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Many a tale is told about the person who, required to pay a fine, a tax, or a debt he considers unjust, fulfills his obligation yet still manages to stage a protest (and make things as difficult as possible for the payee) by paying the fee entirely in pennies. Such events have played out in real life many times (although as we note on another page, businesses are not obligated to accept pennies as payment), but our interest here is in urban legends — and what establishes a tale as an urban legend is not its truth or falsity, but its repetition by multiple people, with varying details of time and place. In the specific case of a baseball player protesting a fine by paying in pennies, this story does indeed seem to have qualified for urban legend status, as a couple of examples from teammates will demonstrate. The first telling comes from Los Angeles Dodger pitcher Don Drysdale's 1990 autobiography, Once a Bum, Always a Dodger, describing (thirty years after the fact) a 1961 incident in which Drysdale was suspended and fined by the National League for hitting Cincinnati Reds outfielder Frank Robinson with a pitch immediately after having been warned by the home plate umpire to stop throwing at batters: One year later, Dodgers shortstop Maury Wills was ejected from a game by the home plate umpire (an act which carried an automatic $50 fine) for repeatedly stepping out of the batter's box during a contest with the San Francisco Giants. (Wills claimed he was protesting the umpires' failure to stop the Giants' groundskeepers from excessively watering down the area around first base.) In his 1994 book about the 1962 Dodgers-Giants pennant race, Chasing October, author David Plaut related (also thirty years after the fact) a familiar-sounding anecdote about how Wills chose to protest his fine: Note how the details escalate between tellings: in the first case the disgruntled player simply plops a sack of pennies onto a secretary's desk and slips out, then returns when summoned and obediently takes the coins away to re-roll them; in the second case he brazenly dumps the entire bag onto the league president's desk and demands that the president count them and issue him a receipt. A couple of problems are evident with the latter account. First off, anyone who has ever a handled a $50 bag of pennies should know that it doesn't weigh anywhere close to 80 pounds. (It actually weighs about a third as much and can easily be carried with one hand.) Secondly, if Warren Giles didn't take any guff when 6-foot-6-inch Don Drysdale tried to leave a sack of loose pennies with his secretary, he likely didn't sit still while 5-foot-11-inch Maury Wills dumped five thousand coins all over his desk and demanded that he count them. A 1974 article by Baseball Digest columnist John Kuenster antedated both these accounts with a tale about Oakland A's pitcher Vida Blue claiming that he had paid a $250 fine imposed by his manager all in coins, also (just like the previous two accounts) dumping the loose change all over the boss's desk: Is there a true story here? Or is this a case of a well-traveled anecdote being adopted by folks whose histories were replete with fines they judged unjust and therefore always felt deserved a measure of retaliation? People sometimes present fanciful tales they heard about from others as incidents in their own lives as a form of treppenwitz (in this case an instance of what they should have done, not what they should have said). We revel in such inventive revenge tales because everyone has at one time been the object of a punishment he felt he hadn't earned.
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