In His Worst Year, Butler Still Serving

One day last summer, in Wrigley Field, Chicago, Brett Butler did a caddish thing.

He hit the first pitch.

Not only that, he hit it off the center-field wall.

On the mound, the Chicago pitcher, Jim Bullinger, couldn’t believe his eyes. At first, he thought some mistake had been made in the lineup card and that wasn’t Brett Butler up there.

It couldn’t have been Butler. Brett would a) have taken the first pitch or b) threatened to bunt it down the third base line.

It had to be an impostor. Bullinger reacted as if he had just been bitten by his own poodle, or chased down a dark alley by Mother Teresa waving a club. You had the feeling he wanted to call time and protest the game to the umpire. What Butler had done was a clear violation of the sacred “book” of baseball that pitchers keep. You had a mental picture of him waving the rule book in front of the ump and shouting: “Show me in here where it says Brett Butler can hit the first pitch. It should be called ‘interfering with a first pitch!’ ”

Brett Butler, like the great Charlie Gehringer, always spots the pitcher the first pitch. Only Gehringer used to bat .371, .356, .339 and like that every year. Charley used to say he took the first pitch “so the pitcher could start even.”

Brett Butler takes the first pitch because he wants to give the pitcher a chance to make a mistake. You’ve heard the baseball expression “that was a good at-bat,” when a hitter battles the pitcher in a tight situation, fouls off a lot of good pitches, searches for the one he can hit? Well, every at-bat is a good at-bat for Brett Butler. He wears out the pitcher. It’s part of his job. A pitcher once described pitching to Butler as “like being locked in a closet with a nest of bees.”

Other players have all 90 degrees of field to work with. Butler pretty much makes do with that part of it between the left-field foul line and the center fielder or shortstop.

Some nights his base hits go clear to the pitcher. He bunts as many as 82 times a season. This has the effect of drawing the infield in. When they get sufficiently drawn in, Butler slides his hand down the bat and slaps the ball into left field.

Pitchers should get overtime facing him. He led the league in 1991 by facing (count ‘em!) 3,064 pitches. He logs more than 600 plate appearances a year. He has had nearly 600 already in this strike-truncated season.

If ever a man was well-named for his role in life, it is Butler. That is exactly what he is on the team. You almost picture him coming up to the manager and murmuring, “You rang, sir?” Or, saying after he has bunted for a hit, stolen second, gone to third on a groundout and scored on a fly ball, “Will there be anything else your Lordship will be requiring?”

He is fun to watch. At 38, he still has almost high-school speed. He steals 35 bases a year, stole 51 in 1990 and has 29 so far this year. He is a sure-handed outfielder. He made no errors in 1991 and 1993 and only 38 in his entire 15-year career before this season.

This Butler does it, all right. As a leadoff man, he knows his first job is to be a bloody pest to the pitcher. He probably has more 3-and-2 counts than any batter in history. He fouls off more good pitches than anybody this side of Luke Appling. Fewer than 50 batters in major league history have more walks than he has, nearly 1,100. And most of them were homer hitters, walked because the pitcher feared their power. The last thing they want to do is walk Butler. Still, he had 108 walks in 1991 and more than 90 five times.

He’s the ignition on the Dodger machine. So, he’s one of the most popular athletes in L.A., right? His picture is on trucks, the fans dote on him, right? They love their Butler in L.A.

Uh-uh. Not.

It’s complicated, but his fans act as if he were a rally-killer instead of a rally-starter.

It all has to do with the strike. Now, you have to understand this about Brett Butler: He likes to be liked. He needs to be liked. He’ll work his heart out for you, but he wants to be patted on the head. He’s an over-achiever who feeds on being appreciated for it. Some guy who was born with the ability to hit .340 and 50 home runs can be arrogant and aloof and scornful of the public. Not Butler. He needs to be popular.

When the strike was called, Brett became a strong union spokesman. I mean, he wants the union guys to like him too.

It never occurred to him the strike would be unpopular with the fan. After all, they were working stiffs, right?

Brett failed to notice that a working man making $5 an hour looked upon a ballplayer making a million a month as part of management. These weren’t the girls in the Triangle shirtwaist fire.

When the Dodgers let him drift into free agency (a polite term for firing) last fall, Brett was sure it was punishment for his vocal union-spouting. It shook him up.

He sat in a Dodger Stadium locker room the other night and pondered a strange year.

“It was the worst year of my life,” said a subdued Butler. “First, the Dodgers let me go. Then, only the Mets and Baltimore even made offers. I was sure it was because of my union statements. I wanted to quit. If it wasn’t for my wife, I would have.

“Then, there was the death of my mother. I was traumatized by New York, but I found I got along good. I love the game of baseball, but I was sickened by the transformation of the game. In midseason, I was hitting only .255. Again I wanted to chuck it. My wife said, ‘You can’t go out like this. Get back in there and hit!’ I caught fire.

“Then I got traded back to the Dodgers. And you know what happened.”

What happened was that the Dodgers called up a replacement player, a player who had, in a sense, crossed the picket lines during the strike.

Brett’s solidarity genes kicked in. He made some incautious remarks, which (in mistranslation, he says) came out as threats that the replacement player would not be acceptable to the team nor his wife to the wives.

The fans were irate. For the first time in his life, Brett Butler heard boos, jeers. At home, yet. Butler was stunned.

How did he get on such a wrong page? The Dodgers, who call him “Bugsy” (affectionately) could understand.

The stories made him out to be spiteful, which he isn’t. They also made him out to be a shoot-your-mouth-off, which he can be.

Brett just wishes he could work society for a walk in this matter. “I would like to get in one more World Series [he was in the ’89 Series with the Giants],” he says.

He would like to get off the soapbox and, as the Dodgers go into the crucial final weekend of the season, get back to doing what he does best--making a nuisance of himself to pitchers, wrangling few more runs and, if not hitting home runs, at least catching a few atop the center-field fence. In other words, buttle.