The other day I came across an interesting passage in an old book called Kill the Ump! by long-time National League umpire Dusty Boggess and told to Ernie Helm (the book is written in the third person). Anyway, here's the passage...

An incident that happened in a ball game in 1961 in which Don Drysdale was pitching may have caused the changes in his throwing habits that made him become one of the best pitchers of his day. His wife told Dusty of the change that came over Don after the game at the Los Angeles Coliseum involving the Cincinnati Reds and the Dodgers.

"Frank Robinson, right fielder for the Reds, was at bat," Dusty remembered. "Don threw the first pitch pretty close to Robby's head. I walked out to the mound and said, 'Son, you have better control than that. Now use it!'" The second pitch was very close, but Cincinnati Manager Fred Hutchinson came out of the dugout protesting vigorously. Dusty stood his ground. The third pitch was back of Robinson's head. Dusty took off his mask and walked quickly out to the mound.

"Son, you are through for the day!" Dusty told Drysdale. That was the first time a pitcher had been tossed out of a ball game for throwing at a batter. Both Walter Alston, Dodger manager, and Coach Leo Durocher came charging out of the dugout. Dusty looked at Leo and pointed to him, saying, "Leo, you're not running this club, evne though you think you are. Let me talk to the boss, not you." With that, he turned to Alston and said, "Walter, get me another pitcher, because Don is through!"

The new pitcher came on. Drysdale was later suspended and fined. After his five-day involuntary lay-off, Drysdale came back to pitch almost perfect control ball.

"To the day I retired, Don's control was excellent," Dusty said. "I don't know if this incident had any effect on Don, but his control was certainly better from that day on."

Drysdale remembered this incident a bit differently...

... I got suspended just once, after an incident involving Cincinnati's Frank Robinson in 1961 at the LA Coliseum. Frank was a great hitter, who actually changed his stance after his first year by moving up on the plate and closing his feet. On this particular day, I pitched him inside and he went down. Dusty Boggess, the plate umpire, came out to warn me.

"Shit, Dusty," I said. "What do you want me to do? Lay the ball right down the middle so he can beat my brains in?"

I came right back in and threw another pitch inside, and down Frank went again. This time, the ball hit Robinson, and Boggess immediately threw me out of the game. I was suspended for five days by Warren Giles, the National League president, and fined $100. I wasn't too happy about it, and neither was Buzzie Bavasi, our general manager. But there was nothing we could do, except to try to point out how ridiculous it all was. I mean, pitchers all over baseball were hitting batters without being ejected or suspended, but I guess that might have been one case where my reputation hurt me instead of helped me.

There are some differences in these stories. For one thing, Boggess suggests he kicked out Drysdale after a pitch nearly hit Robinson, while Drysdale says the pitch did hit Robinson. More substantively, Boggess suggests, in sort of a back-handed way, that his little lecture might have changed the course of Drysdale's career. Drysdale (as we'll see in a moment) explicitly denied that the incident changed anything at all.

Here's what the L.A. Times reported in the next day's edition...

The only highlight, if you want to call it that, of a rather tedious afternoon was when Don Drysdale, the Dodgers' tempestuous twirler, was ejected from the game by umpire Dusty Boggess after Don hit Robinson on the right forearm with a pitch in the sixth inning.

The third of five flingers employed by L.A., Drysdale opened the sixth round by buzzing the ball behind Don Blasingame's head before the Blazer popped up.

Then the Dodger side-winder whipped two inside pitches past Vada Pinson before the latter doubled for the second of his three hits.

After Drysdale's first serve made Robinson hit the dirt, Boggess approached the mound and warned Drysdale, which meant an automatic $50 fine.

Robinson, who likes to crowd the plate, went down on the next pitch, too, although it wasn't as tight as the first one.

Cincy skipper Fred Hutchinson charged out of the dugout and complained about Drysdale's low-bridging tactics to Boggess.

On the next pitch Robinson became the 15th batsman plugged by Drysdale in 126 innings. Big D departed after Boggess told him he had "better control than that."

In case you're wondering why Drysdale was coming into the middle of a game, it was because 1) it was the last game before the All-Star break, and 2) Dodgers starter Roger Craig got knocked out in the third inning (Koufax pitched in this one, too, and got knocked around in his two innings). The Reds wound up winning, 14-3 (remember, this was the year the Reds won their only National League pennant between 1940 and 1970).

For his part, Robinson, in addition to getting plunked by Drysdale, doubled, hit two home runs, and drove in seven. You could knock him down, but you couldn't beat him.

Anyway, back to Drysdale's book for the conclusion of the story...

So I owed the National League $100 and the next time we went into Cincinnati, I decided to pay my debt in person. I went to a bank and got $100 worth of pennies in those rolls, emptied them out, then put all the loose coins in a sack, and delivered them to Mr. Giles's office at the league headquarters in Carew Tower. I dumped the sack on his secretary's desk, she gave me this little smile, and I took off in a hurry. I was pretty proud of myself when I headed back to my hotel room, but I wasn't there too long before the phone rang. It was Mr. Giles's secretary.

"Mr. Giles would like to see you," she said.

I went back to the office and had a bit of a conversation with Mr. Giles. He told me to be careful about the way I was pitching, and I told that I wasn't going to change my philosophy of keeping batters off the plate. It was all very amiable.

"And by the way," Mr. Giles added, "I want you to take those pennies of yours and roll them back up for me."

It took Drysdale hours to put those "damn pennies" back in the containers, but that's exactly what he did.

When I read Boggess's account, I was highly skeptical. Could one lecture/fine/suspension really represent a turning point in a pitcher's career? There's no way to make an absolute determination one way or the other, but thanks to Retrosheet it's not all that hard to find out if Drysdale's control did, indeed, improve after his suspension. Here are his 1961 control numbers, before and after:

                 IP   K   BB   HB  WP
Through July 9  126  103  44   15   5
  After July 9  118   79  24    5   2

Obviously, after the suspension Drysdale's control improved and he didn't hit as many batters (his strikeouts went down some, too). Was this new-found control just temporary? Hardly. Here are career numbers, before and after:

                  Innings  BB/9  HB/9 
Through 7/9/1961   1197    2.61  0.50
  After 7/9/1961   2235    1.55  0.35

Post-ejection, Drysdale's walk rate dropped by forty percent, his HBP rate by 30 percent. Maybe it was the admonitions from Boggess and Giles. Maybe it was the five-day suspension. Maybe it was the 10,000 pennies. In Drysdale's book, he doesn't even acknowledge in his book that his control improved after the ejection. But it sure looks like something happened that afternoon, because Don Drysdale was a different sort of pitcher after July 9, 1961.

**********

Postcript: Some of you, I suspect, are wondering about Dodger Stadium, into which the Dodgers moved in 1962. It's certainly possible, isn't it, that Drysdale's post-suspension numbers in 1961 were something of a fluke, while his improved control afterward was mostly a product of pitcher-friendly Dodger Stadium?

Sure it's possible, and I do think that Dodger Stadium played a part. But Drysdale's walk rate in 1962 (1.9 per nine innings) was roughly the same as the second half of '61 (1.8). Johnny Podres' walk rate dropped, but not by a huge degree (17 percent, from 2.4 to 2.0 per nine innings). Sandy Koufax's walk rate fell similarly, by 18 percent (3.2 to 2.6). As a team, the Dodgers in 1962 actually walked slightly more hitters per nine innings than they had in '61.

Drysdale's post-suspension walk rate in 1961 was 42 percent better than his pre-suspension walk rate in 1961. His 1962 walk rate was 28 percent better than his career walk rate through July 9, 1961. I think those differences are real, and due to some degree to what happened on July 9.

In terms of his career numbers, on the other hand, his walk rate -- and everybody else's in that era -- was greatly assisted not by his home ballpark, but by the expanded strike zone introduced in 1963. In 1962, Dodger pitchers walked 3.16 batters per nine innings. In 1963, Dodger pitchers walked 2.01 batters per nine innings. That wasn't Dodger Stadium; that was the strike zone.