Hey, it’s Jon again, and I’ve got Episode 8 of The History of Charging the Mound for you. It concerns the 1980 mound-charging between George Brett and Milt Wilcox, and as I divulge early in the episode, I do not have any video of the fight to show you, as it appears to not exist. As such, it was a fairly risky choice to make it the subject of its own episode, but I went forward with it for two reasons. First, these guys gave me excuses to wander off on several fun tangents, and I love tangents.
GEORGE BRETT VS. MILT WILCOX
Second, it offered me a lot of insight into one of the big questions that’s propelled this entire project forward: why do batters charge the mound? I don’t want this to sound like an attempt at cheap heat, nor do I want to slander the commenters of YouTube, who I think generally deserve more credit than they’re given. But it’s in those comments that I’ve seen a re-emergence of one of the oldest types of Internet baseball people: the Steroids People.
To these commenters, everything can be explained by steroids. Someone hit a home run? Steroids. Someone got mad? Steroids. Someone got injured or didn’t get injured? Steroids. Someone played a really long time? Steroids. Someone’s career ended early? Confusingly, also steroids. I’ve heard from these folks ever since I started professionally sports blogging in 2007. While I will buy that PED use might be a secondary contributing factor behind the mound-charging phenomenon generally, and even a significant factor in specific, isolated instances, identifying PEDs as the primary explanation suggests a total misunderstanding of what mound-charging is.
Within this episode, I think George Brett demonstrates just how sophisticated this business can really be. Sometimes you’re furious and you don’t fight somebody. Sometimes you’re not, and you do. And quite often, batters run up on a pitcher not because they want to, but because they feel they have to.1
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