Pitching with a purpose: revenge
To understand why we feel pulled to revenge, it helps to understand the role payback played in primitive, barbaric societies. For instance: Major League Baseball.
Revenge is often unproductive.
It can be reckless, and depending on the method, revenge can also be illegal.
But revenge – or at least the threat of it – can also be a very useful tool for regulating behavior. This was especially true in prehistoric times, when our species first began to live in groups, and physical retaliation — or at least the threat of it — served as a significant deterrent.
In fact, these sorts of practices are still employed in the more primitive corners of our present-day existence, such as federal prison or the subject of this particular essay: professional baseball.
RITE OF RETRIBUTION
On the afternoon of July 7, 1987, a rookie pitcher for the Chicago Cubs faced something of a dilemma.
This pitcher, a fellow named Greg Maddux, had been told by his manager that unless he earned a victory in that day’s game against the San Diego Padres, he would be demoted to the minor leagues.
Things started fairly well for Maddux and his team. The Cubs homered twice in the first inning, and they led 4-2 in the bottom of the third when the team’s best hitter – a guy named Andre Dawson – came to the plate. Now, Dawson was responsible for one of those first-inning home runs I mentioned. He was also in the midst of a tremendous season.
But during his second at-bat, Dawson was struck directly in the face by a fastball thrown by Padres pitcher Eric Show. In the baseball vernacular, Dawson was “beaned,” meaning he was struck in the head as opposed to being “plunked” or “dotted,” which would indicate the pitch hit the batter below his shoulders.
Whether the beaning of Dawson was intentional remains a subject of dispute.
The Cubs, however, were furious. They charged at the opposing pitcher, instigating a fairly large fight made more dramatic when Dawson regained consciousness, spit blood onto home plate, and then engaged his own solo mission to try and find Show.
Dawson was ejected along with several others. Show left the game because of an injury.
What happened next was detailed in “Greg Maddux: One of a Kind,” the 70-minute documentary produced by Major League Baseball.
According to the informal codes that govern the game of baseball—its “unwritten rules”—Maddux was expected to hit one of the players in retaliation. A tit-for-tat exchange would demonstrate that hitting a Cubs player in general, and Dawson specifically, carried a consequence.
There was a problem, though. Maddux needed to be credited with the win to avoid being sent down. In order to qualify for the win, he needed to pitch through at least the fifth inning.
Veteran Rick Sutcliffe offered Maddux a solution: Pitch the fourth and fifth innings as he normally would, and then in the sixth, he could do whatever he wanted.
“He looked at me,” Sutcliffe recalled during an interview for the documentary, “and he went, ‘No, I’m hitting the first guy.’
“I said, ‘If you don’t go get three outs, they're going to send you to the minor leagues.’ And with tears in his eyes, he said, 'I don’t care if I get another win.’
“I’m getting goose bumps right now,” Sutcliffe continued. “I can still see his face.”
Maddux didn’t hit the first player the Padres sent to the plate in the fourth inning. He did, however, hit the third. A fastball that struck catcher Benito Santiago square in his hip.
As expected, Maddux was ejected.
As the manager had warned, Maddux was sent down to the minor leagues.
“I certainly would have lost a ton of respect if I didn’t hit anybody,” Maddux says now. “That was way more valuable than any win I could have ever gotten.”
Some will see this story as a testament to Maddux's character. He prioritized sticking up for a teammate over securing the victory that would have benefited him personally.
Others will see this story as an example of the primitive, maybe even barbaric codes that exist not just in baseball but in many competitive sports.
Neither perspective is wrong. Both are, to a certain extent, true.
But to me, this story isn’t about right and wrong so much as it’s a clear example of how revenge functions in the real world and why it can be seen as necessary and even noble.
ROOTS OF REVENGE
For baseball to be played in its current form, the batter must have some assurance that the pitcher will not try to bean him.
For one thing, it’s super dangerous, potentially fatal.
For another, it’s a tactical disadvantage for the hitter. If a batter is afraid of being hit by a pitch, it will compromise his ability to hit the ball with the stick he’s holding.
There are examples of players whose careers were forever altered after being hit in the head by a pitch. They were never able to fully overcome the fear that it would happen again.
It is understandable, then, why intentionally hitting an opponent is forbidden.
This rule, however, is difficult to enforce because it requires officials to judge intent.
How do you determine whether a batter was hit on purpose?
Pitchers are human beings, and as such, they are fallible. They are throwing a spheroid as hard as they can at a target that is 60 feet, 6 inches away at speeds that often approach, perhaps even exceed 100 mph.
Even in suspicious circumstances, a pitcher can create plausible deniability by insisting the ball “just got away from him.”
One solution would be to take intent out of the equation. Just eject any pitcher who hits an opposing batter.
The downside: A lot of pitchers would be ejected for honest mistakes.
Another solution is to leave it up to the umpire’s discretion. In this case, some pitchers who’ve intentionally hit an opponent will get the benefit of the doubt.
This is where baseball’s informal code comes into play.
If a batter is hit by a pitch, one of his teammates may then throw at an opposing batter.
Sometimes, this is done immediately, as it was in the Cubs vs. Padres game in 1987. In other instances, it can wait weeks, months, even years.
Theoretically, the targeting of opposing batters should cease once payback is administered.
Reality can (quickly) get more complicated. Perhaps one team remains adamant that a specific hit-by-pitch was accidental. Or perhaps that team objects to how many times the opponent threw at its hitters before someone finally got plunked. Or perhaps the first plunking was in the butt, the second one up at the head, which would create an imbalance.
Or maybe one of the hitters actually is injured.
Things can escalate. Quickly. You can have full-blown fights and even years-long feuds. These are the outcomes that some people – including those within the game – focus on when objecting to this particular system of retaliation.
Earl Weaver, a longtime manager of the Baltimore Orioles, was famous for his fervent objection to throwing at an opponent on purpose. He’s not alone. Others have been equally adamant that it’s a stupid system that unnecessarily elevates the risk of injury.
Baseball must end its beanball legacy
By Buster Olney | ESPN.com
I don’t necessarily think they’re wrong about that. There’s a reason that vigilante justice is not just frowned on, but forbidden.
However, it’s worth noting that this system of retaliation creates an incentive for pitchers to avoid hitting opponents with pitches, or at the very least to be more careful.
Peaks and Valle
In the 1993 season, a catcher named Dave Valle was hit by a pitch 17 times.
This was the most of any player in Major League Baseball that year, and it was surprising for a couple of reasons.
Valle was a solid and experienced catcher, but he was never considered to be a particularly fearsome hitter. He had three seasons in which he hit more than 10 home runs, and never hit more than 13. He wasn’t the kind of hitter a pitcher would want to scare off the plate.
Valle was never hit more than nine times in any of the other 12 Major League seasons he played.
The reason that Valle was hit so many times that season was related to one of his teammates.
Randy Johnson.
Now, Johnson was one of the most feared pitchers in the league. He stood 6 feet 10, he threw extremely hard and – at least early in his career – was not particularly accurate.
He did not care about this last fact as much as he could have.
Johnson hit 16 opposing batters in the 1993 season, most of any pitcher in the league. The previous year, Johnson hit 18 opposing batters. This was also the most in the league.
Now, as an American League team, Seattle’s pitchers didn’t bat. But Valle – who was Johnson’s catcher – did.
You see the correlation, right?
Valle certainly did.
“There were a number of times that we had conversations about that,” Valle said during a Mariners television broadcast in 2025.
The following year, Johnson hit just six opposing batters.
Some of this was due to improved accuracy. Johnson walked fewer hitters as well. But a big part of it was Johnson became more careful or, to put it more bluntly, stopped plunking people.
Retaliation generated peer pressure, exerted by Valle, for Johnson to modify his approach. The result was an overall reduction in the number of times he hit opposing batters.
This is not how revenge always works in baseball.
In fact, I wouldn’t say this is how it usually works.
It is more like a cherry-picked example that shows it is possible for retaliation — or the threat of it — to regulate behavior.
On the other hand, pitchers have been known to throw at opposing hitters for reasons that are not nearly as noble as sticking up for an injured teammate.
Perhaps they’re frustrated because they’ve been hit hard either by that player or his team.
Perhaps they didn’t like how someone celebrated a play.
Perhaps they soaked in a whirlpool set to the hottest temperature possible, and then, before donning their uniform, had applied liniment to their testicles to achieve a level of unbridled fury. This was an approach favored by Roger Clemens, according to one passage in Tom Verducci’s book “The Yankee Years.” Clemens was known for not only a willingness to throw baseballs at opponents, but he once took the shattered barrel of a bat and winged it at Mike Piazza.
I’m not defending this system. I’m not saying it should be perpetuated. But by looking at the reasons why this system was created, it provides some insight into the motivations.
Revenge — the act of retaliating for a hit batter by plunking an opponent — was used to solve a problem: Umpires could not judge a pitcher’s intent.
So players began doing that among themselves, and by looking at how they talk about these incidents, you can see how it’s become part of the culture that surrounds the game.
In 1987, a rookie pitcher named Greg Maddux did not throw a pitch at a batter named Benito Santiago because he was bloodthirsty or angry. He did it because he was expected to, and the fact that he was willing to follow through, even though it came at a personal expense, was seen as a sign that he was a good teammate.