite a few future major leaguers.
It’s all too clear that Major Legaue pitchers often throw their fastest pitches, some approaching 100 MPH, deliberately high and inside. They are in the major leagues because they can control where their pitches go. Anyone who thinks the major league pitcher who throws a bean-ball did not deliberately throw the ball at the batter’s head is living in fantasyland. This aggressive, willingness to kill or maim, to intimidate
and win no matter the cost, is applauded by all too many Neanderthal sports writers. Needless to say, winning by bean sets a terrible example for the kids who think professional baseball is the epitomy of American sport.
Bean ball pitches can and have killed batters. Brain damage from the concussion of a beaning could disable a person for life. The plastic helmuts batters wear are too thin. They offer too little protection from a dead-on 90+ MPH fastball that squarely hits the area just opposite the skull. Sadly, this is exactly what happened to the Padres Edgar Gonzalez on Saturday night, July 18th. Gonzalez’s only offense was being the brother of the National League’s Home Run leaders. Gonzalez was bean-balled by a 93 MPH fast ball thrown by Colorado’s Jason Hammel.
“SAN DIEGO — Padres second baseman Edgar Gonzalez remained
hospitalized Sunday with dizziness after he was he was hit in the head by a 93 mph pitch Saturday night. Gonzalez did not have a skull fracture or a concussion but complained of dizziness and ringing in his ears, San Diego manager Bud Black said. “They might do the same tests again, sort of a follow up just to make sure,” Black said. “There’s a lot of good signs.” Black said
Gonzalez still does not have 100 percent of his hearing back. Gonzalez’s return is uncertain. “I think you have to wait and see,” Black said. “We’ll have to wait for the doctor’s evaluation.”
( http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5h8z7mu-_nPa5UnydUS5QgngEK4vwD99HNDKO0 )
Why do you think it is that he Commissioner of Baseball and the owners of the major league baseball teams never penalize pitchers who throw bean-balls? Such games could be forfeited. Bean-balling pitchers could be suspended and their million dollar salaries docked. No one demands this. Why is this? The
truth is bean-balling and the “brush-back” are now an inherent
part of American major league baseball. Cut-throat intimidation and win-at-any-cost competitiveness is celebrated not challenged. No wonder America spends more on its military
than all the rest of the world combined. No wonder America has 160 foreign bases overseas. Aggressive, dangerous intimidation has become as American as apple-pie and baseball. And what is worse? Now Japanese and Chinese teams regularly encourage this dangerous practice. Nice going America! You’ve taught the world the fine art of bean-balling!
[...] may sound savage but it used to be a big part of baseball. There were a species of pitchers called headhunters who acted like the enforcers on hockey teams. If you tried any bullshit up to and through the [...]