- 2 days ago
Hey everybody! I'm Jon, and this is my newest documentary series: THE HISTORY OF CHARGING THE MOUND. It is about the history of charging the mound. This is the first episode.
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00:00There are no officially maintained statistics that record the practice of
00:03charging the mound in a Major League Baseball game. Typically, though not
00:06always, it goes something like this. The pitcher throws a pitch that either hits
00:10the batter or almost does. The batter is convinced that the pitcher threw at him
00:13on purpose. The batter drops his bat and runs to the mound with the intent of
00:17fighting the pitcher. Simultaneously, players from both teams jump out of the
00:21dugouts and bullpens and onto the field to turn the affair into a group project
00:24of one kind or another. From here, all kinds of shocking, ridiculous, and
00:28hilarious events can and do unfold. This is self-evidently amazing. In the moment
00:33the crowd goes nuts, that night, fans across the country gawk at the footage on
00:37SportsCenter. Years and even decades later, millions pull up baseball fight
00:41compilations on YouTube and enjoy the show all over again. Although this does
00:44usually result in ejections that materially impact the game and sometimes
00:48suspensions that impact future games, it's not as though a player is awarded a
00:51run for landing a right hook. Mound chargings are extracurricular activities, so it
00:55makes sense that they aren't logged as official baseball events and the way it
00:59runs, hits, and errors are. But for almost as long as I've watched baseball, I've
01:02wished that, for entertainment purposes, if for no other reason, there were some
01:07kind of standardized, browsable record of mound charging. A cleaned up, reviewed, and
01:11graded data set that would allow us to explore the history of this impromptu
01:15human fireworks display. For the longest time, I lamented that such a thing did not
01:20exist. And then I said to myself, well, just make it yourself then, dummy.
01:34After scouring newspaper archives and reviewing all the tape I could get my
01:38hands on, I have ended up with 264 events that satisfy my definition of a mound
01:43charging that warrants documentation. This sample is by no means definitive, nor is it
01:47complete. I can virtually guarantee that I've missed a few, but I'm confident that
01:51between the years 1950 and 2025, I've scooped up almost all of them. Rather than
01:56compiling an archive of every baseball fight, I decided to narrow the focus to
02:00mound charging specifically because the conditions of the fight are so clearly set.
02:05Somebody has beef with a pitcher, or the pitcher has beef with somebody, or both. So
02:09much beef that they're able to first complete a journey of approximately 60 feet, 6
02:13inches without getting cold feet or thinking twice. These conflicts are rife with
02:17in-game politics. Sometimes they really aren't blind fits or raged, but other times these
02:21battles are waged matter-of-factly, even reluctantly, and thought of as a necessary
02:26means of upholding norms and maintaining a balance of power. Some are the boiling over
02:30of a few that's been simmering for hours, weeks, even years. Other grievances are literally
02:35two and a half seconds old. The fights themselves are spectacles, but the real fun is to be found
02:40in the personalities and circumstances that precipitate them. Every single one of these fights
02:45is an invitation to explore a story, and more often than not, it's a great story. Let's take a look
03:06around.
03:07So, I could take a few minutes to walk you through my methodology for researching and cataloging all
03:13these mount chargings and explain to you why some of these bars are taller than others or sit higher on
03:17the y-axis than others, but all that can wait a few minutes. Wanna see a fight? Yep, me too.
03:22Which one
03:23to show you first, though? These things are so reliably fun that I decided to pick one at random
03:27just by whipping down the spreadsheet and clicking on a row, and this is the one I landed on. I
03:32couldn't
03:32be happier about it. Hubie Brooks versus John Smiley on August 3rd, 1988. This one serves as a useful
03:38introduction because it gives us a taste of the situational logic and intrigue that so often surrounds these fights.
03:48Pittsburgh's John Smiley was a two-time All-Star whose impressive career stretched from 1986 to 1997
03:53and ended prematurely due to a broken arm. Montreal's Hubie Brooks was also a two-time All-Star who split
03:59his 15-year career between the outfield, third base, and short. Neither man was ever directly involved
04:04in any other mound charging, which is usually how it works. The vast majority of players finish their entire
04:0910 or 15-year careers without ever getting tangled up in one, so there are very few returning
04:14contestants all in all. One such man, though, is Hubie's Expo's teammate, Andres Galarraga.
04:20Drifting over here to the Galarraga system, we find that the big cat, in contrast with his friendly
04:24and easygoing nature, charged the mound four times throughout his career. According to my findings,
04:29that's tied for second most over this entire 76-year sample. Galarraga is one of my personal
04:35favorite ballplayers ever, and he will for sure get his own episode of this series. He charged the mound
04:40wearing a Braves helmet, a Rockies helmet, and an Expo's helmet, but tonight, on August 3rd, 1988,
04:45he instead plays a supporting role. Galarraga gave us many reasons to remember him fondly. One is that
04:51regardless of whether he was hitting 220 or 370, and he did hit both, he was capable of mashing some
04:57of
04:57the hardest hit baseballs you have ever seen. This one against John Smiley probably doesn't even crack
05:02his top 10, but he does send it flying into the second deck at Three Rivers Stadium. It's not quite
05:07a no-no to
05:08crush a ball further than is necessary to hit a home run. Baseball's unwritten rules aren't that
05:12ridiculous, but a pitcher can be made to feel like he's being shown up regardless. More like John
05:19Frowney. You know what, let's see if a flowchart can help us work through these feelings together.
05:23Did we just give up a home run? Yes. Has it altered the course of the game? Yes. On StatHead,
05:28you can find a percentage called win expectancy, which estimates the likelihood of a team winning or
05:33losing after every game event. Here in the top of the third, the odds were set at about 50-50.
05:39One swing of the bat from Galarraga has instantly pulled the Pirates' chances of winning below 30%.
05:44Is this the latest of a mounting series of frustrations? Yes. Smiley has taken the loss on
05:49each of his last three starts, the last of which was particularly frustrating as he spread out just
05:54three hits in one run over eight innings, only to get zero run support. Can we just get over this
05:59and
05:59move on? Nope. And that's probably owing in some part to the fact that Smiley is a 23-year-old
06:04guy
06:05pitching his first full season in the bigs. More experienced, mature pitchers, including presumably
06:10a future Smiley, have through time and experience developed mechanisms to cope with the occasional
06:14agony of pitching, one of the most frustrating jobs there is. Today's John Smiley evidently isn't
06:19there yet. Will the manager give you the hook so that you can retreat to a place suitable for a
06:23temper tantrum? There are too many memorable episodes to name of a pitcher descending the steps to the
06:28dugout and immediately melting down, but there is an art to it which 2015 Eric O'Flaherty demonstrated
06:34masterfully. After committing the cardinal sin of issuing a lead-off walk, he's taken out of the game.
06:39Just take it easy. Play it cool. Hey, good to see you. Okay, uh, excuse me, just a sec. Gotta
06:45duck over here
06:46real quick and wind the clock back a couple million years and devolve into an ape. Even the camera operator's
06:51like, hey buddy, you alright? No such luck for Smiley though. It's only the third inning in an era when
06:57pitchers are expected to stay out there for seven or eight. He's gotta stand out there all by himself
07:01on that dumb little dirt hill and wear this. So, as the umpire issues us another very hard
07:08baseball that is very painful to be hit with at upwards of 80 miles per hour, I ask again,
07:12can we just let this go? No we cannot. Are we pitching in an era in which it is acceptable,
07:19even normalized? To punish a guy who is just doing his job by nailing him with this baseball? Yes we
07:26are.
07:33I don't mind telling you, it was pretty slow going building out this timeline. Searching the newspaper
07:38archives for the phrase, charged the mound, published in a given year, then scouring through
07:42the mountains of imperfect results, squinting at faded newsprint, casting aside all the duplicate,
07:47syndicated articles, sometimes looking for a second source and a third to try to get a handle on how
07:52the whole mess went down, then debating whether it met the criteria I had set, then diving into our
07:57licensed photo archive for these guys, sometimes having to resort to a photo of a guy wearing the
08:01wrong uniform, other times having to give up, and a couple of times coming up empty for photos of both
08:06guys. But once I hit the 80s and 90s, things slowed to a crawl. In many years, an honest to
08:12god mound
08:12charging went down at the rate of two or three a month. At one point in 1987, there were eight
08:17in the
08:17space of less than one month. These dustups were totally commonplace in this time and anyone could
08:22start one for really any reason they wanted. Quite often that reason was as ridiculous as,
08:28that guy hit a home run off me. And as it turns out, the reason could be even more ridiculous
08:33than
08:33that. So, we've decided that Andres Galarraga must pay in the form of a fastball to the ribcage.
08:39Can we at least wait an hour or so until he comes up to bat again in the sixth inning?
08:44No, we cannot. Which is how we finally fall to the basement of this flowchart. We are going to
08:52intentionally throw at the very next batter we see, Hubie Brooks, for the high crime of wearing the
08:58same shirt as the guy who was just doing his job. Right in the wrist. If you think this is
09:04crazy,
09:04you're not crazy. After the game, Hubie Brooks says pretty much exactly what you'd expect him to say.
09:11Evidently, he didn't like the guy hitting the home run off him, but it wasn't, you know, it wasn't me.
09:18Although it seems that Smiley never explicitly owns up to it, everybody in the building understands
09:23that this was on purpose. The umpsure does as he immediately throws Smiley out of the ball game.
09:28Even Smiley's own manager does. Jim Leland has a certain tendency to sometimes be more honest than
09:34he's supposed to be. At one point, Leland, a lifelong chain smoker, will sit for an ESPN interview that
09:39turns to the subject of cigarettes. He begins to warn people against ever picking up the habit before
09:44then professing his love for it. You know when you finish a big dinner? You just light up and take
09:49a drag?
09:51Man, nothing like it. Actually, you know what? Never mind. Smoking is great. That candidness will
09:57present itself after tonight's game, too, when he implies that, yeah, Hubie was right to think the smiley
10:02threw at him and suggest that, yeah, he was right to charge my pitcher. So if all those guys know
10:07what
10:08time it is, Hubie definitely does. Without even a fraction of an instant of hesitation, he sprints
10:14right towards the mound. Now watch here as Smiley nonchalantly tosses his glove. That is usually the
10:20tell. That, I've found, is a serviceable indicator that the pitcher is not surprised to be run up on.
10:25Smiley actually attempts the first strike, putting a hand out there and missing with a swipe, Hubie counters
10:30and lands with a glancing blow, then strikes the bill of his cap and knocks it off, and usually that's
10:35all the intelligible fighting you can expect from these things. They grapple, they're swarmed by the
10:39clearing benches, and no MMA judge on earth would be able to tell you much about what happens from there.
10:49Who won this fight? Fans like you and me. Between these two, I guess maybe Hubie, barely. But these
10:56affairs are rarely a story of winners and losers. The real intrigue lies in whether and how and why
11:01they happen at all. Which is why I decided very early on that I wouldn't even try to declare winners
11:06as I catalog these mound chargings. Instead, I'm simply awarding a score between 0 and 5 to judge the
11:12overall substance and spectacle of a fight. A 0 signifies that one or both parties acted like they
11:19were gonna charge the mound but lost interest and thought twice before actually engaging. If it's a 1,
11:241 or both really did try to come after each other but they were held back by another player or
11:30an umpire.
11:30If it's a 2, the 2 did engage with one another but it was only really a fight in quotation
11:36marks. No blows
11:37landed and the dust up probably just resembled some glorified hugging. Now Brooks vs Smiley here is awarded
11:43a 3 because 1 or both players, in this case Brooks, landed at least one significant strike. If it's a
11:494,
11:491 or both players landed a more impressive takedown, blow or series of blows. 4s are relatively rare
11:56compared to 2s and 3s because baseball players are generally not very good at fighting. I say
12:01generally there to make a little bit of space for the extraordinarily rare 5s. Across these 264 fights,
12:08I handed out just 11 5 ratings. These are for truly exceptional, perhaps even transcendent,
12:14fight performances on the part of one or both contenders, although typically just one. To take one
12:19example, one I'm sure you've been waiting for me to mention, Robin Ventura vs Nolan Ryan in 1993,
12:24the most well known mound charging to ever take place, is without question a 5. This one really is as
12:30great as you remember it being and I do plan on giving it its own episode but I'm not positive
12:35I would
12:36call it the very greatest. Not when it has contenders like the magnificent Paul Wilson, Kyle Farnsworth,
12:41clobbering from 2003, and 1987's Willie Wilson, Ken Schramm, which I consider a sort of dark horse
12:47candidate due to its unusual circumstances. Even these only scratch the surface really. The x-axis,
12:54as you probably already guessed, is the date. The y-axis measures the intensity of the surrounding
12:59fight amongst teammates and the like. If it's a 0, nobody else even bothered running onto the field,
13:04extraordinarily rare and has almost never happened. A score of 1 describes a mill about. The benches do
13:09empty but everybody just kind of stands around for a minute and walks away. A rating of 2 represents
13:14what I will call a fracas. There's a little pushin' and shovin' but it's pretty aimless and half-hearted,
13:20usually with more of a focus on breaking up the initial fight between pitcher and charger. If it's
13:24a 3, that's a rhubarb. Way back in the day, sportswriters used to refer to bench clearing brawls as
13:29rhubarbs. Why, I haven't really gotten to the bottom of nor do I really care that much, because it's fun
13:34to
13:34say. Anyway, a 3 is awarded to an actual brawl, with additional legitimate fights springing up
13:40during or after the original fight. Hubie Brooks vs. John Smiley is a 3, and it's a fun 3 because
13:46after both guys were ejected, they started yelling at each other in the hallway between the clubhouses.
13:51And while those two reportedly didn't physically engage any further, players and umps ran inside
13:55after him and did some more shoving. Good stuff. A 4 is a melee, a brawl that has totally taken
14:01on
14:01a life of its own. This brawl might flare up, die down and flare up again, there's difficulty
14:06restoring order, mobs of dudes start fighting, it looks like if a bunch of medieval football players
14:11forgot the ball and just started playing without one. These are fun because often you'll see guys
14:16fight for absolutely no reason other than to fight. Two guys who've never even been on the same field at
14:21the same time before might decide that they're mortal enemies now. Guys who have nothing to do with
14:26anything will bum rush a crowd and start cheap-shotting guys because they're just so excited that after all
14:31these years they finally get to be in on one of these. And a 5 is a Donnybrook.
14:41Either the police involve themselves or it's surprising that they don't. This entire saga
14:46could last 10, 20, 30 minutes, fights spill into the outfield, players get injured, people throw stuff
14:52on the grass, fans might even jump over the railings and try to join in. It's total chaos. In this
14:57one
14:57between the Braves and Padres in 84, the only fight to score a perfect 5 in both categories,
15:02I ended up listing all of Fulton County as a fighter. I might make an episode on this one
15:07too, by which point I hopefully will have at least made some sense of it.
15:14You might wonder why I've chosen now, of all times, to conduct an extensive study of the history of
15:19mound charging in Major League Baseball. Well, although I don't always do this, it is useful to wait until the
15:24story has ended before I start to tell it and the institution of mound charging isn't dying. It's dead.
15:36I settled on 1950 as the starting point for this sample because it seems to catch the very beginnings
15:42of the mound charging phenomenon. There were certainly quite a few prior to the 50s, probably dating back
15:47as far as baseball has existed, but they were surprisingly rare in the big leagues. The vast
15:51majority of the relevant reports I found pre-1950 concerned independent or minor league teams.
15:57There was a sparse but steady heartbeat in the 50s and 60s. The 70s saw a modest uptick and the
16:02decade
16:03ended with nine mound chargings in 1979. The phenomenon exploded from there. In the 80s and 90s,
16:09mound chargings became a standard fixture of the sport, happening more than once a month on average.
16:14They leveled off somewhat in the aughts and became extremely rare in the 2010s,
16:18where now most of the way through the 2020s and all decade we have seen...one.
16:24This party is over. Which is not to say we'll never see a player charge the mound again, I'm sure
16:30we will,
16:31but as an institution, as a standard baseball practice for more than half a century, mound charging
16:36is done. Interesting questions arise, of course. First of all, do we think the loss of this custom is a
16:41good
16:41thing or a bad thing or neither? Everyone's mileage will vary, I'm sure. Answering only for myself,
16:47these fights were usually bursting with intrigue and often really funny. I find them highly entertaining,
16:52which of course is why I'm producing this series. It's also fine by me if they no longer happen. I
16:57don't attribute the extinction of mound charging to a general lack of energy or passion in the sport.
17:02When a reliever punches out a hitter to end the top of the eighth, he still pumps his fist and
17:06yells,
17:06the crowd still goes nuts. That energy is still there, it's just being channeled in other directions.
17:11The only thing I wonder is whether it's just mound charging we've lost or if that's a symptom of
17:17something greater, something more cultural we haven't entirely taken stock of and whether
17:22that is a good or bad thing to have lost.
17:28Hey everybody, it's John, the guy who was just yakking at you and apparently still is. Wow.
17:32I decided to add a little epilogue here now that I have finished almost the entire run of the history
17:36of Charging the Mound, just so you can kind of get a sneak preview of what is coming up. Now,
17:41this wound up being a 10 episode season. Episode one is the one you're watching now. Episode two
17:46explores the 2001 encounter between Mike Sweeney of the Royals and Jeff Weaver of the Tigers.
17:51That one is a lot of fun. If you like petty nonsense and or religious guilt,
17:57that one is the one for you. In episodes three and four, we visit the Bell Keeson system,
18:03named after George Bell and Bruce Keeson. If you don't know either of those guys, that's okay.
18:07I barely knew who Bruce Keeson was as he retired when I was two. But he is amazing in that
18:14he was
18:14one of the most injured guys in the history of baseball and yet he stuck around long enough to
18:19tie the all-time record for most times charged as a pitcher with four. And then you got George Bell.
18:25His career almost ended in the minor leagues because of a bean ball that hit his face so hard
18:29that he almost had to retire, but he didn't retire. He came back and he ended up charging the mound
18:34three times in the major leagues, all because he resolved to never let a pitcher push him around
18:39again. Now Bell and Keeson encountered each other because of a seminal 1985 fight in which Bell
18:46kicked Keeson in the ding dong. In episode five, we're going to talk about Dave Rosema, who you might
18:52never have heard of. I'll be totally honest. I had barely heard of the guy when I started this series.
18:57But I did enough reading on the guy to conclude that he is one of the funniest guys to ever
19:02play
19:02baseball. Another such guy is the subject of episode six, Lenny Randall. Longtime viewers of
19:08Secret Base probably don't need much more of an introduction than that. But I will say that in
19:13order to tell his story, it necessitated the use of state-of-the-art CGI technology. It took me a
19:21painstaking amount of time. I don't know if you've ever seen a polygon before, but I got more than you
19:27can shake a stick at. So be on the lookout for that one. Episode seven is going to be kind
19:32of an
19:32intermission. It is, I think, about 45 minutes long. It's like the longest one. And it's actually not
19:37even directly and singularly about mound charging. It's more me trying to unravel the mystery of why
19:42mound chargings don't really happen anymore and what else is not happening anymore in baseball and
19:49whether or not those things aren't related. It's very nerdy. Lots of charts and stuff like that.
19:54If you're into that, you might dig it. Episode eight gets back to business with the fight between
19:59Royals Hall of Famer George Brett and Tigers pitcher Milt Wilcox. This is not the first Royals Tigers
20:04tangle-up that we cover. Those teams just fight a lot. Episode nine of this series is like episode
20:10nine of Star Wars in that it is the very best one. That is Nolan Ryan versus Robin Ventura. Probably
20:16the most, well not probably, definitely the most iconic mound charging in the history of the sport.
20:22And finally the tenth episode, the season finale, is about Andres Galarraga, the big cat. One of my
20:28favorite baseball players ever. Kind of a self-indulgent move on my part, but I just really wanted to talk
20:33about the guy. And also this whole series was originally just going to be one video on Galarraga
20:38in the four times he charged the mound before I blew it up into a whole series. So we have
20:42Galarraga
20:43to thank for many things, including this series. So if you only watch Secret Base on YouTube,
20:47you will be able to watch every single one of these episodes eventually. They're dropping,
20:52the first batch is actually dropping between now and May. The second batch is dropping in July and
20:58August, and the last couple episodes should be landing in like October-ish.
21:02But if you subscribe to Secret Base's Patreon, patreon.com slash secretbase,
21:08there are six of them all finished waiting for you right now. Number seven is like days
21:13away from dropping, and numbers eight, nine, and ten are going to be available on Patreon
21:18way before they land on YouTube. And of course, all our videos over there are completely ad-free,
21:23and we've got a lot of other cool exclusive stuff for you. Plans start at five bucks a month.
21:28Check us out. Either way, whether you watch here or there or wherever else, thank you so much for
21:34tuning in. This is going to be a lot of fun. I think you're going to dig it. And man,
21:39I mean,
21:39I can't say that I am going to come up with any profound explanation for why batters started charging
21:47the mound in the 80s and 90s and why they stopped just as suddenly. But I can promise you that
21:53I'm
21:54going to show you a whole lot in the way of guys pushing and shoving and fighting, usually with
21:59terrible technique, and often for no good reason at all. And it doesn't get any better than that.
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