The Pine Tar Game: 12 Things We Learned After A Rewatch

With sports shut down for the foreseeable future due to the coronavirus, we’re going to have to get creative to get our fixes. Fortunately, MLB Network is embarking upon a programming schedule featuring rebroadcasts of classic games. The first one on the list aired Tuesday night and needs no introduction other than this: The Pine Tar Game.

If you’re a certain age (and lived in a certain media market), you bolted out of your house in the late afternoon hours of July 24, 1983 and imitated George Brett’s enraged reaction after his apparent go-ahead two-run home run off Goose Gossage instead turned into the final out of the game when the umpires agreed with Yankees manager Billy Martin that Brett had too much pine tar on his bat.

Of course, the fun was just beginning. The Royals protested the result and American League president Lee MacPhail ruled in favor of the Royals, re-instated Brett’s homer (but upheld his ejection) and ruled the game be resumed with two outs in the top of the ninth inning. Much to the Yankees’ chagrin, it was resumed Aug. 18 and the final four outs were completed without incident in what was now a 5-4 win for the Royals.

Re-watching the game Tuesday night provided a rare happy diversion in these surreal and challenging times. It also provided an excuse to do something that used to be normal and routine — jump into Baseball-Reference.com and do a deep dive of a historical baseball event. So with that in mind, here are 12 things you might not have known about The Pine Tar Game:

1.) There were three Hall of Famers — Brett, Gossage and Yankees outfielder Dave Winfield — in The Pine Tar game as well as five future managers in Royals starter Bud Black, Royals designated hitter Hal McRae, Yankees right fielder Lou Piniella, Yankees designated hitter Don Baylor and Yankees first baseman/second baseman Don Mattingly (more on that position designation shortly). The 29 position players combined for a whopping 40,571 hits and an even more whopping 3,662 stolen bases. The Yankees’ second baseman and leadoff hitter was 41-year-old Bert Campaneris, who made his big league debut on July 23, 1964 and played all nine positions in a game on Sept. 8, 1965. The Royals’ catcher and ninth-place hitter was Don Slaught, who played the final game of his career on May 19, 1997.

2.) The Royals’ leadoff hitter, Willie Wilson (668 stolen bases), and Campaneris (649 stolen bases) rank 12th and 14th all-time in stolen bases. The player in between them, Tom Brown, played his entire career before the 20th century. Twelve players in The Pine Tar Game finished their careers with at least 100 stolen bases. As of the end of last season, just 46 active players had at least 100 stolen bases.

3.) The seven pitchers in The Pine Tar Game combined to go 519-497 with a 3.62 ERA and 705 saves in their careers. Gossage and Royals closer Dan Quisenberry, who got the final three outs in the bottom of the ninth on Aug. 18, ranked second and sixth, respectively, on the all-time saves list when Quisenberry retired following the 1990 season. (They now rank 25th and 38th, respectively)

4.) Brett finished his career with three homers against Gossage, making him one of just three players to hit more than two homers against the star closer. The others: John Mayberry and Larry Hisle. Brett’s 11 RBIs against Gossage were also the most surrendered by Gossage, who didn’t allow anyone else to get as many as 10 RBIs against him. (Bobby Darwin came closest, with nine RBIs) Coolest thing? Brett’s first homer against Gossage — a go-ahead three-run blast in the seventh inning of Game 3 of the 1980 ALCS that vaulted the Royals to a series-clinching 4-2 win — set in motion a chain of events that had a direct impact on the Pine Tar Game. After the Yankees were swept, manager Dick Howser “retired” to pursue a real estate career in Florida. Of course, that was just George Steinbrenner’s way of saying he fired Howser, who became the Royals’ manager in August 1981 and remained their skipper until he was diagnosed with brain cancer in 1986. Billy Martin spent the 1983 season as the manager of the Yankees — the third of his five stints under Steinbrenner. Oh, and Brett’s Pine Tar Game homer marked the first of two consecutive round-trippers against Gossage. He just waited almost nine years for his next at-bat — on Apr. 8, 1992, when Gossage was pitching for the Athletics, the fifth big league team he’d pitched for since 1983 (a stint that included a cameo w/the Yankees in 1989) and the sixth team overall, counting the 1990 season Gossage spent in Japan. 

5.) The Yankees remained between one and five games out of first place in the AL East throughout July, but had the Royals’ protest not been upheld, the Yankees would have moved into a four-way tie for first place — with the Tigers, Blue Jays and eventual World Series champion Orioles, all of whom were 54-40 through July 25 — with their win over Rangers the next day. Of course, the Orioles finished the season by going 44-24 over their final 68 games to win the AL East by six games over the Tigers, and envisioning a four-way tie on July 25 requires a unique usage of the transitive property and to assume the Yankees beating the Royals didn’t upset some sort of delicate balance in the universe. That’s a little existential for these uncertain times, so let’s just move on…

6.) The Royals’ win, meanwhile, briefly and retroactively tightened an already jam-packed AL West. With the protest-aided victory credited to July 24, the Royals (45-45) remained in third place in the AL West, just one game behind the White Sox (48-46) and Rangers (49-47), who were in a virtual tie for first, and one game ahead of the Angels (47-49). But while the Royals remained a .500 team (12-12) in between the top and bottom of the ninth inning of The Pine Tar Game, the White Sox went 17-7 to take a six-game lead. The White Sox got even hotter from there, finishing the season on a 34-10 run to win the division by 20 (!!!) games over the second-place Royals.

7.) The Yankees used two pitchers — starter Shane Rawley, who scattered 10 hits over 5 1/3 innings, and Dale Murray — to get the first 26 outs. Murray was given the chance to close the game out but was pulled after U.L. Washington’s fateful two-out single in the ninth. Riding two pitchers for an entire game seems quaint these days in the era of the opener and bullpen specialization. How quaint? A team used two pitchers or fewer in a game 312 times last season. In 1983, it happened 316 times in the final 25 days of the regular season and 2,139 times overall. How wild is that?

8.) In addition, Rawley’s outing marked one of the 277 times in 1983 that a starting pitcher lasted at least 5 1/3 innings and surrendered at least 10 hits. That happened just 58 times last season. Murray’s 3 1/3-inning relief stint was one of 625 relief outings to last at least that long in 1983. Last season, there were 292 relief outings of at least 3 1/3 innings. And in 2017, the season before the Rays introduced the opener, there were just 166 relief outings of at least 3 1/3 innings.

9.) Mattingly, wearing no. 46 but sporting neither his trademark mustache nor the sideburns that got him kicked off the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant softball team, entered the game as a pinch-hitter in the seventh inning and went hitless in two at-bats. That officially stopped his hitting streak at nine games. However, Mattingly got a hit in his next 15 games in which he made at least one plate appearance (he appeared as a defensive replacement in one game) before going 0-for-4 against the Tigers on Aug. 11. So if Mattingly got a hit in the bottom of the ninth inning of the resumption — his second at-bat of the game — his hitting streak would have alternately turned into a rookie-record 25-game streak and once again ended it, all at the same time. The rookie record hitting streak at the time was held by Mike Vail, who hit in 23 straight games for the Mets in 1973. (Benito Santiago shattered the record by hitting safely in the final 34 games of the 1987 season)

10.) That wasn’t the end of the quirkiness for Mattingly. Yankees manager Billy Martin, furious the Royals’ protest was upheld, offered his own protest by resuming the top of the ninth inning with the left-handed throwing Mattingly at second base and staff ace Ron Guidry playing centerfield. It wasn’t the first time the Yankees took advantage of Guidry’s athleticism in the pre-interleague play days — the former Cy Young Award winner made eight pinch-running appearances and scored four runs in the eight seasons prior to his one inning in centerfield. The sight of a southpaw at second base, on the other hand, is far less frequent. No left-hander has played second base since Mattingly, though he not only played parts of three games at third base in 1986 but also began a 5-4-3 double play. Don Mattingly is awesome.

11.) Have we mentioned another Hall of Famer was involved in the frantic aftermath of Brett’s ejection? Gaylord Perry, who was rounding out a 22-year career in which he may or may not have thrown a spitball 100 or so times a game, raced on to the field for the bat and scurried into the clubhouse. Not too bad for a 44-year-old. Alas, a security guard caught Perry and he was ejected from the game along with Brett and Howser. It was the second ejection for cheating (or appearing as if he was trying to cheat) in a span of fewer than 12 months for Perry, who was finally caught doctoring the baseball while pitching for the Mariners against the Red Sox on Aug. 23, 1982.

12.) So Perry wasn’t at Yankee Stadium for the resumption of the game 25 days later. Nor, of course, was Brett, who had a nice dinner at an Italian restaurant in northern New Jersey as he came to grips with his newfound fame. Oh sure, in 1980, Brett won the AL MVP, was batting .400 as late as Sept. 19 and finished at .390 as he came closer to hitting .400 over a full season than anyone since Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941. But Brett’s pursuit of history was overshadowed during the World Series, when Brett battled a case of hemorrhoids as the Royals fell to the Phillies in six games. And that was the favorite topic for rabble-rousing fans in opposing ballparks for the next two-and-a-half seasons, until a little bit of extra pine tar turned Brett’s pursuit of .400 into the THIRD-most famous thing for which he was known.

“Greatest thing to ever happen to me,” Brett said at the end of the MLB Network replay. “Before that, I was the hemorrhoid guy. After that, I was the pine tar guy. What would you rather be? It’s pretty simple to me.”



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