Category Archives: Don't Showboat

by | May 4, 2011 · 10:36 pm

Scott Flips Bat, Beckett Flips Out

With all the recent flap about Felipe Lopez’s bat flip against the White Sox, it seems worth pointing out that he’s not the only guy doing such things this season.

Last week, Orioles outfielder Luke Scott tossed his bat with considerable verve after hitting a monster home run against Josh Beckett. This may have gone unnoticed had Beckett not tried to shout him down in the aftermath, then gotten into an argument with the umpire over it.

(Unfortunately, MLB.com’s video cuts away before the bat flip on every single replay.)

After the inning, Beckett was approached by plate ump Fieldin Culbreth, which culminated in an animated conversation during which the pitcher gestured toward the Orioles dugout. One possibility: Culbreth was warning him against retaliation. (If so, it worked; Beckett faced Scott once more in the game, retiring him on a fly ball.)

For a guy so clearly perturbed, Beckett wasn’t much in the mood after the game to deconstruct the moment with reporters.

“What is this, TMZ?” he said. “I thought we were talking about a baseball game. You want to know about bat flips and talking to umpires. I think, why don’t we just stick to the game.”

It’s a fair enough tactic. If Beckett expressed sufficient outrage it’d be all the easier to pin him with the drilling for which Scott seems destined. The one clue Beckett offered up to the press: “These things have a way of working themselves out.”

The teams next meet May 16.

- Jason

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by | August 25, 2010 · 10:26 am

Bautista’s Game-Winning Homer Conveys Message, then he Conveys it Again

Jose Bautista’s first home run Monday meant little on its own, save for being the slugger’s major league-leading 39th of the season.

His second home run Monday meant a lot more, at least to him.

The difference: What happened in between.

That would be the sixth-inning fastball that Yankees starter Ivan Nova sent spinning toward—and ultimately over—Bautista’s head.

The hitter took it as a response to his earlier bomb. Nova was more likely just wild, considering that it was his first start as a big leaguer. Bautista had words for the right-hander as he approached the mound, Nova didn’t back down at all and benches and bullpens quickly emptied onto the field.

Although no punches were thrown, the incident served as a prelude for an interesting response from Bautista after he hit another home run, in the eighth.

Baseball will tolerate a degree of showboating, so long as it’s in response to a Code violation. Bautista’s reaction to his second home run (the eventual game-winner, hit off of reliever David Robertson) started with a bat flip in conjunction with a glare toward the mound. It ended with one of the slowest home-run trots in the big leagues this season, and some fist pumping upon reaching the plate. (Watch it here.)

In addition is the notion that rookies must be tested, which, admitted Bautista, is what motivated his sixth-inning outburst, at least in part.

“I was just trying to see what kind of reaction I was going to get from him,” he said in the Bergen Record. “I was surprised to see he was pretty defiant. He was walking up toward me and flashing his hands up and started yelling.”

Part of Bautista’s motivation was to use Nova’s response to gauge intent. Despite the pitcher’s repeated assertion (in Spanish) that “I don’t want to hit you,” that, said Bautista, was “when I felt that the pitch was intentional.”

Bautista might have already been angry at a Toronto Star columnist who suggested that his power surge might be artificially fueled, using exactly zero pieces of evidence to back up his claim. (Bautista denied everything.)

Blue Jays fans can only hope that he continues to take out his anger on baseballs across the league.

- Jason

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by | June 21, 2010 · 8:21 am

War of Words Brews in Motown Following Valverde’s Dramatics

Valverde in action, back when he was with the Diamondbacks.

We got a Code twofer this weekend, with on-field actions drawing a response that is itself governed by baseball’s unwritten rules.

It started with Tigers closer Jose Valverde, whose antics atop a pitcher’s mound are well established. He spins, spits, hops, jumps and pumps his fists at regular intervals. It’s an ongoing display that has earned its own Facebook fan page, but still doesn’t seem to bother the likes of Nick Swisher and Mark Teixeira, who claimed after facing him last week that they had bigger things to worry about than Valverde’s body language. (Watch his routine against the Yankees here.)

Not everyone in baseball agrees.

Arizona catcher Miguel Montero decided on Friday that he had seen enough of Valverde’s act, following the right-hander’s celebratory gesticulations during and after shutting down the Diamondbacks in the ninth inning. (This included a strikeout of Montero, after which Valverde bent over, then hopped off the mound.)

“He’s a (bleeping bleep),” Montero told the Arizona Republic after the game. “The way he acts, it’s not right, you know?”

Montero’s knowledge, of course, goes deeper than being insulted on the field. The two were D-Backs teammates in 2007, and for the handful of games that Montero was in the big leagues in ’06.

“You’ve got to be professional,” added Montero. “I’ve always felt that way, and I’ve always told him. That’s the way he is. I guess he thinks it’s right, but I don’t care.”

He also added that Valverde didn’t have the “kind of brain” to be smart enough to throw three straight splitters to strike him out.

Children are taught that two wrongs don’t make a right, but in this case, Montero adding a public lambasting of his opponent to said opponent’s initial theatrics made for some quality entertainment.

That’s because by the end of the weekend, Valverde shot back.

“Tell Montero he’s a freaking rookie and I can do whatever I want to,” Valverde said in Sunday’s Arizona Republic. “Tell him that. Put it in the papers. If he wants to do something, tell him to come to my locker and let me know. I never liked Montero. He’s a (bleeping) piece of (bleep). Tell Montero he has two years (in the majors) and I have eight.”

Montero responded quickly, saying that “it doesn’t matter if he’s got eight years. I don’t think he’s got eight years because he got sent down seven or eight times. That really doesn’t count. When you get sent down your major league service stops counting. He got called up in ’02 and he got sent down in ’02 and ’03 and ’04 and ’05 and ’06. I guess this year he was a free agent so that let me know he got six years. In four out of six years he’s given up 100 runs a year. He’s only had two good years in his career. So what? He’s still a (bleep) to me.”

These are baseball players, of course, not mathematicians. Montero is in his fourth season, and, reported the Republic, only one of Valverde’s minor league stints from 2003-06 was due to demotion, rather than to injury rehab assignments.

During his initial blast, Montero said that at the earliest possibility against Valverde, he was “going to pimp it”—assumedly talking about showboating at the plate to a similar degree that Valverde does on the mound.

This would have been an appropriate response. Taking one’s beef to the press: not so much.

But entertaining. Always entertaining.

- Jason

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by | June 7, 2010 · 8:36 am

Phillips Preens, Nats Respond

The Code was at work Saturday in Washington—and it worked perfectly.

There was Cincinnati’s Brandon Phillips, pounding his chest in the eighth inning after dislodging the ball from Nationals catcher Wil Nieves on a play at the plate, the run he scored extending his team’s lead to 5-1.

There was Washington reliever Miguel Batista the following inning, placing a 93 mph fastball into Phillips’ ribs.

There was Phillips, failing even to flinch before jogging to first base without so much as acknowledging what had just happened. (Watch it here.)

Situation ignited, situation handled, situation resolved.

While telling reporters after the game that he plays with excitement, and that he didn’t see anything wrong with his actions, Phillips made sure to add that “if people think I did something wrong, I apologize to whoever thinks so. . . . They did their job and I did mine. Lesson learned.”

In the other clubhouse, Batista—who was ejected by umpire Joe West after hitting Phillips—held up his end of the bargain by denying all intent.

“No, just playing baseball,” he said in the Washington Post, when asked if he had meant to hit Phillips. “Everybody knows Phillips, you got to go way in and way out . . . and that one got away. I mean, he knows he did wrong. He got booed by the fans, so we’re here to win. We’re not here to be fine with everybody who do wrong against us. . . . If it looks suspicious, (West) has the right to throw me out, but he was the only one that thought it was intentional. “

Batista would have benefitted from coordinating stories with his catcher.

“I think everybody in the ballpark kind of knew that that was going to happen,” Nieves told the Post. “So he got hit, and I thought he got hit where he was supposed to. Not in the head. Obviously, we don’t play like that. Miguel hit him in a good spot.”

“I’m pretty sure he knew he did it wrong,” he added. “Hopefully. And hopefully he won’t do it again.”

- Jason

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by | June 2, 2010 · 8:08 am

Gomez Flips, Trips, Quips – and Ultimately Slips out of Trouble

As has long been trumpeted in this space, the unwritten rules are less about on-field actions than the meaning behind those actions. It’s why something as innocuous as a stolen base can serve to enrage an entire roster should it occur at an inopportune moment.

The inverse is also true. Should a ballplayer do something that by most indicators is viewed as disrespectful, he can get away with it if the opposition understands where he’s coming from.

So it went last week with Milwaukee’s Carlos Gomez, who actually hit a trifecta of sorts in a game against the Twins.

He hit a monster home run, then admired it.

Then he flipped his bat—which clipped Minnesota catcher Joe Mauer’s wrist on the way down—and threw up his hands in victory.

Mauer waited for Gomez to circle the bases, then mentioned to him that he might want to be more careful in the future. Gomez—without even bothering to turn around, threw up his arms and, back to his opponent, gave Mauer wiggly fingered jazz hands, indicating that he wanted no part of whatever it was the catcher was trying to convey. (Watch it here.)

All of this for a home run that came while his team was trailing, 15-0.

None of this was even remotely okay. Gomez, however, had some things working in his favor.

Most immediately was the fact that he spent the previous two seasons in Minnesota, which gave the Twins a long taste of his exuberance in such situations. He even paid a visit to the opposing clubhouse before the game, to greet manager Ron Gardenhire and his former teammates.

Because they’d seen his act before, they knew it was not personal. (They also knew that he’d just come off the disabled list, and was especially excited to forge a strong start.)

“Just one of those moments that we know Go-Go can have every once in a while,” said Gardenhire in the Associated Press report. “He was excited, and it just happened.”

“We played with him the last couple years, that’s the type of player he is,” Twins starter Nick Blackburn told MLB.com. “It made me mad, but I shouldn’t be getting mad at stuff like that. I’m sure everyone on his team also knew he shouldn’t have done it, but that’s the type of guy he is. He gets so caught up in the moment.”

Even more importantly, Gomez recognized what he did, nearly as soon as he did it. Upon returning to the dugout, he was informed by teammate Joe Inglett that Mauer was offering words of caution, not talking smack.

Gomez regretted his actions immediately. After the game he offered blanket apologies for his actions.

“I didn’t even know the bat was going to hit him,” he said. “I’ll say again: I didn’t try to do this. . . . I had a good night, but you have to be more professional.”

MLB.com quoted him as saying, “Right now, I feel bad because Blackburn is one of the good friends I’ve got over there. I apologized because I don’t want to try to show him up.”

Gomez also addressed the notion of getting drilled the following day, adding, “I’m going to take it like a man because I know I did [something] bad.”

That might have been enough to get him off the hook; he wasn’t hit by a pitch for the remainder of the series.

- Jason

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by | April 19, 2010 · 5:24 pm

Padilla, Ramirez, Dodgers Get off Scott-Free Against Giants

In September, Prince Fielder did his bowling-pin routine against the Giants. The next time they faced him, this spring, Fielder was drilled in response.

The Dodgers, apparently, are held to a significantly lower standard.

On Friday, Los Angeles right-hander Vicente Padilla broke Aaron Rowand‘s cheek with a pitch, sending him to the disabled list. To judge by the reaction from the Giants pitching staff—no Dodgers player was hit in response during any point of the three-game series—Fielder’s dance was the more offensive of the two items.

Two days later, in the series finale, Manny Ramirez drilled an eighth-inning, pinch-hit, two-run homer to put his team up, 2-1. The slugger then acknowledged the delirious fans with a curtain call—while Sergio Romo was in the process of pitching to the next hitter.

“Manny being Manny” is a popular refrain around baseball when attempting to describe Ramirez. It’s essentially shorthand for “the guy does what he wants,” which is itself shorthand for “the man is so totally self-absorbed that he doesn’t care how he comes across to the rest of the planet.”

Ramirez’s actions, of course, did nothing more than offend. Padilla’s recklessness cost the Giants their leadoff hitter, with the potential for much greater damage. Padilla swears it was unintentional, and by the Giants’ reaction (or lack thereof), they appear to believe it, too.

This doesn’t change the fact that Padilla is, without exception, the game’s premier head-hunter. He led the American League with 17 hit batsmen in 2006, has finished among the top five in the category four times and was in the top 10 once. He currently leads the National League with three.

(Remember Sean Tracey, the White Sox rookie who was first chewed out, then banished by manager Ozzie Guillen when he failed to drill Hank Blalock in 2006? That Blalock was targeted in the first place was because Padilla [then with the Rangers] had already nailed Sox catcher A.J. Pierzynski. Twice. [A week later, White Sox pitcher Jon Garland received his own tongue-lashing from Guillen when he failed to respond after a teammate was hit . . . again by Padilla.])

If Padilla has a defense, it goes like this: The guy hadn’t made it out of the fifth inning in either of his prior starts this season; drilling Rowand (itself in the fifth inning) came after Padilla had already given up three hits, a walk and two runs in the frame, and served to load the bases. If he wasn’t officially on the ropes, he couldn’t have gotten any closer.

Padilla came to bat again in the game, and wasn’t hit. Ramirez’s act Sunday came during a 2-1 game—far too close to even consider retaliation.

The Giants next play the Dodgers in late June. San Francisco will know two things going into that series: Ramirez’s act was laden with more than enough disrespect to merit retaliation. And whether or not Padilla intended to injure Rowand, he thought so little of the incident that he failed to place a call and check up on his victim—itself an unwritten rule in situations like this.

Rowand should be back on the field by then, and like it or not, his opinion will count when it comes to the Giants’ reaction. For now, we can only wait and see what that will be.

- Jason

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Filed under Aaron Rowand, Don't Showboat, Los Angeles Dodgers, Manny Ramirez, Retaliation, San Francisco Giants, Vicente Padilla

by | March 23, 2010 · 8:55 am

Kendry Morales: ‘I Didn’t Know how the System Here Works’

In this week’s Sports Illustrated, a profile of Angels first baseman Kendry Morales describes the player’s reaction after hitting a long home run in A-ball, on his first professional swing after defecting from Cuba.

The ball cleared the scoreboard before Morales made a move toward first base. “He threw the bat down on top of home plate and watched it go, did a real circus trip around the bases,” says (Angels Scouting Director Eddie) Bane. “I remember Bruce Hines, our minor league coordinator at the time, said, ‘Uh-oh, we’re in trouble here.’ “

In Cuba, Morales explains, fans expect a slugger to put on a show. But in the U.S. such displays tend to get someone beaned. “Well, not me, but the guy behind me,” Morales says with a chuckle. “I was adjusting. I didn’t know how the system here works.”

Looking at the Code through an international lens can be fascinating. In Latin America, ballplayers are allowed far more leeway when it comes to on-field self-expression than they are in the U.S. In Japan, the Code is so firm — and so stacked against foreigners — that many Americans who play there experience a significant degree of culture shock. (For the ultimate look at the subject, check out “You Gotta Have Wa,” by Robert Whiting.)

During the process of researching The Baseball Codes, we pursued the question of whether the recent influx of Asian players to the major leagues, on top of the already established population of players from Latin America, could serve to alter the unwritten rules.

Aside from the occasional flashy Dominican who points to his heritage as explanation for his unbridled on-field enthusiasm (Carlos Perez, anybody?), the answer is resounding: It hasn’t changed a thing. We interviewed any number of players who made the jump from foreign leagues to America (as well as several Americans who made the reverse trip), and to a man they said it was a struggle to adapt to Code-based expectations.

(Most interesting for me in this regard was Mac Suzuki, who was born and raised in Japan but who learned baseball in the U.S. He returned to Japan after his six-year big league career, and struggled with their rigid set of expectations. Despite knowing as little about Japanese clubhouse customs as any of his American counterparts, he was granted none of the leeway they received, because he looked and talked just like his teammates. It was trying, and he eventually returned to the U.S. for a comeback attempt.)

Kendry Morales learned. They all learn, if they’re here long enough. Bud Selig and Co. might want to make baseball more of an international game, but the unwritten rules of the major leagues are purely American.

- Jason

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by | January 5, 2010 · 8:41 pm

If Darryl Can Handle Al Nipper, He Can Certainly Handle Trump

The cast for the upcoming season 3 of Celebrity Apprentice was recently announced, and Darryl Strawberry is among the contestants.

Straw, of course, hopes to avoid many of the same conflicts that got him in repeated trouble over the course of his 17-season career. One thing’s certain: If he inspires boardroom attacks like he inspired ballpark attacks, things likely won’t go well.

Need an example? A passage deleted from the final edit of The Baseball Codes has more:

* * *

There are many reasons a pitcher may have to postpone punishment he’s dying to deliver. It’s often a matter of game situation; regardless of how inherently a pitcher feels an opponent deserves a fastball to the ribs, it’s simply not going to happen in the late innings of a close game, especially if it moves a runner into scoring position. If response to personal vendettas could hurt their teams, most pitchers are happy to handle business another day, another series—or, if it comes down to it, another season.

“How long do you wait?” asked one big-league manager. “As long as it takes. If it takes a month, you wait a month. If it’s the last game of a series and you’re not going to see that club again for awhile, you wait.”

Take Game 7 of the 1986 World Series, when Darryl Strawberry of the New York Mets hit a mammoth home run off Boston’s Al Nipper, the ball caroming off the center-field scoreboard at Shea Stadium. Strawberry proceeded to take one of the slowest home run trots in the history of postseason play, a deed that was unequivocally intended to send a message. That the message was more likely meant for Mets manager Davey Johnson—who pulled Strawberry from Game 6 in a late-game double-switch, outraging his volatile superstar—didn’t matter a bit to Nipper, who barely tried to hide his contempt for the moment and the player behind it.

Strawberry described the moment in his book, Darryl: “Okay, so I put it in his face when I pounded that homer in game seven and then took—what was it?—five or so minutes to walk around the bases while the fans went crazy. It was my first Series, my first Series game-winner, and my last home run of 1986. So maybe I wasn’t cool about it. But then I’m not always Mr. Cool.”

With that in mind, when the Mets and Red Sox next met—in St. Petersburg the following spring—it wasn’t much of a secret that Nipper sought payback. The ballpark was packed with media members from New York and Boston who weren’t so much hoping for fireworks as expecting them. This was the era before interleague play, and Nipper knew he wouldn’t get the chance to face Strawberry during the regular season.

With his first pitch, Nipper hit Strawberry on the right hip. It was hardly a blazing fastball, and, in proper retribution fashion, connected well below the shoulders. Still, it was enough to incite the batter to charge the mound, leading players from both teams to flood the field.

“There are times when, yes, you send a message and go, okay, we’re getting you right now, we’re letting everyone know,“ said Nipper. “And there are times when everyone knows you’re going to get him.”

(In fact, Nipper did get to face Strawberry again, as a member of the Chicago Cubs in 1988. In three at-bats, Strawberry was intentionally walked, reached on an error and, in his third at-bat . . . was hit by Nipper in the calf. This time Strawberry merely glared at the mound before taking his base.)

- Jason

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by | December 21, 2009 · 5:51 am

As a Rookie, Rollins had Lessons to Learn

The Phillies picked up Jimmy Rollins’ option for 2011 Sunday, handing him $8.5 million to stick around for an extra year. Before he was an MVP, however, Rollins learned a hard lesson about the unwritten rules.

In the eighth inning of a May game against St. Louis during Rollins’ first spring as a big leaguer, the Cardinals brought in lefty Steve Kline to face him. The Phillies led 2-0, and it was Kline’s job to keep the deficit from escalating. It took him all of three pitches, however, before Rollins clubbed a two-run homer to double his team’s lead.

As he started off toward first, however, Rollins flipped his bat high into the air.

That was all it took to send Kline into a tizzy. As Rollins rounded the bases, the pitcher shadowed him with every step, screaming all the while. “I called him every name in the book, tried to get him to fight,” Kline told me. “He hit it pretty well, and I was upset about it. That’s what I was taught — not to be shown up. I don’t strike him out and fucking do a cartwheel on the mound.”

The pitcher stopped only when he reached Philadelphia third baseman Scott Rolen, who alleviated the situation by assuring him that members of the Phillies would take care of the situation internally.

“That’s fucking Little League shit,” said Kline after the game. “If you’re going to flip the bat, I’m going to flip your helmet next time. You’re a rookie, you respect this game for a while. . . . There’s a code. He should know better than that.”

That’s one part of the story. Kline recounted the details to me in 2007, six years after it happened. When asked if it was forgotten history by that point, the pitcher said coldly, “It’s not forgotten.”

Kline faced Rollins five more times after that at-bat, always in games closer than three runs; never once did he consider prioritizing personal revenge over potential victory. The pitcher retired a few months after we spoke, having gone unrequited in his on-field payback — which probably means that it’s still not forgotten.

As baseball sage Andy Van Slyke said of batter’s box showmanship, “You’re not making money to dance, you’re making money to hit home runs.”

- Jason

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