The chaos peaks just before the first punch is thrown. On the grainy footage, home plate looks like a clown car, with five angry men packed into a space for three.

There was Shag Crawford, whose short fuse was a virtue when umpires ruled the field like despots. He was behind Ted Simmons, the Cardinals catcher who paved his road to Cooperstown with tenacity. There was Cubs third baseman Bill Madlock, a future four-time batting champ known as “Mad Dog.” His legs were splayed. His bat was coiled. He was ready to swing. But so was his teammate, José Cardenal, the second man in the batter’s box, maximum occupancy of one. An arm’s length away was another man out of place, Jim Marshall, the red-faced manager of the Cubs, who doesn’t know that a scuffle is about to knock off his toupee.

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It was the top of the ninth on Sept. 22, 1974, a sunny Sunday afternoon in St. Louis. The score was tied, 5-5. The Cardinals were locked in a pennant race and the rival Cubs were locked in the basement. Nevertheless, it was Marshall who helped initiate the mayhem. A few moments earlier, he had stormed out of his dugout to complain about Al Hrabosky, the Cardinals relief ace who would be remembered as “The Mad Hungarian.”

Hrabosky had recently adopted an elaborate pre-pitch ritual. He called it the “psych-up,” and over the years it became the signature of his carefully crafted on-field persona. The routine helped with focus. It also enraged opponents. Most countered by stepping out of the box. But believing this to be an insufficient up-yours, Madlock retreated all the way to the on-deck circle, even doing so more than once until the umpire decided he’d had enough. Crawford followed Madlock and ordered him to hit. Marshall protested and the umpire humored him, though this détente proved fleeting. The short fuse had already been lit.

In an escalation that would make Joe West blush, Crawford turned his back on the still-ranting Marshall before marching to home plate, where he pulled down his mask, dropped into his crouch, and motioned emphatically to Hrabosky, who obliged with a face-high fastball that the umpire called a strike — mostly in deference to the rule book, and partly in deference to spite — all while the manager stood with his hands on his hips, near a batter’s box that was left unoccupied, a mistake that the Cubs weren’t about to make twice.

Cardenal jumped into the box. It wasn’t his turn to hit. Madlock scrambled to join him. Hrabosky fired again. Heater, up and in. Cardenal cocked his bat as if to swing. Madlock reeled, nearly falling backward. Marshall, still arguing nearby, was nearly beaned. The crowd gasped and booed and hissed. In the broadcast booth, the exasperated announcer summoned the earnestness of Jimmy Stewart. 

“Wow!” he yelled. “This is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen!”

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Simmons stood up from his crouch. What followed, according to Dick Kaegel’s report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was a brief but forceful exchange.

“What are you looking at?” Simmons said.

“Get lost,” Madlock shot back.

Simmons unleashed a right hook to Madlock’s chin. On video, the scene devolved into a low-fi blur of bodies, fists and, if memory is to be trusted, an angry manager’s airborne toupee.

The brawl was Jerry Springer before Jerry Springer, staged when the uniforms were powder blue, the Astroturf was lime green, and the asses were red. If it had happened today, it would be dissected ad nauseam on television, disseminated instantly to smart phones, and described in unsparing detail in one of Jomboy’s Internet-famous breakdowns. A full-blown melee thanks to the escalation of an umpire? This alone would be grist for the Hot Take Industrial Complex.

“That’s one of the great fights right there,” Keith Hernandez says, his eyes trained on his No. 18, a peacemaker in the middle of the scrum. He’s never seen this video before. Now each viewing leaves him oohing and aahing like a titillated middle schooler. He was a Cardinals rookie then, and he had witnessed the drama unfold from his position at first base, just 90 feet away. He had one of the best seats in the house. Years later, he would remember almost none of it.

Says Hernandez: “I’m just amazed that I forgot that.”

This is absolute chaos

— Jomboy Media (@JomboyMedia) September 8, 2021

To those indoctrinated into baseball, there are images that form shared memory. There’s Babe Ruth, cigar in mouth, blowing smoke beneath his Home Run King crown. There’s Willie Mays, back turned and cap flying, in hot pursuit of a deep drive. There’s Carlton Fisk earning his doctorate in Body English, and Nolan Ryan using Robin Ventura’s head like a punching bag, and Kirk Gibson, impossibly and improbably, hobbling all the way home. “If it gets refreshed — any kind of memory — the more it can get ingrained,” says Jason Themanson, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Illinois Wesleyan University. Researchers call this process “rehearsal.” It is key to determining what will be committed to memory, and conversely, what gets lost.

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Rehearsal can take on many forms. It can be a framed photo hanging in a conspicuous place, as it was for the prominent political reporter, whose backdrop was Jason Varitek serving his catcher’s mitt to Álex Rodríguez like an amuse-bouche. It can be team merchandise commemorating a championship run, the kind handed out during champagne celebrations, and hawked on TV immediately after the final out. And, especially this time of year, it can be classic highlights shown during broadcasts of the World Series. Says Martin Safer, psychology professor emeritus at Catholic University, “It’s this rehearsal, this thinking about it, that seems to make a big difference.”

So too does perceived importance, another factor central to memory. Years ago, with the help of a colleague, Safer conducted a study that focused on the Yankees and Red Sox. They gauged how accurately fans could recall the deciding games of the 2003 and 2004 American League Championship Series, the former won by the Yankees and the latter by the Red Sox. Fans of the winning team, they found, retained the most details. Victory made the games important enough to rehearse, and therefore, to remember.

Clarity plays a role as well, one of the reasons behind the enduring lore of the Pine Tar Incident. When George Brett charged out of the dugout, arms flailing, neck veins bulging, the camera was perfectly placed to capture his fury. He filled the center of the frame. The scene requires little explanation. It’s easy to recall. “If the message gets muddled with what was actually going on there, if it’s not described cleanly, if you don’t really know what’s going on, sometimes it’s hard to remember or communicate or share a memory with other people,” Themanson says. “The collective memory fades away.”

More than a century of research has established that memory is fraught with complications. Recollections need help to endure. Enough material must exist to prompt rehearsal; enough people must deem it worthy to preserve. For many years, the fight had neither, and time worked unimpeded to push it into the darkness.

During the rabbit-eared days of television in 1974, there were far fewer chances for the fight to be replayed. The transformational “This Week in Baseball” was still three years away from being broadcast for the first time. ESPN was five years away from launching. The modern-day highlight had yet to be born. Even if it had, satellite technology did not exist to make them easily distributed and, ultimately, ubiquitous. It didn’t help that the scene was so chaotic that it defied easy explanation.

There were no content creators to gawk at how Madlock was punched so hard that it left Simmons with bloody knuckles. There were no talking heads to discuss the vicious flying body block that Simmons absorbed from behind courtesy of Andre Thornton, the slugging Cubs first baseman everyone called “Thunder.” There were no spirited debates on studio shows about Hrabosky’s rage-inducing, baseball-slamming, mustache-wearing Mad Hungarian act, and whether condoning it was tantamount to letting the kids play or letting the kids get away with disrespecting the game.

Newspapers across the country published recaps of the brawl, some with a wire photo of Simmons decking Madlock. A few weeks later, in a segment recapping the regular season, NBC aired the incident during a World Series pregame show. This was the extent of the fallout.

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That any video of the fight existed at all was a matter of serendipity.

By the 1970s, teams began seeing the value of televising their games. But the Cardinals scaled back on home broadcasts under orders from owner Gussie Busch, who feared that giving away the product for free would put a dent in his gate receipts. When it came to footage of the Cardinals, the policy led to a Dark Age.

People like Gerard Grimm would discover this years later, when they’d comb through the archives and find that highlights of Simmons in a Cardinals uniform were relatively scarce. “There’s just this large gap,” says Grimm, a history buff and lifelong Cardinals fan. That gap covered the 1974 season, when the Cardinals aired just 29 of their games, all on the road. By contrast, the Cubs broadcast 148 games, including one from a strange Sunday afternoon in St. Louis. But even if the full game had been recorded, it was always more likely to be lost to history.

Tapes in those days were expensive and commonly reused. They were also bulky. To save space, they were often thrown out. This might have been the fate of the fight if not for dumb luck and random curiosity.

“I told that story for years,” says Kaegel, the Hall of Fame baseball writer, who still laughs when considering the absurdity of the scene. For nearly four decades, this is how the fight lived on, only in the minds of the few who bothered remembering. For most others, the memory faded, even for those with an interest in keeping it top of mind.

Hrabosky’s post-playing days included a long stretch as a color commentator on Cardinals television broadcasts, where tales from the good old days are standard fodder. “He would talk about all kinds of things,” says Grimm, who in that time religiously watched Cardinals games. “But never once do I remember him talking about this game.” From his own recollection, Hrabosky says he was seldom asked about the incident.

Perhaps there wasn’t much to say. While Crawford’s conduct would be beyond the pale today, back then it would have hardly merited outrage. Umpires were expected to rule the field. Then there was the confrontation itself, which wouldn’t have been a lock to receive the Mel Allen treatment. “To me, it was pretty much a standard baseball fight, and I’ve seen hundreds of them, as you can well imagine,” says Geoff Belinfante, the longtime producer of “This Week in Baseball.” “To me, that particular fight wasn’t memorable.” It wasn’t even the most vicious of that summer. That distinction belonged to a free-for-all in Arlington, Texas, where the Rangers’ Lenny Randle drag-bunted for the sole purpose of tackling Indians pitcher Bob Johnson. Even the cranky umpire Crawford had seen worse. He was behind home plate in 1965 when the Giants’ Juan Marichal clubbed the Dodgers’ Johnny Roseboro over the head with a bat.

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The image of five angry men remained trapped in purgatory, a slice of baseball history that was neither destroyed nor discovered. So it stayed for decades until it was scooped up by people who weren’t looking for it. The Media Burn Archive was created by a Chicago television producer who sought to preserve mountains of old tape. That cache included a spring training special called “A Look at the Cubs, 1975.” It was archived only because it featured a 16-second interview with former pitcher Steve Stone, which the producer later used in another project. The show also included something else: 1 minute, 6 seconds of a fight that could now be saved from the dustbin of time.

In the summer of 2013, “A Look at the Cubs, 1975” was digitized and uploaded, along with its treasure, now hidden in the open like a bonus track. It was discovered a few months later by Grimm, the lifelong Cardinals fan, who was always on the lookout for old footage of his favorite team. At the time, Grimm kept a blog called Kinescope Steals Home, a reference to the recording technology used in the early days of television. He wrote that he’d been tipped off about the footage, though he hadn’t viewed it right away. But once he wound up on the Media Burn site, he knew he’d watched something worth remembering. “I was shocked,” Grimm says. “I couldn’t believe that the umpire just continued the game with multiple players on the field and a couple of people in the batter’s box.”

As would happen thousands of times since that day — with thousands of other people — Grimm found himself wondering how he had never seen the fight. “You see that clip of A-Rod and Varitek all the time,” he says. “You’d think that every time the Cubs and Cardinals play that this would be one of the clips that they show in a bumper highlight or that kind of thing, but I guess not.”

Grimm searched online for a clear explanation of the incident. When he didn’t find what he was looking for, he filled the void himself. He used the video to capture still images of the madness. He rifled through newspaper archives to reconstruct the lead-up to the fight. By the time he was done, he hadn’t just produced another piece of content for the internet to consume and cannibalize. His blog post provided context that was critical to make sense out of chaos.

He couldn’t have known it yet, but Grimm had helped to pull a piece of baseball history back from the darkness.

The trouble began on the pitcher’s mound. In those days this was not uncommon with the Mad Hungarian. “Al always got everybody pissed,” says Hernandez, whose position at first base provided an up-close view of the pitcher’s antics. Baseball had long been a game of straitlaced conformity. So when Hrabosky adopted a persona better suited for professional wrestling, it was noticed. For most of his 13 seasons in the big leagues, he embraced being a heel.

Hrabosky also lived his gimmick. He grew out his bushy hair and droopy mustache, then protested loudly when management demanded that he shave. Once, while shirtless near the batting cage before a game, he had to be restrained after unleashing a torrent of obscenities in a tussle with a reporter. It was straight out of the Vince McMahon playbook before there was one. But what put Hrabosky’s act over the top was that he could actually pitch. “It was not pleasant to face him because he was good,” says Rick Monday, the longtime Dodgers broadcaster who played with the Cubs in 1974. “He may have had some shtick — I’m certain he’s never referred to it as that — but he also had the ability to back it up. You had to take him seriously with what he was going to throw at you. Just couldn’t get mesmerized by the shtick.”

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The shtick consisted of his “psych-up.” Before throwing a pitch, he would walk toward second base, lower his head, and slam the baseball into his glove. “Then,” Monday says, “he’d turn around like he was going to eat a rhinoceros.”

Batters hated it.

“What it ultimately achieved was that a guy would go to bat 600 times, and four or five times a year he’d face me, and those four or five times, he’d never thought about situational hitting, never thought about game action,” Hrabosky says. “All he wanted to do was knock my head off.”

One night against the Mets, Hrabosky irked the feared slugger Dave Kingman. “King Kong” got his vengeance by launching a moonshot into the upper deck. “He watched,” Hernandez says, “and then he motherfucked Al all the way around the bases.” Another time, Hrabosky got the Pirates so worked up that they turned on each other. Late in a close game, Bill Robinson reached base and set about distracting the pitcher. Every time Hrabosky finished his routine, Robinson asked for time to tie his shoes. Exasperated after watching several rounds of this from the batter’s box, Al Oliver began screaming. “Stop tying your fucking shoes!” Hernandez recalls hearing. “Stop that! I wanna hit!”

Hrabosky adopted the psych-up shortly before his infamous skirmish against the Cubs. Fearing that he’d be sent to the minors, he sought a method to channel his focus. The tactic worked. By September, the Cardinals were holding off the Pirates in the National League East, and Hrabosky emerged as a weapon in the bullpen. That the routine annoyed his opponents was merely a bonus. “It was all really done for me,” he says. But it was just a matter of time, he figured, until a hitter would lash out. It happened on a sunny Sunday afternoon, when the Cubs were mesmerized by the shtick.

“I just had nothing,” says Hrabosky, who entered the eighth inning of a tie game. “But I threw like three line-drive outs.” When he returned for the ninth, the first man up was Madlock, the rookie who had quickly established himself as a dangerous hitter. “I went behind the mound and tried to get whatever energy I could,” Hrabosky says. “When I got to the mound, he stepped out and went to the on-deck circle. I’d been waiting. I knew somebody was going to do this. It didn’t bother me. He gets back in the batter’s box, and you see him and he’s like, ‘Ha ha, I made you wait.’ So I got behind the mound again and he went back to the on-deck circle.”

The umpire was not amused. Crawford had already heard an earful from the Cardinals that day about a disputed play earlier in the game. Now he was being ignored.

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“Bill, get back here,” Crawford called out to Madlock, who did not respond. Thinking that the crowd noise might have drowned out his voice, Crawford repeated his demand, this time with the manager Marshall in his face to argue. The reaction was the same. The outcome was predictable. “He was another one of those alpha males,” Hernandez says of Crawford. “He controlled the field — and he had a temper.”

The video picks up shortly after Crawford showed that temper, turning his back on Marshall, another grizzled baseball man who had been schooled to never cede an inch. Moments later there was bedlam.

“Madlock said something to Simmons,” Kaegel says. “And then boom.”

Bodies streamed onto the Astroturf.  The veteran Monday, who scrambled onto the field as a peacemaker, recalls the scene as “a three-ring circus — on-deck circle, home plate and in front of the pitcher’s mound where the wrestling arena took place.” Kaegel wrote about how the players “went down in an arm-flailing, churning pile.” At the bottom was Simmons, who recalled falling to the ground, unable to breathe, because he’d just absorbed the hardest body block of his life.

Hrabosky charged toward the plate before thinking better of it. When he retreated to the mound, back to the fringes of the fight, he felt someone take hold of him. Right then, Hrabosky heard Monday’s deep voice. “You’re having too good of a year,” he was told. “Don’t do something stupid.”

Somehow, no player on either side suffered a serious injury. Only one man was tossed as a direct result of the donnybrook, and it happened after a terse exchange.

“Don’t you care about the players?” the manager protested.

“No, I don’t care about the players — they don’t care about me!” the umpire replied.

With that, Marshall launched into a flurry of expletives, earning an ejection from Crawford. “Marshall didn’t like my statement,” the umpire told the Chicago Tribune after the game. “But I don’t think players should be thrown out for fighting.”

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Dizzy Dean’s widow, Pat, was in attendance for the retirement of her husband’s No. 17. There was perhaps no better authority to judge the merits of a dustup. She offered the ultimate endorsement. “They must have done this for Diz,” she told the Post-Dispatch. “It looked like the old Gashouse Gang.”

The margins of the scorebook are filled with notes scribbled in pencil. They are legible only to the beat writer who wrote them. Kaegel laughs as he inspects the page, an artifact from what he calls “one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen in baseball.” Given that his career spanned six decades and thousands of games, this is saying something. The scorebook and his memories were all that Kaegel had kept of the five angry men and the Mad Hungarian. But sometime before his retirement in 2014, research for a story led him to YouTube and the fight. “I was surprised to find it,” Kaegel says. “Who knew that video of it had survived?”

In the eight years since it was first unearthed, the footage has become irresistible fodder for those on a perpetual hunt for content. Grimm’s original blog post has been aggregated by others with larger audiences. Almost every version of the video appears to have been ripped from the original on Media Burn, its watermark cropped out. “Once it gets in that viral machine,” says Jimmy O’Brien, the creator better known as Jomboy, “everyone just eats up and spits it out.”

With every rehearsal it reaches another fan for the first time. O’Brien hadn’t seen it until last year, while digging for content in the early days of the pandemic. “I needed to search for the story,” he says, “because none of it makes sense out of context.” Themanson, the psychology professor, grew up religiously watching the “Game of the Week” and “This Week in Baseball.” “But I’d never seen it before either,” he says. “And I grew up a Cubs fan.” Will Ohman pitched in the major leagues, and since seeing the video for the first time only recently, he uses an image of the five angry men in his Twitter header. “That picture in a baseball sense is the embodiment of communication levels on Twitter,” he says. “It’s people shouting at each other with absolutely no idea of what’s going on.”

The conditions for such ballfield mayhem no longer exist. Umpires can no longer function as blatant authoritarians, and one cross look from Ángel Hernández might be enough to break the internet. Players can no longer brawl without fear of major punishment from the league, ensuring that there will generally be more posturing than punching. In this way, the video serves as a pop of nostalgia, a window into a time of nicknames as colorful as the characters themselves. It’s a world that exists no more. Ohman says that the old norms may have been “sophomoric” or “banal,” but for many, they are also missed. “It was OK to not like each other,” he says. “We didn’t have to be friends, we didn’t have to get along. People could go fight … and then they got to leave at the end and say that was settled, we’re moving on. That’s something that has been lost.”

The fight has yet to make baseball’s all-time highlight reel. Perhaps it never will. Gone are the days of “This Week in Baseball,” a show once influential enough to make images iconic. Highlights flood the landscape. It’s hard to rise above the noise. Social media has vast reach but the audience is splintered. Rights issues complicate getting the footage on television. Then there’s the matter of its perceived importance. After all the drama, the Cardinals won the game when Hrabosky retired the side in order, and Simmons walked it off in the ninth. But the victory lost its relevance when the Cardinals were passed by the Pirates in the homestretch of the pennant race. Second place isn’t fertile ground for memories. And the Cubs were, well, they were the Cubs.

“We couldn’t beat them playing,” Madlock told an interviewer once, “so I think we might have won the fight.”

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But so long as it is rehearsed in some form, so long as it keeps rattling around the internet, the fight has a chance to grow in stature. “This sort of stuff happens quite a bit — not just in sports,” says Safer, invoking a more serious example, the Tank Man footage from the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square. “The Chinese government has pretty much purged that video or those pictures so most of their citizens have never seen it. And yet every once in a while it sneaks back, where people are astounded that this even happened in China.”

Certain occasions prompt a resharing. Before a meeting of the Cubs and Cardinals in 2017, MLB dipped into its archives to upload the Joe Garagiola-narrated NBC clip, which hadn’t been shown since the 1974 World Series. “This is great footage,” Grimm says. “You’ve got hands and faces making contact with each other in the middle of a baseball field — with a Hall of Famer tied to the middle of it.” That latter distinction has imbued the incident with another layer of prominence. On the day of Simmons’ induction, Jomboy Media marked the moment by tweeting out the fight. It was accompanied by a fitting caption: “This is absolute chaos.”

The video generated nearly 300,000 views.

In September, a few hours before the fight made another revolution around the internet, Simmons stood behind a podium in Cooperstown. He had been nicknamed “Simba,” a nod to the mane of hair that he once wore shoulder-length. He was known to be fiery on the field and thoughtful off it, the kind of player reporters sought out for quotes. He demonstrated that eloquence in his induction speech. “Our game is about wins and losses,” Simmons told the crowd. “But after 50 years of organized baseball, I’ve learned that it’s so much more. Baseball is about all the names and faces that remain firmly planted in one’s memory.”

What remains firmly planted — and what drifts away — is a source of fascination even for those immersed in the intricacies of memory. “It surprises me how much crap you have in there,” says Safer, who proves the point by reciting the starting lineup of the 1953 Milwaukee Braves, his favorite team as a boy. “I have absolutely no use for any of that information, but I can remember the team.”

Despite finding himself in the middle of it all, Keith Hernandez has virtually no recollection of one of the strangest fights in baseball history. But he never forgot the names or faces. He remembers how Marshall was “always scowling” and how the manager refused to fraternize with opponents because he was so old school. He remembers how Crawford was a “crusty old Popeye-like cartoon character, like an Irish hard-ass sailor,” and indeed, the umpire served in the Navy aboard the USS Walke, a destroyer that was set ablaze when it was struck by a kamikaze in World War II. He remembers the night that Kingman motherfucked Hrabosky around the bases, and how the pitcher resisted the urge to yell back — “Al just stood there and looked at him,” he says — proof that there were brains behind all that bravado.

Memory isn’t fixed like a photograph. It is an act of reconstruction, which means it’s subject to alteration. “Every time you remember something it’s kind of like re-opening a saved file, if you think of it like a computer model,” Themanson says. “So every time you reopen it, it can be re-saved maybe a little bit differently.” Just as they had on the field during the brawl, Monday and Hrabosky have crossed paths as broadcasters over the years. They have joked about the fight though they don’t remember it the same way.

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Says Monday: “It was a lot more fun watching it.”

Says Hrabosky: “I think it was a lot more fun in person.”

If constructing memory is like assembling a puzzle, then context can reshape the pieces. Perhaps this explains how Hrabosky went from rarely mentioning the fight when the video was lost, to recalling it with glee after it resurfaced.

“I can honestly say that I was the first pitcher to ever throw one pitch with no batter in the batter’s box and the second one with two batters and a manager in the batter’s box,” he says. “So I have a fond recollection of it.”

The Mad Hungarian still wears the mustache of his playing days, though it is graying now. In his home office, he displays three stills of the drama leading up to the brawl. The five angry men have since become a part of his legacy. He isn’t too shy to say that he wants it to endure, and in his retellings, he’s been known to help the process along. “There was a good 20-minute brawl,” he says, though it was closer to two. “Simmons won it with a homer,” he says, though it was a bouncer up the middle. “Marshall was frozen with his toupee up in the air,” he says, an assertion backed by Madlock, though the video is inconclusive. Finally, when asked how he knew that Marshall wore a toupee, Hrabosky concedes, “Oh, I’m not sure if he did or not.”

What is certain, however, is more important than a phantom toupee. Hrabosky believes that the memory is worth rehearsing.

And, more and more, he is not alone.

(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic / WGN-TV)