Diamonds in the Clubhouse: Pro Baseball Players and Poker
For as long as there’s been baseball, there have been card games in the clubhouse. Ballplayers live lives of peaks and valleys, the exhilaration of the game bookended by hours of stupefying boredom. And since ballplayers thrive on competition, there’s always somebody willing to throw some paint and aces and take a bite out of someone else’s salary.
Every clubhouse in baseball has a house game or two. The Braves, for instance, play bourree; the Red Sox favor cribbage, spades, and hearts. The Philadelphia Phillies – most notably pitcher Cory Lidle and catcher Mike Lieberthal – drill Hold‘em into the skulls of their teammates with the speed and velocity of a Randy Johnson heater.
“When I was with the Phillies, we’d play games all the time,” says catcher Shawn Wooten, now with the Minnesota Twins. “On the road, during rain delays – whenever we could – somebody’d have the cards out. The Phillies had more card players than any team I’ve ever seen.”
And when the teams hit the road, they take their cards with them. In the days of Ruth and Gehrig, ballplayers would travel by train, sharing drinks and smokes with sportswriters; these days, it’s charter planes all the way, which presents some interesting challenges for the dedicated card player:
“Playing Hold’em on a plane is hard, so we’d have to rig up this whole system,” says the Red Sox’ Gabe Kapler. “We’d keep our chips in cups, and use a blanket for a pot. It’s tough to explain, but it works fine.”
The road also offers ballplayers a chance to hit the casinos popping up all around the country. Players’ favored casinos include The Borgata in Atlantic City, Canterbury Park outside Minneapolis, and the Commerce and Hustler casinos in LA. But unless they’ve got a rehab assignment in – or a demotion to – the Pacific Coast League, home of the triple-A Las Vegas 51s, they’re not getting within two hundred miles of Sin City. But hey, that’s why there’s an offseason, right?
Baseball players aren’t any more immune to trends than the rest of us; in the clubhouse before games, they’re more likely to have WSOP reruns on the tube than tapes of that night’s opponent. And as poker soars in popularity, more and more ballplayers are pulling up seats at the table – which is starting to raise some concern around Major League front offices.
“No games after BP [batting practice]; that’s the rule,” says the Atlanta Braves’ Jeff Francoeur. “We’ll play anything before then, but we’ve got to put the cards away before game time.”
“We tried to play [Hold’em tournaments] in the clubhouse, but the team nixed that,” says the Phillies’ Randy Wolf.
The team brass isn’t just playing the role of your stick-in-the-mud wife or girlfriend, wondering why you never have money to take her out but always have coin for the weekly game. As anyone who’s ever scarfed up some chump’s rent in a single hand knows, some players just can’t walk away from the table. If you’re an account exec showing up late to work after a Thursday night house game, that’s one thing; but if you’re an outfielder pulling down ten mil a year, well – it’s no surprise that some clubs take a dim view of the “casual” clubhouse game. The Cincinnati Reds wouldn’t even permit their players to comment for this story – something about the lingering stink from a guy named Rose, and all that.
In recent years, card players have given the game its share of black eyes. When the Braves were eliminating the New York Mets in the sixth game of the 1999 National League Championship Series, Mets’ Rickey Henderson and Bobby Bonilla allegedly counted down the moments to the offseason by playing poker in the visitors’ clubhouse. And Alex Rodriguez got a stern talking-to from the Yankees last year when he was caught channeling his inner Matt Damon, trolling underground poker tournaments in New York City with Phil Hellmuth.
“As long as it’s casual, most teams aren’t going to have a problem with [cardplaying],” Wooten says. “There’s always a lot going on in the clubhouse during downtime. As long as it doesn’t get too serious, the teams are cool with it.”
Stakes vary depending on the game and the players involved. The Phillies set up $100 buy-ins; Red Sox games run about $200. And while there’s always rookie hazing, it doesn’t necessarily translate to the table: “Everybody’s money’s good in the clubhouse,” Wooten laughs. “You may not be able to put as many chips on the table in a cash game, but we’ll welcome anybody.”
Still, there is protocol. “In most games, you’ve got to be invited in,” Kapler says. “You can’t just show up and expect to sit down and play.”
The Yankees’ Jason Giambi remembers taking baby steps into the higher-stakes games of his former A’s teammates. “Me and a couple other younger guys would buy in together, and we’d play together,” he laughs. “We didn’t have that kind of glue back then to play with those guys.” And if they did get into the game, they generally didn’t hang around for long. “Rickey Henderson was one of best poker players I’d ever met,” recalls Giambi of his days with the Oakland A’s. “He used to take Ruben Sierra’s money all the time. That was fun to watch, all those guys all pissed off leaving the plane.” >
So now you’re thinking, sure, these guys can hit balls over buildings, but can they really play poker? These days, you’ve got the chance to find out, thanks to the ever-growing number of tournaments frequented by – and, in some cases, sponsored by – ballplayers. Since these aren’t cash games, you don’t have to worry about getting shortstacked, even with your annual paycheck on the table. Then it’s just you against a guy who gets hundred-mph fastballs thrown at him for a living.
Every January, the Phillies’ Cory Lidle hosts the best-known baseball- centric tourney, aptly named the Cory Lidle Official Celebrity Poker Tournament, at the Palms in Vegas. This year, for a $1,200 buyin, you could have sat down at a table with Lidle; fellow ballplayers like Lieberthal, Giambi, Wolf, Wooten; or celebs like Thunder Keller and Lisa Guerrero. (Wooten was so impressed with Lidle’s event that he’s planning his own tourney to serve as a prequalifier for Lidle’s, possibly at the Canterbury in Minnesota.) After breaking even in 2005, this year’s event raised $15,000 for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Get prepared for next year’s tourney by checking out www.corylidlecelebritypoker. com.
This past December, Kapler hosted a successful tournament in Boston for his Gabe Kapler Foundation (www.kaplerfoundation.org), a charitable organization dedicated to stopping domestic abuse. More than 300 players dropped a $250 buy-in for a shot at the tourney’s top prize, a $10,000 seat at the Borgata’s Winter Poker Open. Although the tournament got served a seriously bad beat when a promoter reneged on a promise to donate the seat, the Borgata itself stepped in and opened its doors to the Kapler tournament’s winner, David Zaff. Promoter fiascos aside, the Boston tourney was so successful that Kapler is planning a Los Angeles invitation-only event, featuring other current and former major leaguers.
For sheer marquee value, though, you can’t beat A-Rod’s celebrity tourney. In January, Rodriguez hosted the Dewar’s 12 Texas Hold ‘Em Charity Poker Tournament in Miami. Celebs in attendance included Hellmuth, Jay-Z, Sammy Sosa, Beyoncé, Tom Brady, and Evander Holyfield. The winner, Marc Hambroff, left the private island of Indian Creek Village with a one-year lease on a Mercedes-Benz C230WZ, and the event raised more than $100,000 for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Miami.
So let’s say you’re intrigued enough to pony up the dough for one of these tournaments, and you find yourself sitting at a table with a major leaguer. Which ones are going to knock you out of the box?
Start with Lidle, obviously. “If you sit and watch Cory Lidle, he can be a great teacher,” Jimmy Rollins says. “He definitely knows a thing or two about poker.” The Dodgers’ Jeff Weaver, the Nationals’ Robert Fick, and the Reds’ Adam Dunn, all tournament regulars, also have some game.
Giambi notes that in the Yankees’ clubhouse, “There’s some guys missing a lot of meal money” because they tried to take on high rollers like Randy Johnson and Tanyon Sturtze. Other strong players include the Red Sox’ Jason Varitek (“He won a tournament and it was, like, the second time he’d ever played Hold’em,” laughs Kapler) and the Braves’ John Smoltz (“There’s nothing that guy isn’t good at,” says teammate Chipper Jones of Smoltz, who’s also a scratch golfer.)
On the other hand, every clubhouse has its share of fish. Several Phillies remark that current Ranger and former Phillie Vicente Padilla could always be counted on to sweeten the pot. Kapler laughs at the question, declining to answer but saying only that the Red Sox’ easiest mark is a pitcher. And Francoeur points to Braves All-Star centerfielder Andruw Jones. “Andruw gives up the most money,” he says. “He’s always the most aggressive, even when he probably shouldn’t be.”
Jones, the best centerfielder since Willie Mays, has built a career on deceiving hitters; he’s always streaking across two zip codes to snag otherwise certain hits out of midair. When told that Francoeur has dubbed him Turner Field’s minnow, he just nods and smiles in a way that makes you feel sorry for Francoeur’s bank account.
“I’ve given away a few pots, sure,” Jones says. “But it’s usually to the rookies, the guys who can use it a little more than me.” The biggest hand he’s ever lost? “Probably about $4,000,” Jones says.
The tall dollars also give the pros license to bluff their way right over the top of other players. “I love to [bluff] to my brother (former major leaguer Jeremy Giambi), because he knows I’ve got the money to back it,” Giambi laughs. “I like to put him on full tilt early because he doesn’t want to walk away from the game that soon. So sometimes you can walk away with some good hands from him.”
Still, most ballplayers – unlike, say, certain celebrities (paging Scott Stapp) – know enough about the game to realize that skills on the diamond don’t necessarily mean they can master the other three suits.
“You can bluff your way through some fun games at home, but when you start playing with those guys, it’s a different level,” Giambi says. “It’s just like when you play ball. You know where you’re at, you know what you need to do, you know what everybody else is doing – [the pros can do that] right when you sit down at the table.”
“Poker’s a game, like baseball, where you have to be very patient,” Wooten says. “In baseball, you have to get used to the fact that you’re going to fail seven out of ten times. You’ll never learn it to a T, but you can always learn more. Every time you grab a bat, you’re looking at a different situation; just like every time you sit down at a table.”
