From the Archives
November 17, 2000

Rocket in his Pocket

November 17, 2000

I've been following Roger Clemens' career rather closely since his rookie year, when I first had a chance to see him pitch in person. To this day, I've only seen one pitcher more consistently dominant than Clemens in his peak (Pedro Martinez), and his rather remarkable over-35 career has moved him from the category of great-in-his-time to the pantheon of the all-time greats. I'm sure most readers who've seen Roger pitch in person in his glory years will agree this is no hyperbole.

However, I've never been much of a fan of Clemens the person. I don't generally look to professional athletes as my models for behavior, anyway, and as much as Clemens is a somewhat less than likeable figure, along with most ballplayers, he's on the usual curve of general human behavior. In short, I'm willing to ignore his behavior, what he says, etcetera, and admire his on-field legacy.

But then we come to the perplexing World Series bat-fragment-throwing incident. In case you were hiding under a rock on a South Seas Island without an internet connection during the World Series, here's what happened.

Mike Piazza had a tough at-bat against Clemens in Game Two, part of a series of confrontations between the two greats that was highlighted by a beaning of Piazza by the Rocket earlier in the season. Piazza at the time claimed the pitch was intentional, and while I wouldn't put it past Clemens in general, the evidence from that specific incident of intent to hurt was murky at best. The real effect, however, was that Piazza was down for the count, had stitches, and was out from regular play for a week. It's the kind of thing a batter tends to remember.

So in this particular Game Two at-bat, Piazza finally gets sawn off and hits a grounder to short. The bat shatters, and the barrel flew towards Clemens. Piazza, the handle still in his hand, was trotting out the obvious groundout when Clemens rather deftly fielded the barrel -- and tossed it at Piazza. Or at least in his very specific direction. The bat missed him, but words were said (Clemens mouthing an explanation "I thought it was the ball" at the time!), benches cleared, and feelings hurt.

Of course, the denoument of this story was Clemens went on to pitch one of the more dominating World Series victories in recent years (whiffing Piazza along the way), the Yankees won without Clemens' turn in the rotation coming up again, and the Lords of Baseball fined Clemens a whopping $50,000 during the Series (but oddly enough, didn't suspend him!)

I think the most curious thing about the whole incident at the time was why Clemens didn't get tossed out of the game. The umpire may or may not have read the intent, whatever the heck it was, of Clemens' bat-throwing, but I guarantee you that a non-Yankee in a non-World Series game would've been tossed. The umpiring crew, I'm sure, had implicit instructions of some sort to avoid tossing key players at all costs.

The reality of these situations is you can't use intent or lack thereof as an excuse -- the action itself should be punished. Any justice system, whether it's an umpire adjudicating a game or your local judge sentencing a murderer, has to make most of the judgement on the actions of the accused. If the lack of evil intent is an excuse, then we'd have hitters whacking pitchers with the bat instead of sissy-fighting, and we'd have murderers getting turned loose with explanations that they didn't really mean to kill the guy when they pulled the trigger.

So I don't disagree at all with the large fine, and I still think Clemens should've been tossed and suspended from the rest of the World Series. You can't play baseball if the equipment is used on anything but the ball, period.

So the following may come as a surprise: I'm going to defend, or at least explain, why Clemens threw the bat, as best I can. This is an "apology" in the root sense of the word: a defense of the action, not a plea for forgiveness from punishment.

What possible defense is there, one may ask. The on-the-spot explanation Clemens gave -- "I thought it was the ball" -- is just ludicrous. Trust me, it's impossible to confused a piece of a bat with a ball, especially given Clemens had a few seconds to process the flying wood shards. Clemens' later explanations were fuzzy, as if he himself were seeking an explanation.

You're a pumped up individual. You're facing the most dangerous hitter in the opposition lineup, one who controls the outcome of the game at the moment. If you're somebody who thinks a lot on his place in history, as Clemens obviously does, you may consciously or subconsciously build up a confrontation like this even more than the game situation warrants. After all, we still remember seventy years after the fact that Carl Hubbell struck out Ruth, Lazzeri, and Gehrig in order. Moments like these transcend their context, and even a passing thought of this is likely to get a Type A personality like Clemens even tighter and more hyped up.

Add on to that the implied threat of a confrontation, brought on by the media play from the previous beaning incident. I don't doubt that Clemens was in a very narrow tunnel at that at-bat, wanting desperately to dominate Piazza without hitting him. In short, to beat the guy as badly as he could, cleanly.

Your blood pressure goes up, your grip on the ball is just a bit tight, your reflexes on a trigger. If you're a champion like Clemens, this probably just heightens your skills. The ball is delivered, and it's put into play, and you throw the bat at Piazza.

Come again? Plenty of competitors have this kind of experience without throwing a dangerous hunk of wood at their opponent. To explain how Clemens made this leap, I'd like to share something from my own experience, and leap a little bit into the Science of Human Errors, to provide both anecdotal and theoretical evidence in the Rocket's defense.

Some years ago, I was in a modestly competitive softball league. It was mostly for fun, but the players took the games seriously, and standings were actually kept. My team was playing a particularly tough opponent one day, and it had the tight feel of a championship game. Everybody was playing crisply, and the score was close.

About the middle of the game, in a tie-game, with runners on second and third, a sharp grounder was hit down the left field line by my position at third base. I leaned over, grabbed the ball, and with two outs, knew I had to throw the runner out at first to prevent a run. I made a very strong throw, but it was a bit up and into the runner's path. The ball nearly beaned him, and the first baseman made a great play to pull it in, assisted by the fact the runner lost a half step in doing a sort of half-duck. The ball made a huge clapping sound as it hit into the first baseman's glove. The call was out, and there was a small, involuntary murmuring of concern at the near-miss of the runner among the players on the sidelines for the batting team. There was clearly no intent to hit the guy, but it had my own blood pumping and I'm sure his adrenalin levels were up.

A few innings later, my team was behind by a couple of runs, and I came up in a similar situation, with runners on second and third. I can't remember at all what I'd done earlier in the game at the plate, but it didn't matter. I was tense at the plate, concentrating ultra-hard, trying to simply meet the ball and drive it the opposite way to get the runners home. The pitcher was the runner I'd thrown out in that near head-snapping play at first, and to my eye, I was getting a bit more snap than I should've out of a slow-pitch underarmer. One pitch came inside on me, forcing me to duck out of the way. Mind you, in slow pitch, in the unlikely event you get hit, there's no damage to be done. In a lot of leagues, you can't even take a base if you're hit by a slow pitch. But the body has a logic of its own, and the defense mechanisms kicked in.

A few pitches later, my batting eye thought I had a fat one in my zone. Thoughts of taking it the other way were trampled by the instinct to kill the ball, to drive it to the gap, and I leaned in and took a mighty hack. But being a sucker for the high pitch, I'd underswung. The ball took a mighty backspin, but instead of taking a pop-up arc, went straight back to the mound, where the pitcher fielded it when I was about two steps out of the batter's box. If you've played, you know that moment of frustration, where you've been defeated, largely by yourself, and it's just a matter of the formality of being put out. This is where Bo Jackson would've broken the bat over his knee.

Watching the ball still, I let out an oath of frustration, and dutifully dug in to try to beat it out. Fielding isn't always so crisp in mid-skill-level softball, so you never know. My eyes were glued on the pitcher, who was doing the right thing and taking some steps towards first base so he would be able to do an easy toss to the first baseman instead of a far trickier throw.

I still had the bat in my hand, for what reason I don't know, and the little instinct about getting rid of it to run faster kicked in. But instead of dropping the bat along the base line or tossing it foul, for some reason, I flung it at ground-level exactly in the direction of the pitcher. It was hard: the pitcher spotted it and jumped, to barely miss it, and managed to toss the ball to the first baseman at the same time. If he hadn't jumped and thrown, he would've been hurt by the aluminum bat, and it's likely I would've made the base.

So a spectator looking at the play would've seen it this way. Key game situation, featuring a match-up of two players who'd been involved in a close play with some element of danger earlier in the game. The hitter clearly misses, curses, stares at the pitcher who's fielded the ball, tosses the bat at him, and still gets thrown out. [more]

[continued]

I was instantly mortified that I'd thrown the bat, rather unclear as to why I'd done so, but as you might expect, the immediate uproar was from the opposing team, screaming at me for throwing the bat. I had few defenders on my own team, as they were rightly stunned at what I'd done. That there was no fight was quite a testament to the victim of my bat-throwing, who was just about the only cool head on the field. I can't remember exactly what verbal explanation I gave, other than that I didn't mean it, the bat had slipped, etc. It was at least enough to keep the game going.

I felt awful about the incident for quite a while, not really understanding what unconscious part of my psyche had been involved, but eventually more or less forgot about it. Until I got to graduate school.

There's a field of study that seeks to understand human errors, particularly human errors in interacting with technology and complex systems, that touches on Cognitive Psychology, Systems Design, and Information Theory. It's a fascinating little field, full of conundrums like airline pilots ignoring all sorts of warnings and flying their planes into hillsides and experienced nuclear technicians with impeccable records pushing the exactly wrong set of seventeen switches required to cause near melt-downs. This is an ongoing field of inquiry, one that's become even more important as we have ever more-complex computer-based interfaces to virtually everything that can kill you.

One of the keys to understanding the science of errors is understanding how the human brain processes information in situations where there's literally no time to think out a problem. The actual process is murky, and probably is in the realm of neouroscience, but one theory describes human actions as a sort of series of tiny little programs, if you will. Humans learn these programs through explicit training, repetition, or by having them hard-wired as innate and instinctual bits. The cognitive science word for these little building block programs is "scehmata".

When you're describing a baseball player at the plate, there's a series of schemata that kick in. There's the learned behavior of following the arc of a pitch. There's the trained behavior of swinging the bat. There's the instinctual behavior of ducking out of the way of a ball (I defy anyone who claims they have to learn how to duck!) There's the combination of getting out of the box, running towards first, getting rid of the bat, and stretching out for the hit, all while looking for the ball, which is a rather complex set of these little programlets strung together in an orderly series. Fielding the ball is a similar set of behaviors strung together, some of which are the product of conscious thought but most of which are reactions filtered by training through repetition.

The science of errors teaches us that even the most trained professional can commit an error, a bad one. There can be some sort of interruption in the series of little programs, a bad input of data to the senses, or some unknowable factor that disturbs the usual orderly set of human activities. When designing a safe system, the "safeguards" that are put in to prevent human error are often designed to redundantly provide the same information to a variety of senses, to interrupt the human's autopilot, if you will, to make them consciously pull out of a dangerous system. A familiar example is the audio system that is now standard on commercial airplanes, that tells the pilot to "pull up, pull up" when they're headed towards some object, like a mountain. The radar and visual inputs available to the pilot should tell them they're on a collision course, yet this extra audio reminder turns out to be necessary to prevent accidents in those extremely rare situations when the human being's ordered set of cognitive processes breaks down.

So from my own experience and from my shallow understanding of the theory of human cognitive error, here's what I think happened with Clemens. He's on edge. He delivers the pitch, which in a professional pitcher, causes the "become a fielder" program to kick in for Clemens' brain. This is a little micro-program that sets up the fielder to watch the ball, position to catch the ball, judge the baserunning situation by looking at the runner, and throw the ball to the appropriate base with the appropriate arm angle and strength and so forth to beat the runner. It's all unconscious, because in a professional it's all a trained set of reactions.

But the bat shatters, and comes out an angle. For whatever reason, possibly the intensity with which he has been concentrating which might've cleared the scratch space in Clemens' memory for loading in new programs, if you will, some of Clemens' sub-programs get crossed up. In this case, the field-the-ball program and throw-the-runner-out-program crossed with some little programs previously loaded into Clemens' brain, the throw-close-to-Piazza-but-don't-hit-him program and the 'stare-him-down-to-intimidate-him' program. The somewhat less frequently-used 'avoid-the-broken-bat' program didn't have room amidst all the intensity in Clemens' psyche. And before Clemens knew, consciously, what was going on, he was tossing the bat at Piazza.

I don't think I'd've bought this explanation if it hadn't happened to me in a competitive situation. But I firmly believe this is what happened to Clemens: he just had a sort of temporary systems overload that had absolutely nothing to do with ill will towards Piazza or a desire to hurt him with the bat. In fact, it may be somewhat indirect evidence of the superiority of Clemens the competitor: he overloaded his cognitive system in an attempt to master Piazza. This seems like a much more logical explanation than any theory that holds Clemens was trying to hurt Piazza.

Frank Robinson, if you're reading this column, don't get me wrong. Clemens should still be fined and suspended, because as I noted earlier, you can only judge and try to control behavior, not intent. But at the same time -- god help me for saying so -- Clemens should not be villified for this incident. He was just obeying his good training as a baseball player.
The Baseball Crank may be contacted at crank@thediamondangle.com.
(c) 2001 Matthew Wall/The Baseball Crank.