The trophy sits in John Kruk’s home office. It was presented to him in 1988 by Mark Davis, the one-time Cy Young Award winner and a former teammate of his on the San Diego Padres. The award is a donkey with its rear end painted red, and it remains a conversation piece. One day, with her curiosity piqued by the strange remnant of her father’s past life, Kruk’s 8-year-old asked for an explanation. On the small gold plate mounted on the trophy’s wooden pedestal, she saw a term that for decades has been part of baseball’s colorful clubhouse lexicon.
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This only caused more confusion.
“Daddy, what’s a red ass?”
“I’m like, ‘Well, your father back in the ’80s and ’90s.’”
(Courtesy of John Kruk)The red ass dates back to the days of Babe Ruth, and while a precise definition may be elusive, players know it when they see it. Generally, it is a description of sudden rage, which goes hand in hand with a central tenet of a grueling baseball season: constant frustration. Too often, the sting of failure lingers. Once it reaches a boiling point, a dugout toilet might pay the price. Or a Gatorade cooler. Or a light fixture illuminating the tunnel to the clubhouse. Or a room-service cart at the team hotel.
Consistent with the best of profane terms, the usage of red ass is flexible, which adds to its charm. It can describe a player or a coach with a habit of snapping, a defining character trait.
For example, a database search reveals a dozen instances of former Mariners slugger Jay Buhner’s name and “red ass” appearing in the same story. In one account during the 1991 season, he recalled being pinch-hit for by manager Jim Lefebvre. Irate, Buhner retreated to a small room behind the dugout, where he proceeded to fling any equipment within arm’s reach. Lefebvre appeared to confront Buhner, who lunged after his manager. But well aware of Buhner’s short fuse, an army of teammates stood at the ready, separating the two before things escalated.
“I didn’t handle it well,” Buhner said at the time. “A lot of hard feelings built up, and I’d kept them inside all year. I felt like I had to let it out or it would kill me. I mean, I am the team’s resident red ass.”
Mets catcher Paul Lo Duca, once immortalized on the cover of Sports Illustrated as Captain Red Ass, appears in half a dozen references with the term. Video on YouTube confirms the characterization. In one notorious incident, Lo Duca flew into a rage after taking a called strike from umpire Marvin Hudson. “He’s got those crazy eyes going,” SNY’s Gary Cohen said on the broadcast, as Lo Duca appeared possessed, his bugged-out eyeballs seeming to grow to the size of dinner plates.
“I would get the red ass on the field and with the reporters,” Lo Duca said recently. “But as soon as I got out of the clubhouse, I was fine. There’s a competitiveness about it; maybe that’s where the word came from, you know?… It’s almost like you’re so frustrated and you can’t fix it soon enough. Here’s the thing: The pitch was a strike. But I was more upset he wasn’t giving those same pitches to Tom Glavine all night. That was the gist behind it. I’ll never forget when I got thrown out. Glavine actually paid for my fine.”
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Of course, red ass can also describe a temporary state of mind: a moment of intense rage or a mood. When used this way, the full phrase is often truncated. “He’s got the ass,” Rockies manager Bud Black said. “It means they’re chapped. They’re burning. They’re scalding. You’ve got the red ass. It’s a state of being. I’m pissed!”
In this context, Royals manager Ned Yost was a bona fide red ass during his days as a backup catcher with the Brewers in the early ’80s. He would unleash his anger on the bat rack or let it simmer between plate appearances. He was, in his words, an “ungracious out.”
“My teammates would tell me to grow up,” he said. “I would just kindly say, ‘Fuck you.’ It was dumb.”
In general terms, Yost describes the ass as playing with an edge, as competing and grinding and not giving a (expletive) what people think. “When I used to play the game,” he said, “when you got on first base, your only thought was, ‘I’m going to kill that son of a bitch on a groundball.’” He carried the mentality into his days as a coach in Atlanta in the early 1990s, riding complacent pitchers in the bullpen and occasionally screaming at players in the shower.
“I felt bad later,” Yost said. “But I just had the ass.”
The Dickson Baseball Dictionary lists an entry for “red ass.” It begins: “A tough, angry, intense player; a player who plays hard; a raging competitor who hates to lose.” It goes on to cite Bill Starr’s 1989 book, “Clearing the Bases,” which noted that “Earl Whitehill was a ‘firebrand’ when pitching in the 1920s and 1930s, aptly described in the terminology of those days as a ‘red-ass.’”
A cursory review of Whitehill’s résumé confirms he might indeed be baseball’s earliest documented red ass.
Whitehill’s calling cards were his off-speed pitches and his pinpoint control, though the latter seemed to be selective. He plunked 101 batters in his 17-year career from 1923 to 1939, the most by far in the major leagues during that span. One of those plunkings rendered Lou Gehrig unconscious, threatening his consecutive games streak.
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Later in his playing days, Whitehill triggered an infamous brawl by hurling insults at Yankees infielder Ben Chapman, who gained his own infamy years later as manager of the Phillies for shouting vile racist epithets at rookie Jackie Robinson. According to a report in Time Magazine, the scuffle between Whitehill and Chapman lasted 20 minutes and ultimately ensnared both teams, uniformed police officers and 300 fans. “The spectators, armed with bats they had picked up, tried to bash the players,” Time wrote of Whitehill’s handiwork. “The players bashed each other and the spectators. After 20 minutes, police managed to restore enough order for the ball game to proceed.”
Those red-ass tendencies evidently weren’t confined to the baseball field. In a memoir, former Tigers teammate Elden Auker described a golf excursion with Whitehill, who lost it when a struck ball landed too close for comfort. Whitehill charged down the fairway and back to the tee box in search of the assailant. His playing partners talked him out of a fight. It proved to be an especially wise decision — later, they learned the errant tee shot belonged to heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey.
In 1939, Whitehill pitched his last big-league game. Red asses, however, continued on — even if, due at least in part to the editorial standards of the day, references to the red ass in so many words were virtually nonexistent in news accounts.
This began to change in 1970 when the term was introduced to a wide readership in Jim Bouton’s classic “Ball Four.” It appears relatively early in the book. “Lou Piniella,” Bouton writes, “has the red ass.” The scouting report was prescient. Years later, as manager of the Reds, an enraged Piniella wrestled with his closer Rob Dibble in a postgame altercation before newspaper reporters and television cameras. It seems Piniella learned from a prominent influence: the combustible Hall of Fame Orioles manager Earl Weaver.
“He used to get on me for something every day,” Piniella once said. “I remember him telling me: ‘You’re never going to play in the big leagues. You’ve got too much of the red ass.’ And I told him, ‘You’re a hell of an example.”
The Society for American Baseball Research notes that in 1972, the Montreal Gazette printed the term red ass to describe Tim Foli. He was known to fight teammates and once brawled with a coach over minor-league hockey tickets. “That’s all right,” said then Expos manager Gene Mauch. “He’s a red-ass ballplayer, and now he’ll be playing for a red-ass manager.”
But the landmark use of red ass came in 1975 when longtime Dodgers manager Walter Alston invoked the term in his book “The Complete Baseball Handbook: Strategies and Techniques for Winning.” In one section, the Hall of Fame manager describes the importance of balance when critiquing a player. “With certain individuals, this is a good procedure, because they know they are getting the needle — and that I know they did not hustle on a particular play, or did not do something right,” Alston wrote. “Yet I am giving it to them in a joking, kidding or needling sort of way. I think this is better sometimes than getting the ‘red ass’ and really pouring it on.”
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“Ever since then,” said Jacob Pomrenke, the director of editorial content for SABR, “it became much more common to see the phrase used publicly in reference to baseball players.”
In Dickson’s baseball dictionary, he notes “the term can be complimentary when describing the competitive zeal of Lou Piniella or Paul O’Neill, but it has also been applied to one who whines and argues with umpires.”
Others who have been affixed with the red ass label in print include Jack Morris, Dallas Green, Steve Trachsel, Ed Lynch, Jeff Burroughs, Mark McGwire, Tony Phillips, Madison Bumgarner, Josh Reddick, Matt Williams, Adam Eaton and Keith Hernandez, who, in a 1989 Playboy interview, described his younger self as “very much of a red ass.”
Giants manager Bruce Bochy once used the term to describe Randy Johnson, who burnished his reputation after a frustrating start in San Francisco. It was in 2004, when Johnson was pitching for the 111-loss Diamondbacks, and he had just been pulled from an eventual loss to the Giants. The Big Unit headed for the visiting batting cage at Oracle Park — lumber in hand — and smashed everything that wasn’t nailed down. The whole time, a witness recalled, Johnson could be heard yelling.
“This is how you hit!” the Hall of Famer screamed between cuts. “This is how you hit!”
The red ass register also includes the father and son duo of Buddy and David Bell, suggesting that the condition might have a genetic link. The younger Bell, now the manager of the Reds, made the cut as a member of the Mariners when he got himself ejected for arguing balls and strikes in a spring training charity game. Upon being thrown out, Bell retreated to a room behind the dugout, where he vented by throwing bats and helmets.
“When I found him, his chest was heaving — he was out of breath, he’d thrown so much,” former M’s coach Gerald Perry told the Tacoma News Tribune. “I’m telling you, he’s a quiet storm. He’s the quietest red-ass you’ll ever meet.”
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Hall of Famer Jim Bunning, by then a U.S. senator, was quoted calling ex-teammate Larry Bowa “the biggest red-ass I’d ever seen — probably still is.”
Flashes of anger remain as embedded in baseball as the unwritten rules. But according to the longtime baseball people who keep it in circulation, the term red ass has been reserved for the most exceptionally volatile personalities.
“How ’bout this story?” Black said, relaying a tale about a former teammate and longtime Mariners catcher Dave Valle. “We played together in San Jose, Double-A ball. In 1981 we were in Lynn, Massachusetts. He was known to be a little emotionally tempered as a player. On Opening Day, the first at-bat of the year, he got jammed, and he came in and snapped in the dugout. First at-bat of the year! He had the fucking red ass. He snapped on Opening Day. Nobody does that. First at-bat of the year. But Dave Valle did.”
Ron Gardenhire, the Tigers’ manager, didn’t flinch when asked to offer up his own definition of a red ass. He cited a former teammate with the Mets, a scrappy, mad-at-the-world second baseman named Wally Backman.
“He was just high-energy, always pissed off, never gave credit to the other team for getting him out, and he just lived with it,” Gardenhire said. “Whether it was going out and getting in a taxi cab and yelling at the taxi cab driver because she took us an extra block and cost us 50 cents, that’s a red ass.”
Even in an age of launch angles and spin rates, the concept lives on. Before a game in 2016, Chris Sale once took a pair of scissors to a set of throwback jerseys simply because he did not want to wear them for his start. Last season, former Astros reliever Ken Giles punched himself in the face following a rough outing against the Yankees. The Cardinals’ stalwart catcher, Yadier Molina, has a highlight reel on YouTube devoted to his angrier moments on the field. It lasts more than eight minutes.
Yadier Molina conversing with an umpire. (Dilip Vishwanat / Getty Images)The red-assed rap sheet of former Giants reliever Hunter Strickland includes brawling with Bryce Harper on Memorial Day in 2017. The melee broke out after Strickland plunked Harper with a fastball, which was seen as score-settling after Strickland allowed a pair of mammoth playoff homers a few years prior. Strickland’s transgressions also include breaking his pitching hand after punching a clubhouse door in 2018 because he was still fuming from on-field beef with the Marlins’ Lewis Brinson.
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It not only solidified Strickland’s standing as a red ass, but it also raised a question: Is being a red ass an endearing badge of honor, or is it actually an insult?
“It depends on who you’re asking if it’s an insult or not,” said Strickland, now a member of the Mariners. “Me, personally, I don’t think so; I like the gamers and the guys that go out there and grind it. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with intensity, personally. You don’t want someone passive out there. Nobody is trying to get beat.”
Within press boxes, writers covering the sport have added their own alliterative alternatives to the red ass, flourishes that include “the ruby rectum” and “the scarlet sphincter.” Even those who find the word ass to be too risqué have found workarounds. During his tenure as Yankees manager, Joe Girardi would occasionally make reference to the “red patootie.”
In some clubhouses, the term red ass has become antiquated, but in others, it remains a staple. It might be more frequently used in its shorter form: the ass.
“It’s more of an old-school term,” Pirates pitcher Chris Archer said. “But I definitely still hear it.”
For teammates, it’s best to figure out early on during a marathon season who might be prone to getting the ass.
“Oh, everybody knows,” Tigers infielder Josh Harrison said. “Those guys, you just let them be, and you pick and choose your moments when you can get through to them. But some of them, it’s like, you know what? It’s better to leave them alone. Some of them you can’t get through to. Some of them are in their own little world. For some people, that drives them.”
Kruk’s teammates knew to steer clear, especially after poor at-bats — because with the red ass, as with everything in baseball, there seems to be a code. “I’ve cracked teeth before, grit my teeth so hard because I was so pissed,” Kruk said. “I fought teammates who in my fits of anger said something to me.” But with a measure of pride, he noted that he never once took a bat to equipment when it could have hit a teammate with “possible shrapnel,” nor did he break anybody else’s stuff.
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Still, Kruk admits his red ass trophy was deserved. He saw an anger management specialist — once. It didn’t take. Through the years, equipment managers learned to take extra batting helmets on road trips, partly because of Kruk’s habit of spiking them like footballs after routine groundouts. During early batting practices in empty stadiums, after a particularly bad round, Kruk might fire his bat into the stands. More than once, a portion of his paycheck went toward the repair of clubhouse light fixtures.
However, Kruk wasn’t above having some fun with a fellow red ass.
“Dave Hollins broke a couple toilets,” he said. “One flooded the dugout at Wrigley. There was a pipe sticking out. They had to clean up all the porcelain. We were walking down the tunnel (the next day) and we were talking, he was in a better mood, and I look at this pipe and I said, ‘Man, that’s ridiculous.’ He goes, ‘What?’ I said, ‘That’s the same toilet Babe Ruth took a crap in,’ and he goes, ‘Oh, my God, is it really?’”
Not until retirement did Kruk realize the folly of being angry all the time. “An idiot,” he said of his younger self. “Just stupid.” Perhaps it hit close to home a few years back when he watched his son make an out, fling his bat and toss his batting helmet. Only a sense of hypocrisy stopped him from offering a fatherly reprimand. But old habits die hard. He recalled attending a West Virginia state championship baseball tournament final, in which two of his nephews were members of the same team.
“The kid pitching for them was the heavyweight wrestling state champion,” he said. “Big, strong kid. And he threw a curveball and this little skinny kid got hit. I was sitting with my brother, and the kid flips his bat, and he starts staring at the kid pitching — took a step. And the first thing out of my mouth, I jump up, and I said, ‘Go get him, motherfucker! Just so he can kick your ass!’”
“My brother was like, ‘What is wrong with you?’ I’m like, ‘Man, I just had a flashback.’”
Apparently, once a red ass, always a red ass.
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— With Meghan Montemurro, Andrew Baggarly, Rob Biertempfel, Max Bultman, Rustin Dodd, Nick Groke, Ken Rosenthal and Eno Sarris.
(Top photo of Lo Duca: Chris McGrath / Getty Images)
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