Baseball's symphony of sounds

Dunn says: "[Dayan] Viciedo [of the White Sox] makes the loudest sound. I can tell you if he's hitting in our group, or way over on Field 4. It sounds like a cannon when he hits the ball. He swings so hard. I'd blow out every muscle in my back if I swung the bat that hard."

But according to most players, the loudest sound of all comes off the bat of Josh Hamilton.

"When you're walking to the tunnel and you hear the sound off Josh Hamilton's bat, you say, 'What the hell is that?' It sounds like a gunshot," John Baker says. "And he's hitting with Nelson Cruz and Mike Napoli, guys with a lot of power. Mike Trout makes a lot of noise, also. He doesn't start his swing until it's so late, later than anyone. That quickness creates serious noise."

C.J. Wilson says: "It depends what type of bat you use. An ash bat has more of a whip sound to it; a maple bat has more of a crack. There is no sound coming off the bat like the one off Josh's bat. That's partly because he uses a really heavy bat, 33 ounces. It's sort of a smashing sound. Most guys have a little click. It's like his sound lasts much longer than other guys'. It reverberates more than other guys'. It echoes. When he squares it up, you can hear it from 100 feet away. And when you're in an enclosed place, like the batting cage in Detroit, it is crazy loud when he's hitting."

Diaz says: "There's nothing like the sound off Josh Hamilton's bat. He uses such a heavy bat. It's much more dense. It resonates."

Francoeur says: "I played with Chipper [Jones]. I played with Billy [Butler]. I played with Josh. There is nothing like the sound that's made when Josh crushes a baseball."

LaRoche says: "I could swing Josh's bat and make a similar noise even though he swings the bat 100 miles per hour faster than I do. But I wouldn't make that sound nearly as often as he does."

Berkman, though, shakes his head in disbelief.

"I think it's psychosomatic," he says. "I can't tell the difference. Josh Hamilton's sound is no different from the sound of Miguel Cabrera, Albert Pujols, Matt Holliday and Prince Fielder. It's been that way forever in baseball. Old-timers said, 'Oh, you should have heard the sound made by the bat of' … then fill in the blank. If you took the 10 best hitters in baseball, put a blindfold on me, I couldn't tell the difference between the sound of any of them."

The sound on the mound

I knew I was in trouble on the mound tonight. I could hear the crowd.
-- Roger Clemens

Remarkable concentration is also required to be a major league pitcher. The night in the 2000 World Series when Clemens picked up the barrel of a broken bat and threw it at Mike Piazza is a perfect example of that focus. Television cameras picked up Clemens mouthing the words, "I thought it was the ball," meaning he thought the bat was the ball and that's why he picked it up and threw it at Piazza. A convenient excuse? Maybe. But when pitchers get in a zone on the mound, they sometimes have no idea what's going on around them. They need that silence.

"I don't want to hear a sound out there; I don't hear a sound," says Rangers pitcher Derek Holland. "Have you ever seen the movie 'For Love of the Game'? I try to watch it the night before every start. I don't stand on the mound and whisper, 'Clear the mechanism' to myself like Costner did. But I get so locked, I can't hear anything. The only sound I hear is when I turn to say something to an infielder, which really annoys them."

Wilson says: "I don't hear a thing. I hear nothing out there. But when a dude really squares one against you, then you can hear it. You know, and you drop your head and say, 'Please go foul, or hit a bird.' When a player hits a home run on the road and the place is really loud, and then the place just goes silent, that's the big noise: the absence of noise. It's like when a record skips or some guy walks into a party who's not supposed to be there."

Nationals pitcher Drew Storen says: "I don't hear anything from the stands. It's like from 'For Love of the Game.' But I can hear my infielders. I can hear what's being said in the dugout. It's fascinating. As players, we have a sense of whose voices are what. We hear what we need to hear, and we don't pay attention to what we don't need. It's very difficult to get our outfielders' attention from the bullpen, but they can hear things from dugout because that's where they need to be listening. As players, we know the sounds of the game. You know when there's a fly ball and the fans yell, 'Oh!' like it's gone? As players, we aren't fooled by that sound. We know that's a routine fly ball to center."

And yet, the mound can be a very noisy place, too.

"Pitchers are out there grunting and snorting; Jake Peavy is the best. He's hilarious," Wilson says. "He's always yelling at himself on the mound. He's yelling, 'Dang it, Jake, that's terrible!' [A's closer] Grant Balfour is always yelling at himself also. He grunts all the time. I will yell a loud obscenity once in a while. I'll drop an F-bomb. At that point, there is no volume control out there. It's like, 'Whoops, sorry to the kids in the front row.'"

Peavy smiles and says: "I try not to yell; I try not to swear. But at 7 o'clock every night, I turn into someone different. I'm out there trying to focus. I'm competing. I can't control myself. But I have three little boys. I want them to be able to watch their daddy pitch without hearing all the yelling. Greg Maddux made me feel good. He would say one [bad] word all the time when he pitched. I just try to say, 'God bless it.' But I wear my emotions on a sleeve. I'm conscious of it. I love to compete. I am not a crazy animal. But it's been 11 or 12 years of this. I don't think I'm going to change. And I'm not going to apologize."

Dunn smiles and says: "I make fun of Jake. I mock him. I can't even make the sound he makes when he's out there; it will hurt my throat. We do an over/under on when he's going to first yell at himself. I usually set it at about five and a half pitches. He's a clown."

Diaz says: "In the minor leagues, Peavy broke my bat. I singled up the middle, and he yelled at me, 'Are you going to take that?' I said: Yes. I need all the help I can get off Jake Peavy."

The Padres' Baker says, "[Chris] Carpenter and [Roy] Halladay are always yelling at themselves. I saw Carpenter give up a hit to a guy -- a guy who was just called up -- in a simulated game and Carpenter was screaming into his glove as the guy was running to first. It wasn't very nice language. Halladay is the same way. I hit a grounder up the middle off him a couple of years ago, and he bore a hole in my face with his eyes, then he screamed at me. That was a good feeling: make a guy that good that mad."

Baker adds: "Kip Wells yells on the mound all the time. Or he'd really grunt, that Serena Williams grunt. We'd mess with him and tell him that he only screamed when he threw his breaking ball, so he started screaming on his fastball. Jason Marquis told me last year that he was going to start screaming when he let the ball go, just yell "Strike three!' just to mess up the hitter."

Pitchers make sounds with their pitches. Ex-Dodgers catcher Paul Lo Duca once said that Eric Gagne's changeup spun so quickly and tightly "it would rip your shirt." And it made noise.

"Some pitchers, you can hear the ball coming, it's spinning so fast," Wilson says. "It makes a sizzling sound, it comes in so hot. [The Rangers' Alexi] Ogando's ball makes that sound. His stuff is so filthy. It has backspin on it. [The Angels'] Garrett Richards is the same way. The ball is halfway to you, and you think, 'Oh s---, here it comes,' it's making so much noise. Rick Ankiel was like no one else. When he threw that curveball, you could hear it spinning from the dugout. It was disgusting. His curveball is the loudest I've ever heard."

Reynolds says: "You can hear a really tight slider. It sounds like a big insect flying by your ear. Back in the day, you could hear Peavy's slider. And [John] Smoltz's slider. They were loud."

Dunn says: "It happened to me this spring with [the White Sox's] Nate Jones. I was facing him on the back field. I couldn't see the ball, but I could hear it coming. I thought, That one sounded really hard. It makes a sound, a buzz, like a pissed-off bumblebee."

Baker says, "With [the Blue Jays'] Josh Johnson, it sounds like a missile is coming at you."

LaRoche says, "When [Adam] Wainwright throws his curveball, I hear the pop when he lets it go."

Fuld says, "When Verlander throws that curveball, it is spinning so fast, you can hear it. He just has more revolutions on it that anyone else. But the sound you hear after he throws that curveball is even louder: the whoosh of the bat when you swing and miss."

The sound of the crowd

I listen to the fans. But when you hear 'You suck!' for the 30,000th time, you tune it out.
-- Adam Dunn

Baseball fans are different from those of any other sport. There are so many of them, they are so close to the field, there is a game every night, the game moves so slowly, there is so much dead time, so much time to rag on the players. And although pitchers and hitters do their best to block out the sounds of the fans when they're on the mound or at the plate, that's a tougher challenge for outfielders. An outfielder can stand in one place for 30 minutes at a time with the fans right behind him, screaming. That's why there is more heckling going on in baseball than in other sports.

"A couple of places, there is great animosity for you: Wrigley Field and San Francisco," Berkman says. "You get the feeling that they genuinely hate you there. They are very uncreative there. You know, they usually just say, 'You suck.' Or they call me fat."

Fuld, who is 5-foot-8, says: "You can hear the fans in Oakland and Toronto. I get yelled at, especially about my height. You know, the usual, 'Hey, Fuld, stand up, we can't see you.'"

John Baker says: "You can hear people yelling at you, especially when you're going poorly. You can hear the three people screaming at you, 'Baker, you suck.' At Dodger Stadium, 50,000 are screaming at you. Barry Bonds said you have to be pretty good to have 50,000 yelling at you. I think it's worse when three guys are, and you can hear every word they say."

But every ballpark is different.

"Your ears play tricks on you," Wilson says. "The acoustics are so loud in some parks. Like Tampa, it's so loud in there even when there are only 10,000 in the stands. There's a fan in the stands with the cowbell, you can hear him. There's an old Rays fan in an old Rays jersey -- you can listen to the game on the radio and hear his voice. You know why players wear warm-up jackets in the bullpen? It's so the uneducated fans don't know them and can't yell their name. It is like, 'Hey, you' or 'Hey, brown-haired pitcher' instead of, 'Hey, Wilson.'

"But in Detroit, they are very clever. When the Rangers had Eric Gagne, they'd yell, 'Hey French Tickler, how are you?' It was hilarious. One city, which I won't mention, they are not inventive. They have the worst heckler there. He yells at the right fielder the whole game. He just yells his name. Really? Is that it? Is that all you have?"

A lot depends on where and when you are playing.

"In spring training, you can hear the left fielder cough from the pitcher's mound," Wilson says. "But in the regular season, when you are in a packed ballpark in a stressful situation, you can only hear the roar of the crowd. In quieter places, you can hear a fan in the upper deck. It's funny, but my brother comes to all the games I start. His voice cuts like a knife. When he yells 'Yes, C.J.,' I can hear him from wherever he is sitting. I laugh my ass off. He weighs 140 pounds, and I can hear him in a crowd of 40,000. It's a genetic thing."

Some visiting players have become favorites of the home crowd, and vice versa. Two years ago, the fans in the right-field stands in Oakland became favorites of Francoeur because they were so passionate, and so funny. During one game in Oakland, he wrapped a baseball in bacon and threw it into the bleachers in right field.

"I call them 'the Bacon Crew,'" Francoeur says. "Last year, I bought them all a bunch of hot dogs during the game and they started cheering me. Then I bought them pizza. At end of [2013] spring training, they came to an exhibition game in Camelback just to cheer for me. I got together with those guys for an hour in the parking lot after a game this spring. We just cooked some bacon."

Francoeur says that he hears no sounds when he's at the plate but that he hears everything in the outfield because "it takes a lot more focus to hit than it does to play the outfield. I am so confident in my ability out there. I hear everything, but I can still focus completely on the game."

Diaz agrees. He hears the fans when he plays the outfield. He says he used to get razzed in Philadelphia, as all outfielders do, until a few years ago "when I leg-whipped the Red Man. This guy came running out in the field dressed in a red spandex outfit. I was considering giving him a full-steam spear; but he was slightly built, and for a second, I thought it might be a woman. So I leg-whipped him to the ground, then the security guys clobbered him. The security guys gave me a security T-shirt and an ID badge. The next Halloween, I went dressed as a security man. It was a nice night at the park. The next time I went there, I got a standing ovation from the fans.

"Then they heckled me. They'd scream, 'You don't hit the ball as hard as you hit our fans.' The fans in Philadelphia are very creative."

That's what Dunn is looking for in a game.

"I listen to the fans," he says. "I don't want to miss anything. I am listening when I'm at first base. I am listening for something funny. I am willing to laugh if they say something funny."

Elliot Johnson laughs and says, "I heard a guy yell this: 'Elliot Johnson, Elliot Johnson, I Googled you and the reply I got was, "Why?"' I turned and gave him the thumbs-up. That was pretty funny. He made me laugh. There's no telling what you might hear at the ballpark."