Written by Sam Miller at ESPN.com
The Portsmouth High Patriots, like almost every high school baseball team, kept a trick play in their pocket.
Theirs was called the “phantom pickoff throw”: The pitcher would spin as if making a pickoff attempt but keep the ball tucked in his glove. His fielders would act as if the throw had gone wild, make a lot of noise and chase after it, and the runner — tricked — would start to run to the next base. The pitcher would casually throw him out.
This play worked. Pitcher Brendan Solecki remembers using it twice, once when he was on the freshman team and once as a sophomore on the varsity. Both times the runner fell for it. “Against Woonsocket, the parents were not very happy,” he says. “Like, ‘That’s not baseball, that’s bush league.'”
But high school baseball, and maybe only high school baseball, is built for trick plays. At levels lower than high school, everybody is just trying to have fun, trying to learn, and it seems cruel to try too hard to humiliate your opponent. At higher levels, a play like that would never work. High school is the intersection between childhood and adulthood: The young men on the field are good enough to throw in the high-80s, strong enough to play on full-sized fields in front of major league scouts, polished enough to speak in clichés. They’re also young enough to fall for a trick play straight out of “Little Big League.”
In 2005, a parent approached Portsmouth coach Dave Ulmschneider about an interesting book he’d found. It turned out to be more of a pamphlet.
There were 16 plays, with a page or two of explanation for utilizing and defending each. A lot of the plays were clearly cheating, such as the runner going from second to home, skipping (or “cutting”) third base when the umpires were looking the other way. Some were just plain baseball, stuff every team did, like a delayed steal. Some didn’t seem likely to work, and some didn’t seem realistic. Then there was a play called “skunk in the outfield.”
That’s how it came to be that a Portsmouth sophomore named Johnny Pedrotty stood in right field in Game 2 of the Rhode Island state championship series, that a crowd of a thousand fans erupted into profane chaos, that a star infielder almost blacked out from the stress, and that Ulmschneider found himself unsure of how to stop what he’d unleashed. It’s how, for two minutes and 32 seconds, baseball broke.
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