The Hidden Ball Trick -- One Man's Harrowing Tale

Ah, the trade deadline; the final checkpoint before the sprint to the finish, where renewed hope springs forth from the fans of those prudent general managers who orchestrate the perfect deal.  (Sadly, all the negotiating and maneuvering does little to affect things for the 24 or so teams that, just as at the beginning of the season, still literally have no shot at winning the World Series.)  The pressure cooker that is Major League Baseball’s pennant race seems analogous to the ballpark climate at the time of the opening pitch.  This is what we’ve all been waiting for and why we wasted a darn good evening watching the All-Star game.

But for one baseball fan, these elements conjure, too, an incident of great trauma, one that lays dormant for most of the year until the players have cleared waivers and the salaries have been prorated or even absorbed in a trade. 

I want to take a break from my usual hard-hitting journalism to relay to you this tale, over a generation old, which has never been brought to the public’s eye with the proper attention it has deserved.  It’s the story of a baseball player wrongfully-accused of a crime he didn’t commit. 

It’s not a great crime, mind you, the kind that “60 Minutes” would cover, but it’s worthy of telling here.

On a beautiful spring Saturday in suburban Boston, two Little League teams faced off.  It wasn’t a particularly intense rivalry, but individual personalities did clash.  One was that of a diminutive shortstop whom we’ll call Dewey, sporting the eye black and a Napoleonic complex.  The other was our victim, a cerebral player with less-than-textbook tools, but a gift for making the play when the situation called for it. 

We’ll pick up our tale at second base in the mid-innings.  Our victim was on second following a double to right-center.  Dewey, at his position, moved closer to the bag and looked overtly suspicious, like he was up to something.  Though the runner was on the bag, it looked like a pick off play was on. 

The runner stopped for a moment to survey the situation.  “Something’s up here,” he thought.  “Gotta watch for the pick off.  Second baseman’s playing straight ahead.  It would only be a play to the shortstop.  Strange that they’d even bother to hold me on since I’m no threat to run.”

He looked at the pitcher who toed the rubber.  I’ll repeat that.  The pitcher toed the rubber.  And quite satisfied that he was protected, the runner took his lead, with his gaze focused squarely on the pitcher’s legs.  Any movement that wasn’t directly toward the plate would send the heady player diving back to the bag.

One slow step off, right foot ahead, then left foot to right foot, just as he’d learned it from Joe Morgan on “The Baseball Bunch” with Johnny Bench.  And then it happened! 

He wasn’t two steps off the bag when the plotting shortstop lunged at him and tagged him with the ball. 

“You’re out!” cried the umpire.  The fielding team cheered as the giddy shortstop flung the ball around the horn.

The hidden ball trick – the most embarrassing plight known to man – had been executed to perfection, except for one minor detail . . . the runner was safe! 

As you’re probably aware by now, there’s a reason I mentioned the pitcher’s “rubber fetish” twice earlier.  You can’t be caught if the pitcher is at the rubber, or on the mound for that matter. 

According to the baseball rule book, a balk is to be called if the pitcher “stands on or astride the rubber without the ball.” You know this is a serious rule because it invokes the word “astride.”  It’s like when your mother calls you by your full name.

It was an egregious crime perpetrated against this one individual base runner, almost conspiratorially.  (How many of you knew the runner was safe as you were reading?)

The defiant runner stood on the bag, territorially.  “The pitcher was on the mound!” he screamed.  But to no avail.  The umpire wasn’t hearing it.  Was he Dewey’s father?  Was he unfamiliar with the rules as were laid forth by Abner Doubleday?  Did he have a soufflé in the oven he had to get home for?  No one knows for sure what possessed the umpire to blow that call so fantastically.

The runner continued to plead his most valiant case.  “I’m not out!  The pitcher was on the rubber!  It’s a balk!” 

“Sit down,” yelled the ump.  Looking for fairness in this suddenly oppressive tyrannical regime, the runner turned to his manager.  Surely, she would put a fight for her player who was in the right.  “You can’t pull the hidden ball trick if the pitcher straddles the rubber.  It’s in the rules.” 

“Sit down,” she yelled.

And thus came the second death of Julius Caesar. He screamed out, “Et tu, Brutus?”  (Or Bruticia as she was a woman.) But the appeal fell on deaf ears.  And our hero was sentenced without a jury of his peers in the most un-American manner, ironically, in this proudly American sport. 

Getting caught off base is embarrassing enough; it’s like having a scarlet “HBT” written on your flowing dress, forced to absorb the stares and verbal abuses behind your back and to your face.  Yet, there was no one to rescue the one sane voice in a village of morons. 

The fielding team, and especially the shortstop celebrated their crooked victory, proud to have obtained it by cheating with their accomplices in high places. 

And our hero lived the rest of his life haunted annually around this, the start of baseball season, until one day, he put it all behind him to become a writer for one of the greatest sites in the history of mankind, garnering thousands, nay millions, of views.  While that poor shortstop, frustrated that he was never able to ride the big person rides at the amusement parks, lived out his life a bitter old recluse, having peaked in high school only as a lapse in the judgment and knowledge of the umpire granted him one moment he could be proud of, if even unfairly.  He probably went on to sell women’s shoes for a living.

And those are the emotions the trade deadline (and spring training, and rosin, and pine tar, and Cal Ripken Jr., and ivy matching that of Wrigley Field, etc.) conjures up in me.  Let the race to the finish begin!