beanball

Similarly, the official rules of Major League Baseball (MLB) specifically prohibit the act of throwing a beanball and provide penalties for possible ejection for players who violate this rule.

The title alone is a "triple" play-on-words that refers to the refrain from the familiar baseball song, to coming out of the closet and to a climactic beanball murder.

sports," the beanball. (25) Its deadly nature is clear from the

"A History of the Beanball," in Baseball Abstract 1987.

When a tennis player suffers a detached retina after being struck by an opponent's enthusiastic overhead smash, the opponent is generally not considered a tortfeasor.(1) But at what point does a beanball pitch or a spikes-up slide in baseball, a late hit in football, or an aggressive soccer slide tackle transcend the code of acceptable behavior and sportsmanship that governs participation in sport?

The beanball wars are on, and so is the endless assault on sportsmanship's sensibilities.

McMullen recalled, "Both clubs met in the pitcher's box and you hit anyone near you." The headline over Halsey Hall's story in the Minneapolis Journal the next day read, "Sammy Bohne Doesn't Play, But Gets More Hits Than Those Who Do." There were plenty of ejections in the game, but Hugh McMullen was not among the ejectees--ironic because in a letter written by McMullen 55 years later, Hughie admitted that he had indeed spiked Betts intentionally in retaliation for a beanball Betts had thrown a few pitches earlier.

Especially intriguing is Wendel's frank and frightening examination of the beanball, which uncovers a taboo subject in a game dominated by macho athletes: fear.

Through the years, Red Sox players have had to duck fastballs from opposing pitchers down here and while they're not about to duck questions about the past beanball wars, they're tired of talking about them.

Of the over four hundred photographs, the following are the most striking: a 1937 photo of a sprawled Cochrane, whose extraordinary career has just been ended by a beanball; an action photo of an 1887 game at Recreation Park; a 1940 photo of Floyd Giebel carried on the shoulders of ecstatic teammates; a photo of Greenberg sliding around Hack in the 1945 World Series; and a 1951 photo of Bob Swift, though on his knees catching a pitch, towering over the midget Eddie Gaedel.

Levitt and Trandel, White, and Klein contend that the number of batters hit by pitches rose in the American League after 1973, not because pitchers had less to fear from retaliation directed against them personally, but because the substitution of hard-hitting DHs for weak-hitting pitchers made beanball more profitable: AL team managers had more to gain from placing designated hitters on base by instructing pitchers to plunk them than from giving free passes to pitchers, who otherwise represent easy outs.

The league fired a beanball at the head of CBC Distribution and Marketing, Inc., claiming the company was violating the publicity rights of players.

In his few years in the majors, he had been involved with a number of beanball incidents.