Tales of beanballs and the Bambino

Only Pedro Martinez knows whether he viewed Jason Giambi as a surrogate for Babe Ruth, but if so, it must be said that Pedro doesn't know Jason's ass from his elbow.

In May of last year, after his Boston Red Sox had endured some tough sledding against the arch-rival New York Yankees, the American League's best pitcher had done his best to personally exorcise the "curse" that had dogged the Boston team for 82 years. Martinez dared the shade of Babe Ruth to materialise at Fenway Park while he was on the mound.

"I'd drill him right in the ass," vowed Pedro.

After uttering those fateful words, Martinez, who had won back-to-back Cy Young Awards in 1999-2000, having been unanimously voted the league's top pitcher in both seasons, didn't win another game last year, finishing the year on the disabled list with a gimpy right shoulder.

Last Saturday, the very first time he faced the Yankees and Giambi, who had been lured to New York with a seven-year, $120 million contract, Pedro hit the Yankee slugger in the left elbow with a fastball.

Presumably to erase all doubt about his intent, when Giambi came to bat again two innings later, Martinez hit him again, this time in the short ribs.

Nobody expected the Yankees to take this lying down, and they didn't.

New York pitcher David Wells waited just one batter before throwing a pitch that sailed behind Boston outfielder Trot Nixon's back. The plate umpire didn't even wait for Nixon to dust himself off, pointing first to Wells and then to the Boston dugout, putting both teams on notice that the next knockdown pitch would spell ejection for its perpetrator.

The Red Sox took three of four games from the Yankees over their weekend series at Fenway, but long-suffering Boston fans are only too well aware that their team continues to labour under an imprecation of nine decades standing.

By 1918, Boston's ace left-handed pitcher had begun to emerge as one of the game's top sluggers as well. On the days he wasn't pitching, George Herman Ruth played left field, and although he played just 95 games he led the major leagues in home runs. Ruth was the game-winning pitcher in two of the Red Sox's four wins as they defeated the Chicago Cubs in the World Series.

A year later, in his final season with the Red Sox, he hit 29 home runs - more than any other league team. But following the 1919 season the Sox's cash-strapped owner, Harry Frazee, in need of funds to underwrite his Broadway production of No, No, Nanette!, sold Babe Ruth to the hated Yankees for a comparatively paltry $100,000.

Thus was born the so-called "Curse of the Bambino". Ruth went on to hit 714 home runs. The Red Sox, who had won six of the first 17 World Series played, have never won another.

Boston pitchers have been decking New York batters, and the two arch-rivals have engaged in innumerable bench-clearing brawls, ever since.

Pitchers have thrown at, or near, batters since baseball has been played. Anyone who's ever wielded a bat will tell you that it's part of the game.

"It's the territorial imperative," said Bill (Spaceman) Lee. "You're staking out your turf."

Lee, the eccentric 1970s-era Red Sox left-hander, was back in Boston this week to participate in yesterday's Eamonn Coghlan-Neil Cusack Marathon Golf Classic at South Shore Country Club. The night before the tournament, Spaceman was recalling past Red Sox-Yankee wars for a host of dinner companions, including Coghlan and Father Joe Young of Limerick.

While it didn't end Lee's career, he suffered a debilitating injury in the course of a 1976 Donnybrook at Yankee Stadium, when New York third baseman Graig Nettles plucked him out of a scrum and body-slammed him to the infield dirt. Lee, who incurred torn ligaments and a separated shoulder in his pitching arm, had won 17 games in each of the previous three seasons, but never won as many again.

Lee then related another beanball story, this one three decades old, that represents at once his best and worst memory of the practice.

In 1971, pitching for Mayaguez in the Puerto Rican Winter League, Lee drilled Caugas catcher Elisio Rodriguez with a pitch. Rodriguez, who would go on to enjoy a middling career, mostly with the Milwaukee Brewers, was sufficiently incensed that he dropped his bat and charged the mound.

As he closed within a few steps, Lee reflexively threw out his pitching hand in what, quite by accident, turned out to be a picture-perfect left hook that knocked Rodriguez unconscious on the spot.

Only the next morning did Spaceman learn the full implications of what he had done. Translated from the Spanish, the next day's deadline read "MAYAGUEZ LOSES, BUT LEE KO's RODRIGUEZ IN THE SEVENTH."

"I didn't know until that moment that I'd knocked out the former Golden Gloves light-heavyweight champion of Puerto Rico," said Lee. "People with a better understanding of the local culture than I were warning me not to make the trip to Caugas the next week, but I went anyway.

"When I came out of the clubhouse after the game, Rodriguez was waiting for me with two of his relatives," Lee recalled. "Two of them held me while he worked me over. Then they ran my face into a light pole. One of them had a knife, and he probably would have used it if Ron Woods, one of my team-mates, hadn't happened along just then.

"So if you're asking about the winter I spent in Puerto Rico, that was the year I got a nice new set of teeth."

George Kimball captured two first-place awards for 2001 coverage from the Boxing Writers Association of America. He won an award for news coverage for a Boston Herald report on the activities of promoter Don King, while his amusing account of King's failed attempt to bring the John Ruiz-Evander Holyfield fight to China, written for The Irish Times, won in the column category.