When I was writing columns for the Baltimore Sun back in the day, readers had a couple of options if they wanted to contact me directly with a comment about something I’d written. They could write me a letter. Or they could call me.
Yes, this was before email, before social media DMs and before there was the ease of just dashing off a comment at the bottom of an article online. I received a lot of letters and fielded a lot of phone calls at my desk in the newsroom.
It was the landline-to-landline era, pre-cell, and when I wasn’t at my desk and a caller left a voice message — that was the latest technology — I always returned it. But I made sure to do so from the office. Caller ID was another cutting-edge technology and I wanted my unlisted home phone number in as few hands as possible, having learned the hard way that you (or other members of your family) occasionally fielded some weird calls when your picture ran with your column in the newspaper four days a week.
But one day when I had time to kill and a to-do list that needed shrinking, I broke my unwritten rule and returned some messages from home. I can do it this once, I figured.
One of the messages I returned that day was from a lawyer in Towson named Bob. He was a baseball fan with an idea.
“Too many pitchers are getting hit by batted balls coming back up the middle. It’s really dangerous,” Bob told me. “Do you think Major League Baseball would ever think about putting a screen on the field to protect them?”
I responded, “You mean during the game? A screen on the field?”
That’s right, Bob replied — a screen to protect pitchers, just like the screens they used to protect pitchers during batting practice before games.
“Someone’s going to get badly hurt if they don’t do it,” Bob said.
I thought it was a silly idea. But Bob subscribed to the paper. I didn’t want to insult a customer.
“You’re right that someone could get badly hurt, Bob,” I said. “Interesting idea, the screen.”
Silly me. I’d failed to follow one of the first commandments we teach our kids, that they should always tell the truth.
I should have told Bob what I really thought, that I didn’t think a screen on the field would ever happen in the major leagues, not in a million years. Now, with my tepid reply, I’d given him the impression that I thought it was possible. And because I’d returned his call from home, Bob now had my home number. Which became an issue.
Two days later, he called me again. At home.
“Have you thought any more about the screen on the field?” Bob asked.
Well, not really, I said while cursing myself for having broken that unwritten rule about not returning calls from home.
Bob called me at home again a week later, this time with a proposition.
“Why don’t you see what Mike Mussina thinks? You have a press pass. You have access to him in the clubhouse,” he said. “Mike’s a smart guy. He went to Stanford. I bet he thinks it’s a good idea.”
Mussina, of course, was the ace of the Orioles’ pitching staff, in the prime of a career that would eventually result in his enshrinement in the Hall of Fame. We’d always had a good relationship, but he didn’t suffer fools easily, and when I envisioned myself asking him if he thought baseball should put screens on the field to protect pitchers, I didn’t envision the conversation going well.
But once again, I didn’t tell Bob the truth. “Maybe I’ll ask Mike one of these days,” I told him, fully expecting never to do it.
Bob’s reply: “Do it soon,” he said.
I’d created a monster. Because I’d returned his original call from home, Bob began calling me there all the time, urging me to ask Mussina about putting screens on the field. He wasn’t exactly stalking me, but he was persistent. And intensely focused. One day when he called, he tried to convince my 8-year-old son that putting screens on the field was a good idea.
“Is your dad there?” Bob asked when my son picked up the phone.
“Sorry, he’s not home right now,” my son said.
“OK, hey, kid, can you ask him if he’s talked to Mike Mussina yet about putting a screen on the field? Don’t you think it would be a good idea for baseball to do that?” Bob said.
When I got home later, my son just said some weird guy had called. I knew who it was.
It was too late for me to start ignoring Bob. I’d made the mistake of humoring him. I had to live with it. And live with it, I did.
For a long time, he called me at home at least every week or whenever he read that a major league pitcher had been struck by a line drive, insisting that something needed to happen and that I should ask Mussina about it.
During one of our conversations, he revealed that he had another sports-related passion. He believed that the human-held scoreboards that accompanied each group at a golf tournament should note the number of putts each golfer had taken in that round along with the golfers’ overall scores for the tournament. “It would be good for golf for the fans to know those in-depth statistics, don’t you think?” Bob said. I told him I didn’t know anyone at the PGA who could make it happen.
But the screens were his No. 1 subject, and it all came to a head early in the 1998 season when Oriole pitchers took a physical beating on the mound. Norm Charlton was struck in the nose by a batted ball in Chicago. Doug Drabek was struck in the chest in Tampa.
Neither was seriously injured, but when my home phone rang early the next morning after each incident, I knew who was calling.
Then, on May 14, 1998, Mussina was on the mound for the Orioles at Camden Yards, pitching against Cleveland. With Cleveland’s Sandy Alomar Jr. up in the top of the fifth, Mussina threw a fastball that Alomar whacked up the middle. Mussina never saw the ball coming, he said later, but fortunately, he ducked his head just enough that it hit him first above the right eye and then on the nose.
Mussina dropped to the ground, bleeding heavily, as his teammates rushed to the mound. A crowd of 43,039 fans fell silent. Players on both teams were visibly shaken as Orioles trainer Richie Bancells worked on Mussina.
“I’ve never hit anybody like that before,” Alomar said later. “It was very scary and I was so nervous. I was shaking and praying to God for Mike and his family.”
Jim Palmer said later that it was the worst beaning incident he’d ever seen on a major league mound. But Mussina never lost consciousness and eventually walked off the field. Testing revealed a hairline fracture of the nose and a mild concussion, and it took 20 stitches to close the wound over his eye, but there were no serious injuries.
I was covering the game and wrote about the scary scene. The next morning, when the phone rang at home, I had no doubt who was calling.
“Now you HAVE to talk to Mussina!” Bob shouted. “He could’ve been killed. If he comes out now in favor of the screen, he could convince people.”
I couldn’t put him off any longer. Looking back, I’m not sure I was thinking clearly, perhaps due to the sheer relentlessness of Bob’s barrage of calls. But for whatever reason, I felt I had no choice but to ask Mussina the stupid question Bob wanted me to ask.
So I did.
It took me awhile. I waited for the right moment. Months later, long after Mussina’s injuries had healed and he was back to being the Orioles’ ace, I approached him in the clubhouse one afternoon before a night game in which he wasn’t pitching.
“So … Mike … this guy has been calling me,” I started, then went on to explain how Bob had entered my life with one great goal, to protect pitchers everywhere with a screen. On the field. During games.
“Whaddya think?” I concluded.
As noted earlier, Mussina didn’t suffer fools. And this was, no doubt, a foolish question.
But instead of mocking me, as was surely warranted, he raised one eyebrow and archly smiled at me.
“If there was a screen on the field in front of me,” Mussina said, speaking deliberately, “Wade Boggs would hit the ball into the net every time he came to bat. He’d reach base every time he came up.”
He repeated himself for emphasis: “Every. Time.”
Then he continued: “The is the major leagues. Hitters have incredible bat control.”
Point made. But he went ahead and finished his thought.
“It’s never going to happen,” he said. “Tell your guy it’s never going to happen.”
I did just that the next time Bob called, giving him the GREAT news that I’d finally spoken to Mussina about his idea but also the BAD news that Mussina had said to forget about it.
“You’re kidding,” Bob said, the disappointment palpable in his voice. “It makes so much sense. I thought he’d be more open to it.”
No, I told him. the ace of the Baltimore Orioles didn’t think it was a good idea for pitchers to throw behind a protective screen during games. After I delivered that breaking news to Bob that day, the pace of his calls slowed and finally stopped altogether.
Until I left the paper in 2007, I never returned another message from home. Lesson learned. But to this day, over the past quarter-century-plus, whenever I’m watching a game and a batter whacks a ball that hits the pitcher, I do think of Bob.
BaltimoreBaseball.com is delighted to be partnering with John Eisenberg, the author and longtime Baltimore sports columnist, whose latest venture is an Orioles history project called The Bird Tapes. Available via subscription at birdtapes.substack.com/subscribe, the Bird Tapes is built around a set of vintage interviews with Orioles legends that Eisenberg recorded a quarter-century while writing a book about the team. Paid subscribers can hear the interviews, which have been digitized to make them easily consumable. The Bird Tapes also includes new writing on Orioles history from Eisenberg, who is the author of 11 books, including two on the Orioles. BaltimoreBaseball.com will publish Eisenberg’s new writing.
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Frank Robinson
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