BACK IN THE BOX

He held a towel to his face, trying in vain to stanch the blood flowing from his nose. Aided by teammates and members of the Cubs’ medical staff, he stumbled groggily toward the clubhouse. That he could stand up at all might have been considered a minor miracle.

Joe Girardi was down for only a couple of minutes after getting hit in the face by a Woody Williams fastball in the eighth inning of the Cubs’ 6-3 victory at San Diego on Saturday. But they were the kind of minutes that, if you were watching, you remember them second by second.

Inflicting physical pain on an opponent is nothing new in sports. Hockey players use their full body weight to check each other into the boards. Football players plow into each other dozens of times a game, the harder the better. Boxers, unprotected by pads or cushions, attempt to pound the opponent’s face into an unrecognizable stew.

Still, the sight of a batter being hit in the head by a baseball is singular in the horror it induces. It’s simple science. Force, as we are taught in high school physics, equals mass times acceleration. Stationary, a five-ounce baseball is harmless. But speeding up to as much as 100 miles an hour in a fraction of a second, that baseball becomes a dangerous projectile by the time it travels the 60 feet, six inches from mound to batter’s box.

Some careers have ended with a beaning. One player, Cleveland’s Ray Chapman, was killed when he was hit in the head by a Carl Mays pitch in 1920. Others have resumed their careers with no visible problems, but the fear is always there, even if it goes largely unspoken in the macho world of baseball.

“Some guys really forget about it, but I’ve seen some guys get timid,” said the White Sox’s Charles Johnson, a catcher who is usually first on the scene when a batter goes down.

Girardi was fortunate. Though the scene was gory, the damage was minimal: a fractured nasal bone and a cut sewed up with three stiches. Once the swelling of his face subsides, the only physical reminder Girardi will have is a slightly crooked nose. He did not go on the disabled list, and says he hopes to be back in the lineup this weekend.

The hardest part of coming back from a pitch to the head, however, may not be the physical recovery, but the mental rehabilitation.

“I hope it will be the same, and I envision it being the same, but you don’t really know until you go through it,” Girardi said. “I don’t have any fears about playing, but we’ll have to see what happens when I go up there.”

If he has put aside his fear, Girardi already has overcome his biggest obstacle, Seattle Mariners manager Lou Piniella said.

“To be a good hitter, you can’t have fear,” Piniella said. “You’ve got to feel comfortable that the helmet offers you ample protection, number one, and number two, that these things happen very rarely and the chances of it happening to the same player twice are very remote.”

Cubs broadcaster Ron Santo, hospitalized after being hit in the left cheek by a pitch from the Mets’ Jack Fisher in 1966, said his return–which came less than two weeks after he’d been carted off the field on a stretcher–was aided by the fact that he knew why he was hit. In an effort to foil an overshifted defense, Santo shifted his feet and tried to go to right field.

“I moved my body and locked myself up,” he said. “The ball was up and in where a normal knockdown pitch was that I would get away from. But I locked in and got it. And I knew it was my fault. I had no ill effects because I knew why I had been hit.”

Most players are not that sanguine. The Mariners’ Edgar Martinez has avoided a beaning in the big leagues, but was hit in the head as a minor leaguer.

“It takes some time until that image and that thought get off your mind,” Martinez acknowledged. “At the time it happened to me, it was probably late in the season, and I remember the thought [of being hit] was there pretty much the rest of the season.”

Said Piniella: “The first few at bats after you get plunked pretty good, it’s a little difficult. When I played, I got hit one time, and the first couple of at-bats were not the most comfortable. But then I did what I had always done, which was go into the ball.”

Fisher made it a point to tell Santo he had not hit him on purpose. “It’s almost always a mistake,” Johnson said, adding that a beaning can affect the pitcher as much as it does the batter.

Hard-throwing reliever Ken Tatum seemed to lose his effectiveness after hitting the Orioles’ Paul Blair in the head in 1970. And though shoulder problems are blamed for former Sox reliever Bobby Thigpen’s rapid decline from his record-setting 57-save season of 1990, he was visibly upset after hitting Oakland’s Terry Steinbach in the face in 1991.

“Some guys really get bothered by it,” Johnson said. “You don’t want to hurt somebody’s career or end somebody’s career on a ball that you didn’t mean to hit them in the face.”

The best way for a batter to get over a beaning, said White Sox hitting coach Von Joshua, is to treat it as an accident.

“When you’re in a car accident, you’re not afraid to get back in the car. It’s like an accident. It happened. You’ve got to get back in there and try to forget about it. You can’t let it affect you or your hitting.”

The Mets’ Mike Piazza has followed that advice, continuing to put up big numbers in the wake of a beaning last month by the Yankees’ Roger Clemens that Piazza charged was intentional.

So, too, has San Francisco first baseman J.T. Snow. Struck in the face by a Randy Johnson fastball in a horrifying spring-training incident in 1998, Snow missed the first six weeks of that season. A switch-hitter at the time, Snow abandoned batting right-handed when he returned but remains an effective hitter, on pace for the third 100-RBI season of his career after driving in 98 runs last year.

Some accidents, though, are too severe to walk away from. While Chapman is the only major leaguer who has been killed by a pitch, major league history is littered with careers shortened by a beaning. Baltimore’s Blair was never the same hitter after being struck by Tatum’s fastball in 1970, though Blair’s defensive skills enabled him to stick around for an additional decade.

Houston shortstop Dicky Thon was on the cusp of an All-Star career when he was hit by the Mets’ Mike Torrez in April of 1984. Thon returned in 1985 and lasted in the majors until 1992, mostly as a part-time player. He never realized the immense promise of his youth.

San Francisco’s Robby Thompson was hit in the face by a fastball from San Diego’s Joey Hamilton near the end of 1993, a season in which Thompson hit .312 with 19 home runs. Thompson never hit higher than .223 after that, and retired in 1996 at the age of 34.

The most tragic beaning story, however, may be that of Boston’s Tony Conigliaro, who was hit in the face by the Angels’ Jack Hamilton in August of 1967. Only 22 at the time, Conigliaro was the youngest player in baseball history to hit 100 home runs, the kind of guy who arrived in the big leagues with a Hall of Fame halo already in place.

Sidelined for the Red Sox’s “Impossible Dream” pennant drive, Conigliaro missed all of 1968 as well. He came back to hit 20 home runs in 1969, and had 36 in 1970 after being traded to the Angels. But his vision gradually deteriorated and he retired after 74 games in 1971. He was 26.

“It wasn’t that he was scared of the ball or intimidated by the situation or anything else,” Piniella said of Conigliaro. “What happened to him was that it blurred his vision.”

And what happened to Conigliaro is what makes standing in against a major league fastball so dangerous.

Johnson expects Girardi to resume his All-Star season seamlessly. “A guy like Joe Girardi, he’s one of those hard-nosed type of players where he might just let it go and just keep playing and forget about it,” he said.

With his lingering congestion and a voice muffled by what sounds like a head cold, Girardi is still not fully recovered. But he knows the injury could have been much worse.

“The way I look at it is that I was really blessed because this [the fractured nose and the stitches] is all I have,” he said. “It could have been a lot worse, but God was protecting me.”

Originally Published: August 11, 2000 at 1:00 AM CDT