For the Birds
In baseball, EVERYTHING has happened more than once.
Please know that Project 3.18 has nothing against birds. We own a bird feeder which we fill semi-regularly, we sublet space on our front porch to two different robin families, and we’ve befriended a mated pair of cardinals whom we have taken the trouble to name.1
Rather, we here at Project 3.18 are very much for baseball stories that veer in unexpected, unplanned directions. It’s right there in our Substack tagline! We are interested in what humans do in moments for which there is no instruction manual.
For that reason, we have to do this story, because the most unlikely thing we can imagine happening in baseball has happened four times. At least.
But we’ll do it classy. We won’t include a single one of the approximately 10,000 poor-taste/too-soon bird jokes, puns, and plays-on-words that litter the source accounts. If a bird is unfairly-criticized, we’ll use our platform to defend it. And we’ll use our photo allotment today to celebrate our (living) animal subjects, remembering them for their best.
Part I: The Hawks
As far as we can tell, the first time a professional player struck a bird with a baseball was in 1981, during a July 7 minor league contest between two teams in the Class A Northwest League.
During the second game of a doubleheader against the Eugene Emeralds, Medford A’s outfielder Ron Harrison hit a deep fly ball to right field. Eugene’s left fielder, Eric Davis, backpedaled to the warning track and got into position beneath the ball, as he’d surely done hundreds of times. “Then all at once I see him start running in,” said Eugene’s manager, Greg Riddoch.
Davis charged forward several steps and caught the ball, but nearby, a medium-sized bird, later identified as a common nighthawk, was seen to fall to the playing field.
“Some of the kids said they thought they saw the hawk dive after the ball, then it smacked him,” Riddoch said.
Harrison, who’d been in a mini-slump to start his season, returned to the bench, not sure what to think, other than that he was now 1-for-9. Meanwhile, the game’s two assigned umpires conferred. They decided that Harrison should be awarded a single.
Now, we’re not going to dive too deeply, but this seems to be a misapplication of the rules.
As we’ll see, the rules typically say that if a batted ball strikes an object (such as, say, an umpire) in between the foul lines, it remains in play, requiring the defense to collect it as best they can. In this case, Davis’ positioning suggested the ball was catchable, and even after the incident, the ball was caught, making it hard to see the umpires’ decision to award Harrison a base as correct. But we digress.
Ron Harrison never reached the majors, and retired from baseball after 1987. Eric Davis, however, went on to become a very successful big-league player, with the kind of offensive power folks might expect would be dangerous to birds. This would lead to some confusion.
Two years and 364 days later, halfway across the country, another nighthawk was struck and killed, this time by one of the most exciting players in the major leagues.
It happened during the fifth inning of a game at Milwaukee’s County Stadium, once again during the second game of a doubleheader.
The batter was Oakland A’s left fielder Rickey Henderson. Facing the Brewers’ Mike Caldwell, Henderson hit a booming fly ball out into center field where Rick Manning settled under it, only to “pull a Davis” and run in in response to a sudden and most-unfortunate change in the ball’s trajectory.
Manning made the catch, and the ball in the center fielder’s glove had a feather stuck in it. Another nighthawk had fallen to baseball. “It was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen,” Manning said. “You can play baseball in a bird cage and never hit a bird.”
Manning wrongly impugned the poor bird’s intelligence, saying it was “dumb” for diving toward the ball as it was coming down, but then his conscience reasserted itself. “The bird looked to be okay, but then it took a nosedive. I should have let the ball go and caught the bird.”
The crowd of 20,000 fans, slowly realizing what had happened, began to boo and jeer Henderson. “Then when I went back out to the field the fans were flapping their arms and calling me a killer.”
This seems like a story with no heroes, but one quietly emerged in the aftermath. At first, no one knew what to do with the hawk. Was this a job for the umpires? The grounds crew? No one volunteered.
As the adults dithered, Bill La Macchia, an 18-year-old ball boy about to enter Marquette University, stepped forward. He walked from his seat on the left field line into center field where he picked up the bird using his glove and placed his cap over its still form, “to show respect,” he said afterward. “I didn’t think it looked good to see a bird lying out there,” LaMacchia said. “No one from the grounds crew went out there, so I thought I’d go.”
Television cameras followed La Macchia’s one-man procession as he walked quickly through the center field gate and delicately and discreetly placed the bird behind the outfield fence.
Afterward, Henderson assured reporters that he had not called this particular shot. “I wouldn’t harm a bird. I would never harm a bird.”
But this was Rickey, after all, so he offered a slightly eccentric perspective: “I would, however, have told [the bird] to at least get me a hit out of it.”
“They’ll probably run it on television over and over. I don’t think it will ever happen again,” Henderson said.
One of his teammates that day could have corrected him. Oakland’s starting pitcher was rookie Curt Young, called up from the minors a few weeks earlier. The Medford A’s were, of course, a minor league club affiliated with the Oakland A’s, and Young was there the night three years prior when Ron Harrison had done the exact same thing, except that he got on base.
Nighthawks are insectivores, preying almost exclusively on flying insects. They are active primarily in mornings and evenings, and they enjoy “basking” in swarms of small bugs, opening their beaks and then diving through to catch the bugs in mouths lined with specially-evolved bristles.
You can see where this is going, right? What better place to find a swarm of bugs than in front of the banks of lights that sit high above many ballparks? To a hungry nighthawk, a fast-moving baseball high in the air might seem to be some sort of irresistible, Moby Dick-type moth.
So there, Rick Manning.
Part II: The Doves
After going 108 years without a bird-related workplace incident, baseball had had two similar accidents in just a sliver of the time. Sadly, the pace would not slacken.
On April 12, 1987, the Atlanta Braves routed the Mets at Shea Stadium in Queens, New York, 12-4. The real history came in the third inning, when a player got a hit at the expense of a bird.
The Braves were leading, 2-1. Center fielder Dion James batted for Atlanta, facing New York pitcher Bob Ojeda. James hit a routine fly ball into left field, where outfielder Kevin McReynolds prepared to make the catch. But the ball never made it to his position, and because this was a daytime game, looking into the bright sky, McReynolds was at a disadvantage.
“I didn’t know what happened,” McReynolds said. “It was that time of game when the sun was in my eyes. The only thing I could think right off was the ball went into the sun and I just lost it. Then I saw two objects falling.”
The ball fell into short left field, about twenty paces behind the Mets’ shortstop Rafael Santana, and an unfortunate bird fell nearby. The ball was ruled fair and James took second base before McReynolds recovered enough to pick it up. The Mets’ manager, Davey Johnson, tried unsuccessfully to figure out how the umpires had gotten this wrong. “I was trying to think of a protest. The closest thing I could think of was fan interference.”
There was some debate over the type of bird lost. Pigeon was the obvious guess, but ornithological experts in the Braves’ dugout would later upgrade the bird to a dove. A columnist would later refer to the bird as a mourning dove, so we’re going with that.
Once again, no one could decide what to do with the bird, which lay forlornly in the outfield grass.
The Shea Stadium grounds crew did not budge, perhaps because this was below their pay grade or because it was a Braves player that made the mess. The first staff member on the scene was the Mets “ball girl,” Sarah Goldstein. There she encountered Rafael Santana, the Mets’ shortstop, and third baseman Howard Johnson.
While Johnson provided moral support, Santana picked the bird up by a wing. Photographers expertly captured the moment he sought to pass it to Goldstein, who took it with two fingers and the utmost reluctance. Any human being from any culture and any point in history could look at Goldstein in that picture and understand that she's being made to touch something yucky.
Not knowing what else to do, a clearly-uncomfortable Goldstein returned to her seat and set the bird down next to the rain tarpaulin near her chair. There she sat, in some distress, attracting the notice of Ozzie Virgil, the Braves’ catcher, who was not in the lineup that day and had been working in the bullpen in left.
“The girl looked like she was upset. I wanted to get it away from there.” Virgil placed the bird in a cardboard box and carried it away into the bullpen.
“I saw the whole thing. Birds usually do a good job of dodging balls, but it ran right into the ball, the poor thing.” He seemed moved.
“Can you imagine, it was a dove, a bird of peace.”
On base at great cost, Dion James would eventually come around to score in the inning. “That bird died a hero to me,” he said afterward. “It’s too bad it happened, though.”
The players knew that they’d just seen a remarkable occurrence. “I hunt a little bit,” McReynolds said. ”Those things are hard to hit with a shotgun, let alone a baseball.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it in 41-years,” Chuck Tanner said, Braves manager. “The bird should be stuffed and sent to the Hall of Fame.” (This did not happen.)
For some reason, the Mets communications team decided to make a statement about the incident. This job was delegated to a spokesman named Jay Horwitz, who rather messed it up.
“To the best knowledge of the Elias Sports Bureau, no bird has ever been killed in a major league game by a fly ball,” Horwitz said. “But in 1981, in the Northwest League, Eric Davis hit a ball that struck a bird and killed it mid flight.”
Horwitz had it backwards. Eric Davis didn’t hit the deadly ball in Medford–he caught it. As the wire services put that erroneous account appeared in every paper in the United States with a Sports section, it was not Davis who objected, but the Elias Sports Bureau.
On April 14, a young Newsday reporter named Tom Verducci quoted Seymour Siwoff from Elias. “No one from Elias claimed it was a first,” Siwoff said. “In 110 years, it must have happened somewhere before.” And these were the records people!
On April 15, the Oakland Tribune finally set the record straight, reminding the public of the Henderson Incident that had happened just three years before. Any journalism points the Tribune earned by making this correction, however, they immediately lost for their mangling of the 1983 Harrison Incident. In this latest version of the tale, both Eric Davis and Ron Harrison hit different birds “in the same year in the same league.”
Despite being falsely accused of involuntary manslaughter, we could find no response from Eric Davis correcting the record. Maybe he didn’t see it? In any case, Project 3.18 has now corrected the record. Take that, Associated Press.
The mourning dove, also known as the rain dove, is one of the most abundant birds of North America, with a population estimated at 475 million individuals. Mourning doves are fast, agile flyers, and often make sudden ascents, descents, and dodges in the air. As Kevin McReynolds referenced, mourning doves are considered a game bird, with tens of millions hunted for meat and sport in the United States each year. Despite those losses, mourning doves remain tremendously successful because one pair can produce as many as twelve offspring a year.
After the James Incident, there was a period of peace. For fifteen years, everyone’s luck held, until spring training in 2001, when the most unfortunate dove of all flew in front of Randy Johnson’s 97 mph fastball.
The Arizona Diamondbacks were playing the San Francisco Giants and Calvin Murray was the batter. March 24 was Johnson’s last start of spring training and the Big Unit was fully-warmed up. He fired a pitch towards Murray, and in the same second, a small bird flying at top speed streaked into the ball’s path.
Rod Barajas was catching, or attempting to. “I’ve never seen that before, and I’ll probably never see that again,” he said. “The ball was about three-quarters of the way there…the bird landed about ten feet behind home plate.
The umpire immediately and correctly ruled the ball “dead,” just as it would have been if the batter had called time before the throw. But the unfortunate and overlapping nomenclature inspired a single, endlessly-repeated joke.
The Giants’ second baseman, Jeff Kent (“a noted bowhunter”), emerged from the dugout and picked up the bird, which was identified as a dove, and if anyone would know that, we supposed it would be noted bowhunter Jeff Kent. While most everyone in the park was stunned, Kent was thoroughly amused, and he picked the bird up and pointed it at Johnson in laughing accusation.
“Maybe I’ll have Randy back to my ranch,” Kent said. “And he can have a bucket of balls instead of buckshot.” Kent collected the bird in a bucket and went back to the dugout to continue being horrible.
No records make it easy to confirm, but we’re going to go out on a limb and say that when the at-bat resumed, Calvin Murray struck out as fast as he could.
Johnson, a dour man in all seasons, did not break character. “I disregard everything that happened in that inning,” the lefthander said. “I don’t think that was very funny.”
The Arizona Republic reported that Johnson looked “sharp” in his final spring start, “beyond the incident with the bird.”
The combination of overwhelming force and unfathomable odds made the incident an instant sensation and a part of Johnson’s legend. That dude killed a bird, and while it was an accident (how could it be anything else, at the speeds involved), the shoe nonetheless seemed to fit. Life had been taken out there, and National League batters took note. Johnson had his second-best season ever and won a World Series, while everyone he faced got to walk out of the batter’s box alive and with a vague feeling of gratitude.
We don’t have a definitive ID for this one, but some thoughtful searching suggests that the bird Johnson downed was likely a Eurasian Collared-Dove, which is extremely common across the southern half of the United States and particularly Florida and the Southwest states.
If it helps, the Collared-Dove is an invasive species. It got here by way of the Bahamas, after a pet-shop burglary in the 1970s prompted the shop owner to inexplicably release his flock of 50 doves, whose ancestors have mostly taken over the continent and then some, being discovered as far away (from anywhere) as Iceland. Not too shabby, as legends go.
Do you know of any other bird-related baseball incidents? Please give us a lead by leaving a comment. We know there must be more out there.
There’s one more bird story to tell, one that stands apart and alone. In that story and that story alone, a baseball player will be held startlingly accountable for his bird-related offenses, because in Canada, you do not mess with the wildlife.
On August 5: “Oops?”
If you only read one offbeat baseball inventory today, thanks for making it this one. If you are inclined to read two, we have a recommendation:
Shout-out to Fred and Lucy, if they’re reading this.
Paul. I enjoyed another offbeat baseball story of yours. Also, in the bird genre: Mark (the Bird) Fidrych.
8/4/83. Dave Winfield kills a seagull in a Blue Jays (no pun there) game in Canada. Fined by PD then released.