On April 22, 2010, Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees ran across the mound at the Oakland Coliseum on his way back to the dugout.
Dallas Braden, pitching for the A’s at the time, took extremely verbal exception.
It became a national story, propelling a book about baseball’s unwritten rules that had been released only a few weeks earlier waaaaay up the Amazon charts. (Shortly thereafter, The Baseball Codes crested at No. 34 overall, which in my new-author mind was nice, but hey, it’s a good book, so why not? Having since published two more titles, my stance is now more along the lines of Holy hell, did that actually happen?)
It took a while after Rodriguez, but somebody again crossed a mound in noteworthy fashion.
On Sunday, in the fourth inning of the first game of a doubleheader, St. Louis starter Miles Mikolas got Cincinnati’s Freddy Galvis to fly out to center field. It was nondescript: a routine flyball, the second out of what would be a three-up, three-down frame … until Galvis returned to his dugout. Rather than trotting around the mound, he jogged straight over it. It was, after all, in the middle of his straightest path of return.
Mikolas was having none of it.
“I asked him politely to use the grass,” the pitcher recalled after the game in a St. Louis Post-Dispatch report. (What Mikolas actually said, at least according to the lip-reading skills of @Jomboy, was “You walk around that shit. You run around the fucking mound.”)
At this point in the exchange it becomes obvious that Galvis was guilty only of ignorance. At first, he was confused about why he was being shouted at. Then he grew indignant. When Cards catcher Yadi Molina preemptively cut off Galvis’ route to the pitcher, benches and bullpens quickly emptied.
Nothing came of it, of course, the relief pitchers from both teams only making it about halfway to the infield before things calmed down. Still, there is plenty to unpack. Mainly: Why should a pitcher even care?
Mikolas offered one avenue of response, saying: “We do a tremendous job of taking care of that mound—your landing spot, the rubber, kind of keep it nice for the guys coming out of the bullpen. No one wants to come out of the bullpen with the mound all chewed.”
That’s the practical answer. The cosmic, karmic answer has to do with one’s space, physical or otherwise. As I wrote in the A-Rod/Braden aftermath:
The pitcher’s mound is unlike any other space on a baseball diamond. Pitchers use it to literally survey the field from their vantage on high. Braden’s taken some flack for calling the mound the center of the universe, but that’s exactly what he was taught. It’s the point of origin for every play on a baseball diamond, a notion that can, for those who care to run this deep, lend a sacredness to it.
Ultimately, Braden laid down the gauntlet back in 2010, sending a message to Rodriguez through the press: “If he wants to run across the pitcher’s mound, tell him to do laps in the bullpen.”
Mikolas has Braden as precedent, and Braden had plenty of precedent of his own. A sampling:
- Bert Blyleven: “I used to really get pissed if a guy flew out, say, and he came back and stepped on my mound. I used to say something to some of the hitters. Just don’t run on my mound. That was my mound that day.”
- Jamie Quirk: “Stay clear of the mound. It’s his area; don’t try to run across it or toward him. Just go back to your dugout and stay clear. That’s just courtesy of doing things the right way.”
- Dave Roberts: “That’s his office, his domain. To run across it is disrespectful.”
- Jim Price: “I’ve seen that happen, and then there was retaliation.”
- Bob Gibson: “(Steve) Carlton and I shared one pet peeve relating to the office [the term Carlton used to refer to the mound]. We hated when hitters crossed behind it on their way back to the dugout. We took down names.” (From Stranger to the Game.)
It’s tough to fault Galvis for not knowing what he’s never been taught. Upon hearing about it from the opposition, however, it would have been a better look for him and the Reds both had he quietly gone about inquiring in his own dugout whether Mikolas might actually have a point. Manager David Bell—the son and grandson of former big leaguers—would be a great place to start.
The reality, of course, is that many big leaguers have likely done precisely the same thing, unnoticed because the pitchers whose mounds they crossed either didn’t notice themselves or didn’t bother to make an issue out of it.
Miles Mikoulas did. And it was spectacular.
The Baseball Codes 