65 Seconds - Part 2 of 3
65 Seconds - Part 2 of 3
Wherein the kids fight incessantly and dad says he will turn the sport around if they don't stop
Welcome back for the second installment of “65 Seconds.” Here’s Part 1, if you missed it.
This week we chart the key events that put Pete Rose and Dave Pallone on a collision course and explore the mindset of the man who’d have to decide whether and how to hold them accountable.
Fate made its first move nearly a decade earlier, in the late 1970s, when Pallone got an unexpected promotion.
March 1979
During the last week of Spring Training, all but two of Major League Baseball’s umpires refused to sign their contracts for the 1979 season.
Never sympathetic characters in the eyes of the public, the umpires had compelling reasons to mount a work stoppage. They made less than officials in other professional leagues despite working more games, and received no vacation between Spring Training and the end of the regular season in early October. The umpires were under contract until 1981, but despite an earlier understanding that their union, the Major League Umpires’ Association, and the two major leagues could continue discussing issues outside the areas covered by their contract, baseball seemed to be giving them a very cold shoulder.
The work action (they never officially went on strike) lasted roughly 26 days, covering the last week of Spring Training and most of the first three weeks of the regular season. A bid to use the courts to force the regular umpires back to work failed, so baseball went to Plan B.
A motley force of the few umpires who’d signed contracts, amateurs, and recent retirees became the core of the league’s “replacement” crews, but this was not quite enough bodies. Close to solving the problem, the leagues got a little desperate and took a more controversial step. Eight minor-league umpires were called up to serve in the big leagues. One of those umpires was 28-year-old Dave Pallone.
Suffice to say that no one was happy with the replacement crews. The regular umpires picketed the first few games of the season in uniform, and many of them never forgave the men who crossed those lines, no matter how good they would prove at the job. During the strike, players and managers complained fervently about the poor quality of work the replacement crews did, and the number of ejections spiked.
It was a relief when the MLUA and baseball came to a revised agreement in mid-May. Umpires got raises, a 401(k), and each league agreed to field an extra crew to facilitate a time-off rotation during the season. To ensure that last provision went into immediate effect, the eight minor league umpires who’d worked during the strike were asked to stay on, and all eight initially agreed.
It was rough going, however. Having crossed a picket line, the eight were refused full membership in the union, and their returning colleagues treated them with everything from disdain to outright hostility.
“I’ve no qualms about [breaking the strike]”, Pallone said in a 1987 interview. “I knew I’d be alone on the field the first few years.”
For a long time, Pallone and the others of his cohort were not allowed to ride in the same cab as their peers, dressed alone, and were ignored if hurt during the game. Some of them felt they received less support after making controversial calls, and in some instances their lockers and belongings were vandalized.
Still, it was “a decision I’d make again,” Pallone said. The strike was his chance to live his dream, and he’d taken it, no regrets. Not all of the eight would have said the same; by 1988, half of the cohort had been fired or resigned.
“Of the 56 umps, I’d say 44 have accepted us,” Pallone said of the remaining four.
For the players, members of one of sports’ most powerful and successful unions, strike-breakers in any vocation were forever marked, and any time players found themselves in disagreement with a former “replacement umpire” their anger ratcheted up about 20% quicker and hotter. Many players would comment upon a replacement umpire’s pedigree on the way to being thrown out, or after they’d already been given their walking papers.
Verbal barbs were one thing. Pallone and his colleagues were used to those. Dave Concepción was another thing entirely.
August 27, 1983
In 1983, Concepción, a core member of the Big Red Machine of the 1970s, was 35 years old and still playing shortstop for the Cincinnati Reds. During a late August game, he attempted a steal of second base, where Dave Pallone was stationed. Pallone called Concepción out. Concepción felt he’d been safe, and they argued.
This was a tale as old as time, right up until the moment when (Pallone alleged) Concepción, standing just a foot or two away, spit into the umpire’s face. Somehow Pallone managed to not retaliate, other than throwing the shortstop out of the game. He made his report to Chub Feeney, the National League President at that time, and Feeney suspended Concepción for three games.
Concepción, for his part, denied having spit on Pallone, but from the way the umpire seized on the incident, Concepción was probably guilty, even if perhaps the spit had been unintentional. The shortstop did admit to some pretty cutting remarks, telling Pallone: “What do you think you are, the best umpire in the league? You know where you come from.”
Pete Rose, Concepción’s longtime teammate on the Reds, was off playing for the Phillies in 1983, but there is no doubt he would have heard all about this incident, at the time and when he returned to the Reds the following year.
July 20, 1987
When he became National League President in 1987, Angelo Bartlett Giamatti arrived with a mission in mind: he wanted to restore decency and order to the ballpark and bring the reality of baseball closer to how it had lived in his imagination since childhood. Giamatti was not a coy man, and the former president of Yale University wrote the thesis of his presidency in an op-ed piece for the Boston Globe in the middle of his first season in baseball.
“Sports…have a problem,” he wrote. The problem was “the slow but steady deterioration of the environment in which sports take place. When the ambiance for a sporting event begins to sour, people stay away.”
People attended sports contests, he wrote, to “enjoy the gathering, to see and hear the crowd, become a community, to cheer, to intervene vocally, to swap stories and pleasantries and opinions.”
“But if…you cannot watch a contest free from the constant assault of obscene language or a mindlessly insistent scoreboard, seemingly run by people who dare not let the contest speak for itself; or if your child cannot watch without passively ingesting marijuana clouds; or if there are fights in the stands and on the field that subtly and insidiously fuel and feed off each other—then you begin to wonder why you came.”
The president saw the pace of technological development and its potential to transform people’s lives and decimate the ballpark experience. Within 7-10 years, Giamatti predicted, most Americans would have “video rooms, enhanced sound, remarkable reception facilities, and libraries of tapes—in our homes.”
Why, he wondered, would such media-saturated Americans choose to come out to see a game in person if public arenas and parks “are as deeply disagreeable…as they will be if they continue on their present course?” And what would happen to the game if good people stopped coming out? That question troubled him, and Giamatti vowed to try and keep baseball a game for “decent” people, which he helpfully defined as: “families, [well-behaved] young people, groups of neighbors, and the elderly.”
“Violence,” he warned, “feeds off the environment more than it fuels it.”
If he accomplished one thing in his tenure as president of the National League, Giamatti promised to clean things up. A year later, on April 30, 1988, his worst fears for baseball would materialize at Riverfront Stadium.
August 1, 1987
Hal McCoy, writing for the Dayton, Ohio Daily News, made a Hall-of-Fame career writing candid, personal stories that brought the turbulence of Pete Rose and his baseball team into vivid life for his readers.
On this day, McCoy captured Rose as he marched around the clubhouse showing off a letter from the new President of the National League, Bart Giamatti.
Giamatti had written to inform Rose that one of his players, third baseman Buddy Bell, had been fined the customary $100 for being ejected from a recent game. In addition, Giamatti had assessed Bell an additional $100 fine after learning that the third baseman had run into the umpire who threw him out at the airport the next day, where the Bell proceeded to “get my money’s worth,” in his words.
Since Giamatti had Rose’s attention, the NL president also reminded the Reds’ manager that he himself had an outstanding bill of $200—for an ejection in mid-July and “subsequent gestures mimicking the umpire’s waistline.”
“Rose,” McCoy observed, “has publicly questioned the work habits and dedication of umpires, the eyesight of umpires, and even the size of an umpire’s belt, with increasing frequency.” These were the sorts of trends the umpires themselves kept quiet track of.
No matter how much money he made, Pete Rose loved all of his dollars the same and could not tolerate being unjustly parted with any of them. He planned to appeal Giamatti’s fine, an appeal which, given some rather archaic procedures, would go to Giamatti, the man who made the initial decision. Anticipating this, the president instructed Rose to send his payment in the meantime, as the appeal would not be considered until August 17, some two weeks later, “when I return from vacation.” This last line is what had set Rose to stomping.
“The president of the [bleeping] league takes a vacation in the heat of the [bleeping] pennant race,” Rose fumed to McCoy (and thus to his readers, Rose knew well). “You tell me how the president of the league can take a vacation in August. Never heard anything like that in my life.”
Rose wondered aloud if Giamatti planned any disciplinary action against umpire Dave Pallone, who had, according to McCoy, “admitted at a banquet recently that he carries a personal vendetta against Dave Concepción over the 1983 spitting incident, including trying to distract him while the player was on defense.”
Would Giamatti act on Pallone’s indiscretion?
“We won’t find out until at least after August 17,” McCoy wrote, answering his own question.
“Vacation time, y’know.”
August 3, 1987
It’s not clear how the interview connected to the banquet, but two days after McCoy’s story, Edvins Beitiks published a wide-ranging interview with Dave Pallone in the San Francisco Examiner. For whatever reason, it is evident that Pallone was feeling rather good about himself that day, coming across as cocky, confident, and having left his filter back at the hotel. He was 36 years old and in his ninth year as a major league umpire, one of the few who had come out of the fires of the ‘79 strike and gone on to prove themselves and establish a career.
Much of the conversation inevitably centered around conflict. “You’ve got to know the personalities of people,” Pallone said. “Know the coaches and players by their first names. If they come out and you [say their name], they tend to calm down.”
He said that he’d grown to tolerate a certain amount of chirping from the bench over the years, “but if it’s cussing, you’ve got to stop it right there.”
Pallone was asked about the Concepción incident from 1983. “I don’t respect him now,” the umpire said, “and I’ll never respect him until the day he retires and I probably won’t respect him even then.”
The umpire stated for the record that he hadn’t made any “bad calls” against Concepción, but did say quite a lot else after that.
“I’ve got him thinking, every game, that I’m going after him. Mind over matter. I’ll stay in his line of sight at second. Maybe I’ll just stare at him and he’ll turn around and say ‘What are you staring at?’ and I’ll say ‘I’m not staring.’”1
These comments violated the most important style-elements of umpiring:
De-escalate, whenever possible
Avoid attracting unnecessary attention
Don’t tell a newspaper that you intentionally play mind-games with an individual player or players
Pallone was now on a roll. He felt “American League umpires don’t work hard enough to make life miserable for [managers Billy] Martin and [Earl] Weaver.”
“There were times there I hoped Martin and Weaver would come to the National League,” Pallone said. “The first time he kicked some dirt on me, I’d get some dirt on him.”
The interview ended with a discussion of a recent incident where an irate player had wiped his glove on an umpire.
“The worst thing you can do is touch an official,” Pallone said. “I’m not talking about bumping, that happens. But [anything more than that] deserves more than a fine and a few days’ suspension.”
Sports Illustrated would later attribute another quote from Pallone to this interview, though it was not present in the original version we saw. We include it with that caveat because, in it, Pallone said something that, to borrow a legal term, seems to establish a pattern of behavior.
Discussing the aftermath of the spitting incident, he reportedly said: “There are films of me running after [Concepción], players pulling me back. If they hadn’t, I probably would’ve hit him, probably would have been thrown out of the league.”
September 2, 1987
A month later, working a Reds game, Pallone threw Dave Concepción out again.
This time the dispute was over a called strike as Pallone worked behind the plate. Concepción, the umpire said, didn’t like the call and “referenced my character.”
The Examiner interview quickly came up. Pallone denied taking any specific steps to “mess” with Concepción or acting on a vendetta of any kind.
“Just because I have no respect for him as a man, I have respect for my job and I have respect for my profession. This is a pennant race. I consider myself a good umpire. I am not going to lower my profession over someone’s feelings that they think I have for them. There is nothing I can do about it. It’s his prerogative if he wants to feel that way.”
“If it had been anyone else in the league, he would have gotten thrown out, too.”
Dave Concepción told Pete Rose he would not pay the automatic $100 fine for being ejected.
“The guy is messing with me. I shouldn’t have to pay it after the things he said.”
This latest incident forced NL President Giamatti to share that he’d had “a long conversation” with Pallone after the Examiner interview.
“I understand there has been a history of some unhappiness between the two of them, but I am satisfied that Mr. Pallone is an objective and professional person.”
Following the events of April 30, 1988, Bart Giamatti would have to revisit this earlier assessment.
Thank you for reading Part 2 of “65 Minutes.”
Our story will conclude next week as we chronicle the fallout from what at least one writer insisted on calling “the Riot on the River.” For our part, we prefer “the Shove Heard ‘Round the World,” having come up with that one ourselves.
The conclusion: “65 Minutes; Part 3” — Tennis Fugit
After the Rose/Pallone altercation in 1988, as players and umpires milled around on the field, Dave Concepción suddenly loomed up in Pallone’s peripheral vision, lingering for a second or two and then melting away into the crowd. Mind over matter.