Throwback Thursday: Joe Medwick, Beanballs, and the Source of Baseball's "Code"

To fully understand a harrowing beanball incident that took place 76 years ago, we should probably begin with Bryce Harper. In an interview published in March, Harper offered his opinion that "baseball's tired."

"It's a tired sport, because you can't express yourself. You can't do what people in other sports do… Jose Fernandez will strike you out and stare you down into the dugout and pump his fist. And if you hit a homer and pimp it? He doesn't care. Because you got him. That's part of the game. It's not the old feeling—hoorah… if you pimp a homer, I'm going to hit you right in the teeth. No. If a guy pimps a homer for a game-winning shot… I mean—sorry."

The interview inspired Harper to promote a riff on Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" campaign slogan. "Make Baseball Fun Again" became a full-fledged advertising campaign, winding up on hats and T-shirts. The slogan offers several difficult challenges. First, least important, and most Trumpishly, the interview makes it seem as if the campaign is less about liberating baseball from the conservative code of behavior it evolved over generations and more about the aggrandizement of Harper himself.

"Endorsements, fashion—it's something baseball doesn't see," Harper said. "In soccer, it's Beckham or Ronaldo. In basketball, it's Curry and LeBron. In football, it's Cam. Football and basketball have such good fashion."

The other, bigger problem with the campaign is that it recalls Donald Trump, and that's a catastrophic problem in its own right.

This may seem a harsh inference to make about a slogan and a hat, but remember, the medium is the message. The medium can be a cap, and the message can be the indirect normalization of something that's really about bigotry and mass deportations. Baseball is not just a sport; it's an island in the broader sea of our culture. Sometimes, as with Jackie Robinson, ideas spread from the island outward and play some part in effecting positive change. Often what shows up on the island simply reflects, for good or ill, what's being carried in on the tide. At no time is it just sports.

The final challenge applies only to the culture of the game, and suggests that Harper has greatly underestimated the degree to which baseball, more than football or basketball, is a sport about being humbled. "Make Baseball Fun Again" represents a kind of forgetting of its own, a trivial version of the amnesia that causes history to repeat itself. The most practical consideration is that in a game in which even the Ty Cobbs and Ted Williamses make out roughly two-thirds of the time, anyone who "pimps" anything is soon going to have a pile of glaring failures pimping his futility right back at him.

Harper himself might have got a hint of this by now; after hitting nine home runs in April, the pitchers have decided he's best left alone and he's hit .226/.405/.347 over a span of games representing a quarter of the season. Each pitcher who intentionally unintentionally walks him could taunt his relative impotence after each free pass. They don't, because they may understand that at some point they will have to pitch to him, at which point he is very likely to balance the scales. Anyway, it's not just that element of mutually assured destruction that created baseball's etiquette-related strictures. Lame as they can seem in the moment, there is a whole century of history behind all this.

This is where poor Joe Medwick comes in.

Then, as now, baseball players were rash and had trouble dealing with embarrassment. In the early days of the game, they were also frequently ill-socialized drunks, which meant that their inhibitions were non-existent and their resort to violence quick. If you hit a homer, you didn't "show up" the pitcher by taking a half hour to round the bases because he would put the ball behind your head the next time up. If a pitcher razzed a hitter for striking out, that hitter might bunt down the first-base line and try to spike him as he went to cover first. And so a code of behavior evolved, not because baseball didn't want extravagant gestures but rather to avoid unnecessary carnage.

Not only was the alternative dangerous and stupid, it was bad for business. At the start of the last century, the game was so loutish that it had trouble attracting families. One of the reasons we have two leagues is that the American League was created in reaction to a National League that did a poor job of policing rowdyism. In time, with competition from the AL, it improved.

Not that violence has ever stopped flaring up. In 1940, the Brooklyn Dodgers were a literally bankrupt team that had been sucking around the second division for most of the previous 20 years. They were also in the second season of a renaissance directed by its "bellicose, red-faced, and clownish" as well as frequently inebriated president, Larry MacPhail. Shortly after the First World War, MacPhail decided, apparently on a whim, that he would personally bring Kaiser Wilhelm to justice. He came reasonably close to doing it, missing the Kaiser but snagging the ashtray off of his desk. That was just a normal day for him.

When the Dodgers opened the season with nine straight wins and reached mid-June with a winning percentage of nearly .700, MacPhail decided the team was ready to compete, chucked his rebuilding plans, and traded four players and $125,000 that the organization didn't have to the St. Louis Cardinals for two veterans, starting pitcher Curt Davis and left fielder Joe "Ducky Wucky" Medwick.

Davis would be a solid pitcher for the Dodgers, but Medwick, 28, was the real attraction. The native New Jerseyan was a former MVP, Triple Crown winner, postseason star, and close friend of Dodgers shortstop-manager Leo Durocher. As a career .335/.372/.545 hitter, he promised to upgrade a team that had succeeded more on its deep pitching staff than its offense. To say that MacPhail and Durocher were pleased by the trade would be an understatement. The very fact that they needed Medwick was a validation.

The trade went down on June 12th. Medwick moved into the Hotel New Yorker, where Durocher lived. In addition— and this must have seemed like a really bad idea even then—visiting teams stayed there, as well. On the fifth day after the trade, the Cardinals checked in, and the morning of the second game of their series with the Dodgers, Medwick and Durocher found themselves riding an elevator with that day's starting pitcher for the Cardinals, a 29-year-old righty out of West Virginia named Bob Bowman.

Despite being ex-teammates, there was no love lost between Bowman and Medwick, as Ducky may have loafed after the odd fly in his eagerness to be traded out of St. Louis. And everyone in baseball had a bone to pick with Durocher, who was one of the most abrasive personalities of that or any era. What Durocher later called "the usual baseball byplay" ensued. The conversation was reported several different ways, but the basics were that Durocher predicted the Dodgers would thrash Bowman. Bowman said he knew how to handle the Dodgers. Durocher: "You haven't the guts to throw at us." Bowman: "I don't throw at punk hitters." He meant the light-hitting Durocher. Medwick responded that Durocher didn't have anything to worry about; he batted eighth, and the Dodgers would have knocked Bowman out of the game by the time it was Leo's turn to hit. In response, Bowman sputtered and raged nearly incoherently, saying:

No, you unnatural bums,
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall—! I will do such things—!
What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth.

Okay, I borrowed that from Shakespeare; Bowman had been in the mines since he was 16 and wasn't likely to speak in such terms. Another thing that keeps order in baseball is that it has always had its share of privileged college kids and each decade's version of travel-team bonus babies, but they have always shared the field with the Bowmans of the world—the immigrants and children of immigrants, the sharecropper's children, the poor of a dozen countries—whose talent lets them escape a life of laboring in dangerous darkness. What Bowman actually said, which was plenty eloquent, was "I'll take care of you! I'll take care of both of you!"

Medwick was right that Bowman would never get a shot at Durocher. What he didn't know was that it would be because Bowman would hit Medwick in the head with a pitch, putting him in the hospital, and because Bowman would then be escorted from Ebbets Field by the police so that the Dodgers fans—and the Dodgers president—wouldn't murder him. Bowman's first pitch to Medwick, the fourth batter in the bottom of the first, was variously reported as being behind his left ear or "right under the button of his cap." Either way, Medwick was knocked out cold, "landing so hard his feet flew into the air." Pictures show him laid out at home plate like a martyr, looking pretty darned dead. His wife, sitting with Mrs. Durocher in the stands, could be seen and heard in near hysterics.

Medwick would be carried off on a stretcher, but recovered consciousness quickly, joking, "That's just my luck. Yesterday I couldn't hit the ball out of the infield and today I get hit on the head." That was still moments in the future, as was the medical treatment that would certify the lack of a skull fracture or internal bleeding. Before Medwick had even been taken away, MacPhail appeared. A New Yorker profile of MacPhail the next year described the scene this way:

"The spectators in the stands at Ebbets Field cheered as they watched MacPhail's arrival on the scene. Waving his arms and roaring in his vibrant moose voice, he galloped down the aisles of the grandstand and across the diamond to the pitcher's box, his hat askew, his coat-tails streaming behind him, and a look of unbearable anguish on his face. As one umpire later said, 'MacPhail came down here and tried to provoke a riot.'"

First the owner tried to hit Bowman with a rolled-up newspaper he happened to be carrying. As Dodgers catcher Babe Phelps and coach Chuck Dressen tried to hold him back, MacPhail stood in front of the visitor's dugout (some reports say on the roof) daring the Cardinals to fight him. "Not one of you [expletives] will come out of there." As Durocher and Dressen restrained him, Johnny Mize and Pepper Martin did come out in attempt to calm him down. No further violence ensued, at least that day. Cardinals catcher Mickey Owen would throw some punches at Durocher the next afternoon.

After the game, MacPhail issued a press release accusing Bowman of a "cowardly" premeditated act of violence based on his comments in the elevator. The Brooklyn District Attorney, William O'Dwyer, and his assistant DA, Burton Turkus, were famous for investigating Murder, Inc., a group of hitmen who acted as contract killers for organized crime. Seven members were given the electric chair. Now MacPhail asked them to investigate Beanball, Inc.

The DA agreed to take the case based on Bowman's words, but quickly dropped it because then as now it was impossible to prove a pitcher's intent. As Cardinals pitcher Lon Warneke observed, even the threatening banter could be construed as commonplace. "Say, we kid like that all the time before a ball game," Warneke said. "Of course we don't mean it. I'll bet I've said worse than that a hundred times. That's pretty thin stretching this out to a threat." Medwick refused to implicate Bowman, and even Durocher tried to avoid testifying because neither he nor any of the other players wanted to set a precedent in which their on-field actions were literally policed.

There is more to the story, including the possibility that Medwick was hit because Dressen had done a poor job of stealing the Cardinals' signs, but let's leave it at this: MacPhail brought lights, plane travel, and radio to baseball. About the only area in which he refused to innovate was the color line, fighting Branch Rickey when he later became a co-owner of the New York Yankees. Otherwise, there was no area in which he wouldn't try to shake things up. He was a showman who desperately wanted the broke Dodgers to succeed. With that in mind, consider his rage at the Cardinals and his fervid assertion that the pitch had been an act of attempted murder. Consider this, again from the New Yorker: "The fact that he had emerged from the press club, a hangout for reporters"—read: MacPhail's ballpark bar—"which has no view of the field, did not lessen the effect of his tirade on the people of Brooklyn."

MacPhail hadn't even seen the pitch. America never stopped being great. Baseball never stopped being fun, just as sure as there was no Beanball, Inc. As with all such intimations, we need to consider who is shouting them the loudest and how they might profit from it.