The Pine Tar Game by Filip Bondy

Author:Filip Bondy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

16

The Ninth

“I wanted that pitch to be buried in his neck. He beat me. I don’t know how he got the barrel of his bat on that ball.”

—Goose Gossage

George Brett knew about the pine tar, and he had a fairly good notion about the rule. Despite some hedging that day and in years to come, Brett understood full well that his precious seven-grain bat was in violation of the pine tar rule. There is a witness to his premeditation. Dean Vogelaar, the Royals’ public relations director at the time, was at the batting cage with Brett just days earlier in Toronto, before the Royals headed to New York for their next series. “I’d probably remember this moment better than George,” Vogelaar said. “George showed me the bat. He showed me the pine tar on it. He was going to keep using it, he said, but had some concern about it. He wondered how much longer he would be able to get away with it.”

Umpires had warned him, and there was no hiding the fact that Brett was a complete pine tar mess, Exhibit A in a baseball court of law. Most batters have certain habits they rely on when they step to the plate. Sometimes these are superstitious rituals, sometimes these are muscle memory cues. Brett routinely massaged the barrel of his bat before placing his left foot first into the batter’s box. The pine tar would get all over his left hand and then he often would tip his batting helmet with that hand and the helmet would get all gunked up from the pine tar. That stuff was everywhere, all over Brett, a launderer’s nightmare. So there may have been some cold-blooded calculation involved in the unlawful use of this bat, even if the crime was ultimately petty. And while Brett might have known he was guilty of stretching the rules in this matter, he seemed largely unaware of the potential consequences for such misconduct.

Brett’s bat only grew more illegal during this weekend series against the Yankees, from additional pine tar applications. The home team actually supplied Brett with the stuff as part of the pregame routine. Pete Sheehy, equipment manager for the Yankees since 1927, delivered a can of pine tar to the Royals on that fateful Sunday morning, along with rosin bags and other sticky tools of the trade. Sheehy had begun providing pine tar to teams around the early 1970s, when it suddenly came into fashion. “Babe and the others, they didn’t use such stuff as pine tar and batting gloves and things like that,” Sheehy said, with some disdain. “They just swung the bat.”

Bats were still being swung on this summer Sunday afternoon, from both sides of the plate. It was now the fateful ninth inning, the Yanks were up by a fragile 4–3 score. If this game were played today, then surely the bullpen closer would be called in to pitch the ninth. Goose Gossage hadn’t appeared the day before and had only thrown to two batters in the previous three days.

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