Category: Swinging 3-0

Don't Play Aggressively with a Big Lead, Retaliation, Swinging 3-0

Tony La Russa Endorses Retribution Against His Own Team, Minnesota Obliges

Posted on by Jason Turbow

This is how I concluded yesterday’s post about Yermin Mercedes hitting a 3-0 homer off of Willians Astudillo with two outs in the ninth inning of a game that the White Sox led by 11 runs:

If the Twins for some reason decide to retaliate tonight, or if [Tony] La Russa benches Mercedes in some misbegotten stab toward outdated honor, then we’ll be talking about this again tomorrow. More realistically, the enduring optics of one fat guy hitting a homer off of another fat guy, plus the ridiculous nature of the pitching itself, means that this controversy will not likely endure beyond last night’s news cycle. Nor should it.

Guess who’s talking about this again today—so much talk!—for every wrong reason imaginable. When it comes to misbegotten stabs, Tony La Russa has managed to lap the field.

When was the last time a manager slagged his own player to the press, gave tacit approval for the other team to retaliate, and, after said retaliation occurred, claimed publicly that he had no problem with it? More pertinently to the White Sox, when was the last time a manager did any of those things and still had his job at the end of the season?

It started when La Russa shared some thoughts before Tuesday’s game. No surprise: He was upset.

“That’s not a time to swing 3-0,” the manager told reporters before the game, according to an MLB.com report. He called it “sportsmanship and respect for the game and respect for your opponent.” He said that Mercedes “made a mistake.” He called Mercedes “clueless.” Most brazenly, La Russa also said that “there will be a consequence that [Mercedes] has to endure here within our family.”

What the fuck is that about? La Russa was intentionally vague. Could the Twins have taken it as a green light to respond? Of course they could have. Did La Russa know that his comments might be taken as such? If he didn’t, he’s a fool. More likely, that was his intent from the beginning.

With that as the background, it should surprise nobody that, with one out and nobody on in the top of the seventh in a game that the White Sox led, 4-2, Minnesota reliever Tyler Duffey threw a pitch behind Mercedes’ legs. It was clearly intentional. Was he acting alone? Was he following orders? Either answer reflects some overt thuggery. Most enduring was the impression that the most old-school guy in the building, Tony La Russa, orchestrated the entire thing against his own player.

If that actually was his goal—or even if a critical mass of White Sox players think that was his goal—La Russa should just resign now. Few people in that room will listen to him again. Not helping the manager’s cause were postgame comments in which he said things like “I don’t have a problem with how the Twins handled that” and “I didn’t have a problem with what the Twins did.” He outright excused the pitch, saying, “The guy might have just been trying to get a sinker in,” when the guy was clearly not just trying to get a sinker in.

Yes, there’s the fact that Mercedes swung through a take sign on his fateful homer, which is enough to piss off any manager, but come on—managers don’t discuss missed signs during press conferences. La Russa was angry at one thing and one thing only. By leaving things intentionally vague, he gave the Twins all the leeway they needed to respond however they saw fit. (La Russa is 76. Twins skipper Rocco Baldelli is 39, and was born two years after La Russa’s managerial debut. Somehow, they both ended up looking comparably stodgy after this one.)

For those who doubt whether this series of events will cost La Russa in the long run, know that the inevitable avalanche of doubt within the White Sox clubhouse has already begun. After the game, Lance Lynn—Chicago’s best and most veteran pitcher, who’s been around long enough to have played for La Russa in his last managerial job a decade ago—spoke out. While Lynn didn’t overtly criticize his manager, he took a clear position against the La Russa’s entrenched stance.

“The more I play this game, the more those [unwritten] rules have gone away, and I understand it,” the pitcher said in an MLB.com report. “The way I see it is, for position players on the mound, there are no rules. Let’s get the damn game over with. And if you have a problem with whatever happens, then put a pitcher out there. Can’t get mad when there’s a position player on the field and a guy takes a swing.”

And so it begins. La Russa is well on his way to losing that clubhouse, if he hasn’t already.

If there’s a saving grace for him it’s that the White Sox are 25-16, the best record in the American League. Then again, in the first game after the Mercedes Incident, the same one in which Minnesota gratefully accepted La Russa’s offer to throw freely at his own player, Chicago coughed up a four-run lead to the team with baseball’s worst record, and lost, 5-4.

White Sox players deserve to feel better about things than they inevitably do this morning.

Update (5/20): Guess who doesn’t agree with La Russa? Tim Anderson for one. Lucas Giolito for another. For players to publicly contradict their manager on the most visible point he’s made since taking over the club is an ominous sign. And it’s only the beginning.

Update (5/21): Tyler Duffey and Rocco Baldelli were suspended three games for their roles in this. The best part about it was when a guy on Twitter said, “Tony La Russa appealed the decision.”

Update (5/21): CC Sabathia has thoughts, which normally wouldn’t be worth a dedicated update but boy howdy these ones are.

0
Don't Play Aggressively with a Big Lead, Swinging 3-0

A Ridiculous Pitch In A Ridiculous Setting Leads To Another Conversation About Swinging 3-0 During A Blowout

Posted on by Jason Turbow

The stringency of baseball’s unwritten rules has been slipping for the better part of a generation now. Players care less about how to play the game than ever, at least from the standpoint of decorum, a shift that has largely worked out pretty well for the sport.

One of the stodgiest of the unwritten rules is also one of my favorites when it comes to representing the old-school mentality. Nothing says “don’t do what you’re paid to do in an ideal situation in which to do it” like not swinging at a 3-0 pitch while your team is leading big.

The idea behind the rule is actually kind of sweet. Relief pitchers called in at the tail ends of blowouts tend not to be world-beaters, and the last thing either team wants is for them to extend the game by walking guys. So when the count runs to 3-0, baseball’s code urges hitters to allow the opponent a moment to get straight with a courtesy fastball down the pipe. The war has already been won; ceding a minor point during an inconsequential battle is the gentlemanly thing to do. It is how ballplayers approached such at-bats for the better part of a century.

The argument against such behavior is simple: Ballers gonna ball. Guys get paid on stats, so why short them based on game score? Fans want offense.

Both of these viewpoints were trotted out last season when Fernando Tatis homered on a 3-0 pitch with a big lead against the Rangers. It was a thing for weeks thereafter, based largely on the fact that Tatis’ own manager publicly came out against the swing.

Yesterday it happened again, this time with wrinkles.

The event in question was Yermin Mercedes’ homer on a 3-0 pitch while Chicago led the Twins 15-4 with two outs in the ninth. Everybody, even the White Sox, were ready for that game to end.

One wrinkle came via the guy who threw the ball. Willians Astudillo is a catcher by trade (it’s the position he’d been playing in this one since the fourth inning), and at 5-foot-9, 225 pounds, might be the most perfectly round player in baseball. Astudillo had already made one mound appearance already this season, in which he breezed through the Angels for an inning in April throwing nothing but junk. This time would be different.

The righty lobbed eephus after eephus to Mercedes, none close enough for the hitter to even consider. The fourth pitch of the at-bat was mostly a batting practice meatball that Mercedes could not refrain from hammering.

Which leads one to question how much seriousness should be afforded an at-bat that the opposition is clearly not taking seriously. Does Astudillo deserve more respect for trying to help his team by performing out of his element? Or do the Twins deserve whatever Mercedes gave them for making a relative mockery of the sport? Hell, the fateful offering was the slowest home-run pitch—47.1 mph—ever measured by Statcast.

Another wrinkle: Mercedes’ manager, Tony La Russa, was the subject of an entire book—Buzz Bissinger’s Three Nights in August—devoted largely to his deep consideration of the unwritten rules. La Russa did not appear to address Mercedes’ swing during his postgame press conference, which left the bulk of the commentary to the Twins broadcast, featuring former big leaguer Roy Smalley saying, “I don’t like it. At 15-4, I don’t like it. You’re gonna get the same pitch after this. I don’t like it.”

If the Twins for some reason decide to retaliate tonight, of course, or if La Russa benches Mercedes in some misbegotten stab toward outdated honor, then we’ll be talking about this again tomorrow. More realistically, the enduring optics of one fat guy hitting a homer off of another fat guy, plus the ridiculous nature of the pitching itself, means that this controversy will not likely endure beyond last night’s news cycle. Nor should it.

Update, 5/19: Yeah, we’re still talking about it. And for the stupidest reasons possible.

0
Let The Kids Play, Swinging 3-0

Rangers Don’t Dig Tatis’ Tater, Fuel Controversy Over How (Or Whether) To Respond To Blowout Tactics

Posted on by Jason Turbow

Yesterday, Fernando Tatis Jr. hit a grand slam and the internet lost its damn mind.

It wasn’t the homer that did it, of course, it was the response … something to do with the unwritten rules.

In this case, circumstances matter. It was the top of the eighth inning, the bases were loaded and the Padres were leading Texas by seven runs (thanks in part to a three-run homer by Tatis an inning earlier). Pertinent to this discussion, Tatis’ fateful shot came on a 3-0 pitch. The Rangers didn’t know it at the time, but the young slugger had missed (or ignored) a take sign from his coach.

With that, Rangers manager Chris Woodward removed pitcher Juan Nicasio, inserted pitcher Ian Gibault, and watched as Gibault threw a pitch behind the next batter, Manny Machado. Message delivered. (No warnings were issued, and no other pitches came close to hitting anybody.)

After the game, Woodward addressed the issue directly. “I think there’s a lot of unwritten rules that are constantly being challenged in today’s game,” he said. “I didn’t like it, personally. You’re up by seven in the eighth inning; it’s typically not a good time to swing 3-0. It’s kind of the way we were all raised in the game.”

This is the point at which Woodward, and baseball in general, tends to lose touch with its fan base. What in the hell was the manager talking about, cried the majority opinion? Why should one of the sport’s brightest young stars be expected to do anything other than bright-young-star things, regardless of the situation?

It’s complicated. The rationale starts with pitchers, not hitters. During a blowout, nobody in either dugout wants to see the pace grind nearly to a halt while a pitcher tries to finesse the edges of the strike zone, especially while down in the count. From The Baseball Codes:

The last thing a pitcher wants to do with his team down by a wide margin late in the game is walk batters, which not only suggests unnecessary nibbling but extends a game that players want to end quickly. When a count gets to 3-0 … it’s a near-certainty that the ensuing pitch will be a fastball down the middle.

At which point pitchers are expected (or were once expected, anyway) to throw something straight that will get the game moving again. For that one-pitch adjustment, hitters are expected (or were once expected) to lay off. As Sparky Anderson said in a New York Times report: “You don’t cherry-pick on the other team. You don’t take cripples. Three-oh, he’s struggling, he’s got to lay the ball in there. Don’t do it to the man. He’s got a family, too.”

Then again, Anderson said that back in 1993, which may as well have been 1893 as far as the evolution of the unwritten rules is concerned. The sport in which Anderson managed bears little resemblance to the modern game in numerous ways. A prominent aspect of this evolution is showboating, bat flips and the like, which once would have been certain to draw a pitcher’s attention but are now mostly background noise.

Swinging 3-0 is not quite the same thing, but it’s in the same ballpark.

It does happen from time to time. Last year, Twins outfielder Jake Cave swung 3-0 while his Twins led 13-5 in the ninth, and connected for a single. The next hitter, Max Kepler, saw three inside pitches and was drilled by the fourth.

Here’s the catch: The team doing the responding—the team at the wrong end of Cave’s swing—was Chris Woodward’s Texas Rangers. Woodward, it appears, is no stranger to having his pitchers mete out punishment for those who he feels cross a line, and swinging 3-0 is a prominent one for him.

(There are plenty of non-Woodward examples, as well. In 2017, Corey Seager swung 3-0 with a 5-0 lead, and before long teams were brawling on the field. In 2012, Jayson Werth swung 3-0 and benches emptied. In 2011, David Ortiz’s 3-0 swing helped lead to another fight. In the past, I’ve covered incidents from Davey Lopes, Vladimir Guerrero and Gary Sheffield. Hell, in 2001, Tsuyoshi Shinjo, fresh from Japan and unaware of this particular rule, was drilled for swinging 3-0 … and missing. Hell, Corey Kluber doesn’t even like it when guys swing hard against him, regardless of the count.)

Yesterday, the response from the Padres was less about the retaliatory pitch from Texas than with their own shortstop. On the telecast, cameras caught Padres first baseman Eric Hosmer—30 years old and a 10-year vet—telling various Rangers that “we’ll talk to him.” Sure enough, Hosmer sat Tatis down for a dugout conversation. Later, San Diego manager Jayce Tingler talked to reporters about the importance of getting signs correctly, called it “a learning opportunity,” and said “[Tatis] will grow from it.” (Prior to taking over the Padres, Tingler worked in the Rangers organization since 2007. The guess here is that he knows precisely what it will take to avoid bad blood with that team.)

But what about Tatis himself? On one hand, he’s 21 years old, in only his second season and hails from the Dominican Republic, where a freewheeling, unfettered brand of baseball is the norm. On the other, he grew up learning the major league game from his father, whose own big league career ran from 1999 to 2010, when Jr. was 11 years old.

“I’ve been in this game since I was a kid,” Tatis Jr. said after the game. “I know a lot of unwritten rules. I was kind of lost on this. … Those experiences, you have to learn. Probably next time, I’ll take a pitch.”

This is just another example of baseball needing to get a handle on outdated concepts of ballplayer decorum. Developing an entire promotional campaign—Let the Kids Play—around the idea of unfettered joy on a ballfield is fine … right up until an angry pitcher disagrees and responds to a bat flip with some questionable behavior. Somehow, Woodward’s Rangers have been involved in those fights as well.

The reason that most pitchers no longer care about bat flips is that bat flipping has been divorced from the meaning it once held. It is now seen as a joyous act, not a disrespectful one.

Swinging 3-0 during a blowout holds deeper connotations, but ultimately the concept is the same. Either we let the kids play, or we don’t. When Sparky Anderson told the Times that, as pertains to swinging 3-0, “there is a thing in this game—honor—that will always stay with me and I’ll never give it up,” he was speaking from a different era.

At some point, baseball has to make up its mind. Until it does, this cultural dissonance of blowback against young stars doing things that the public wants to see is going to continue until everybody’s so frustrated that they turn their backs altogether. This is a problem that baseball is already trying to counter; it led to Let the Kids Play in the first place.  

“I love this game, and I respect the game a lot,” Tatis said after the game. “I feel like every time I go out there, I just wanna feel respect for everybody else. … This game is hard for everyone, so why not just celebrate and have fun the way you wanna have fun?”

It was the smartest thing anybody said all day.

0
Bat Flipping, David Ortiz, The Baseball Codes, Unwritten-Rules

David Ortiz: Maybe Not the Best Spokesman for His Own Damn Point of View

Posted on by Jason Turbow

Ortiz flip

David Ortiz took on the haters yesterday in the pages of the Boston Globe. It should come as no surprise, since the guy’s proclamations were the same as they ever were. To wit:

  • Flipping a bat is his right as a hitter.
  • He doesn’t make a big deal of it when a pitcher pumps a fist after striking him out.
  • Shut up.

On two of those counts, anyway, he is correct. He’s also correct in his assertion that such expression is more at home in the modern game than ever before. When Ortiz started flipping bats back in the late-1990s, baseball’s landscape was far less tolerant of such displays than it is today, but the guy has officially worked himself into the mainstream … or worked the mainstream around himself.*

It’s in his rationalization of the process that Ortiz goes off the rails.

Start with this:

“Respect? Respect my [expletive]. I don’t have to respect nobody when I’m between those two lines. I’m trying to beat everybody when I’m between those two lines. This ain’t no crying. There’s no, ‘Let me be concerned about taking you deep.’ No.”

While Ortiz subsequently affirmed a willingness to respect his opponents as people, he couldn’t have landed further from the point.

As the father and coach of two ballplaying preteens, I emphasize respect for the opposition as emphatically as I do proper mechanics. Just yesterday, one of my son’s teammates, a 7-year-old, pitched his first-ever inning in Little League, and struck out the side. When he returned to the dugout, however, the first thing he heard from his father, another coach on the team, was about his habit of repeatedly pumping his fist after throwing strikes.

Argue with the approach if you’d like, but not with the underlying message that respect on a ballfield is paramount.

In the big leagues, of course, players have spent the last decade separating actions like bat flips and fist pumps from the concept of respect. It’s all about me, Ortiz and players like him insist, not about him or them. They’re not showing anybody up, they say, so much as celebrating their own actions.

That credo, however, leaves plenty of wiggle room for respect. The moment that bat-flipping became accepted major league practice was the moment that it could no longer be seen as disrespectful.

With his sentiments in the Globe, however, Ortiz kicked the entire house of cards to the ground. I’ve come to accept that bat flipping and the like are now part of the professional sport. When they become not about a player’s own greatness, but the lack of same from the opposition, though, it’s a bridge too far. Perhaps this is not what Ortiz was intending to convey, but the phrase “I don’t have to respect nobody” seems pretty clear-cut.

He also said this:

“Whenever somebody criticizes a power hitter for what we do after we hit a home run, I consider that person someone who is not able to hit a homer ever in his life. Look at who criticizes the power hitters in the game and what we do. It’s either a pitcher or somebody that never played the game. Think about it. You don’t know that feeling. You don’t know what it takes to hit a homer off a guy who throws 95 miles per hour. You don’t know anything about it. And if you don’t know anything about it, [shut up]. [Shut up]. Seriously. If you don’t know anything about it, [shut up], because that is another level.”

While Ortiz’s “Respect my ass” proclamation is ridiculous, his if-you-didn’t-play-your-opinion-doesn’t-count cliché is simply tired. Sportswriters spend more time considering the game than most players, and many die-hard fans spend even more time at it than the guys in the press box. Having never laced up spikes as a professional hardly invalidates their opinions.

Even more glaring was Ortiz’s claim that a vast number of his colleagues—pitchers—be similarly marginalized. If he really wanted to find a prominent position player who’s hit plenty of home runs and disagrees with much of what he says, he wouldn’t have to look far.

There was more.

“When a power hitter does a bat flip, you don’t hurt nobody. If I hit a homer, did a bat flip, threw it in the stands and break a couple of people’s heads, I understand. But that’s not what it is,” he added. “When you see a pitcher do a fist pump when they strike out any one of us, or jumping on the mound, I don’t see anybody talking about that. Nobody’s talking about that.”

 

Hmm.

Does Ortiz really think that pitchers acting like assholes do not get noticed?

Ultimately, he sounded less like somebody elucidating his right to self-expression, and more like somebody trying to bluster his way through an argument in which he does not fully believe. He’d have had me with the simple notion that he likes to celebrate after doing something good. The abundance of overt and misguided rationalization, however, has little benefit for anybody.

In Ortiz’s defense, at least one of his statements is incontrovertibly correct. “This ain’t no old school,” he said in closing. “This is what it is in today’s day. You pull yourself together and get people out, or you pull yourself together and you go home. That’s what it is.”

* Reggie Jackson is frequently cited—including by Ortiz during his diatribe—as the guy who all but invented the home run pimp. Actually, it was Harmon Killebrew, a guy who Jackson himself credits with breaking that particular ground. Similarly, for all the credit/infamy (depending on your point of view) given to Yasiel Puig for popularizing the bat flip, we should not lose sight of Ortiz’s importance in setting that particular standard.

 

0
Swinging 3-0, The Baseball Codes

Wayback Machine: Dealing With Code Violations in a Bygone Era

Posted on by Jason Turbow

Darrel ThomasIn researching a project unrelated to baseball’s unwritten rules, I came across an item that was too good to not share.

May 25, 1979: In the sixth inning of a game against the Reds, Dodgers second baseman Davey Lopes drilled a three-run homer. Trouble was, the Dodgers led by 12 runs at the time, and he swung at a 3-0 pitch to hit it. The blast gave Los Angeles a 17-2 lead.

This, of course, was a clear violation of the unwritten rules. From The Baseball Codes:

The last thing a pitcher wants to do with his team down by a wide margin late in the game is walk batters, which not only suggests unnecessary nibbling but extends a game that players want to end quickly. When a count gets to 3-0 … it’s a near-certainty that the ensuing pitch will be a fastball down the middle. The unwritten rulebook does not equivocate at this moment, prohibit­ing hitters in such situations not just from swinging hard, but from swing­ing at all.

There’s also the factor of rubbing it in while running up the score. In the modern game, of course, such actions are no longer universally seen as an unequivocal sign of disrespect. Baseball is entertainment, the thinking goes, and nothing is more entertaining than a well-struck ball. The rule still exists, but more players than ever opt out of recognizing it.

In 1979, however, such was not the case. Two innings after Lopes’ homer, Cincinnati reliever Dave Tomlin fed him four straight inside pitches. None of them connected, but after the fourth, Lopes, irate, threw his bat into the air and hollered toward the mound.

It was enough to draw players from both dugouts, even as Lopes angrily stalked toward first base. No fight appeared forthcoming until Dodgers utilityman Derrel Thomas—a perpetual wild card when it came to baseball propriety—decided to take a swing at Cincinnati’s Rick Auerbach, spurring numerous scuffles. This, far more than Lopes’ action, spurred the Reds to action.

Before the next day’s game, Cincinnati players decided to draw names of the Dodgers out of a hat, representing their assignments in the eventuality of another fight.

Every slip of paper said the same thing: Derrel Thomas.

(Thomas started the following day in center field, without incident.)

 

1
Don't Play Aggressively with a Big Lead, Jayson Werth, Swinging 3-0

Some Leads are Insurmountable; Others are Insurmountable Only for the Cubs

Posted on by Jason Turbow

Opinions about when it is and isn’t appropriate to play aggressively—stealing bases, say, or swinging 3-0—vary widely. When you’re the Chicago Cubs and are in the midst of getting pummeled, repeatedly, by the best team in the National League, it only makes sense that sensitivities might be a bit raw.

The game in question was the capper following three straight Nationals victories over Chicago, by a cumulative score of 22-7—“one of the biggest butt-whippings” Cubs manager Dale Sveum said he’d ever received. Ultimately, it served mainly to add misery to a season which at that point had the Cubs on pace to lose 102 games.

In the series’ fourth game, on Thursday, it took only four innings for Washington to build another substantial lead, 7-2, so when Jayson Werth swung at a 3-0 pitch with the bases loaded and two outs in the fifth, it was enough to officially drive Cubs bench coach Jamie Quirk into an extreme state of annoyance.

From the dugout, he started “screaming out obscenities” toward Washington third-base coach Bo Porter, according to umpire Jerry Layne in the Chicago Tribune, a situation the umpire felt “was inappropriate” and “caused everything.”

“Everything” began with Porter approaching the Chicago bench and screaming right back at Quirk. That escalated to both dugouts emptying onto the field. (Watch it here.)

“You’re up 7-2,” said Cubs catcher Steve Clevenger. “You don’t swing 3-0.”

There’s truth to the statement, but its timing is straight out of the 1960s. The last time the fifth inning was utilized as a yardstick for when to stifle an attack, it was a pitcher’s league. They were the days of Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson, long before offenses exploded in a spate of expanded rosters and juiced balls and tiny ballparks and BALCO-fueled hitters. Today, the fifth inning sounds downright quaint.

Then again, this is the Cubs. The line for when to call off the dogs is malleable, depending on a team’s bench and bullpen, the freshness of its starting pitcher, the state of its offense. With the Cubs, for whom a two-run deficit might seem like an unbridgeable chasm, perhaps five runs, and only four innings to score them, is a  lot.

We’ve already established that their emotions are raw, which explains why reliever Lendy Castillo threw at Bryce Harper to lead off the the sixth. That set Harper off on his own shouting jag, and the dugouts emptied again. (Watch it here.)

Harper nailed it in his postgame comments, saying in the Tribune, “I’d be pretty ticked off if I was getting my teeth kicked in all week, too.”

Nationals manager Davey Johnson proved to be tone deaf earlier this season when it came to a different facet of the game’s propriety, but on this particular issue he was pretty much spot-on.

“We’re in a pennant race, we’re going to swing 3-0, we’re going to do everything,” he said in the Washington Post. “We ain’t stopping trying to score runs. Certainly a five-run lead at that time is nothing. I think it was the bench coach’s frustration in us handing it to them for a couple days. If they want to quit competing and forfeit, then fine. But we’re going to keep competing. I don’t know why they’re getting on about swinging 3-0. Their first baseman [Anthony Rizzo] swung 3-0 in the first inning. What’s the difference with the bases loaded in the fifth with only a five-run lead and two outs?”

At this point in the game’s history, not much. “Only” a five-run lead is exactly that, even against the Cubs. One would hope that next time they display a bit more pride.

3
Don't Play Aggressively with a Big Lead, Swinging 3-0

Mike Cameron: Code Over Glory

Posted on by Jason Turbow

Mike Cameron gets congratulated after his fourth homer on the day.

We got word Sunday that Mike Cameron was retiring after 17 seasons of largely productive baseball. He hit 278 home runs during that span, four of them in a single game (watch the glory here). A four-homer day is noteworthy for many reasons, of course, but it turns out the Code was involved in this one.

It was recounted in the original draft of The Baseball Codes, but the passage was cut for space considerations. In honor of Cameron, here it is:

On May 4, 2002, Seattle’s Mike Cameron stepped to the plate in the top of the ninth inning with two on, nobody out and his team leading the Chicago White Sox, 15-4. When reliever Mike Porzio started him off with three straight balls, Cameron knew just what to do—his manager, Lou Piniella, was a stickler for the unwritten rules and had taught his players well.

Cameron watched the fourth pitch split the plate for a called strike. It didn’t even occur to him that he’d already hit four home runs on the day, and couldn’t have asked for a pitch served up more nicely to give him a record fifth. As Cameron proved, however, should players let it, the Code even trumps history.

– Jason

4
David Ortiz, David Ortiz, Don't Showboat, Don't Play Aggressively with a Big Lead, Everybody Joins a Fight, Swinging 3-0

Pride, Punches and Papi: Things to do when Your Team is Getting Hammered

Posted on by Jason Turbow

David Ortiz charged the mound on Friday. What he thought he was doing was putting an end to some half-baked intimidation tactics from Orioles pitcher Kevin Gregg. What he actually did, however, held significantly more interest. With one inspired charge the guy tore open baseball’s unwritten rulebook, giving us a good look inside; before the game was done, the Red Sox and Orioles touched on no fewer than five distinct sections of the Code.

To recap: Boston hammered the O’s for eight first-inning runs, highlighted by Ortiz’s three-run homer. By the time Ortiz batted in the eighth, the score was 10-3. Gregg—Baltimore’s closer, in the game to get some reps—threw three inside fastballs to him, two of which forced Ortiz to jump backward.

After the third, Ortiz took a few steps toward the mound, pointing and shouting. Dugouts emptied, but no punches were thrown. Once order was restored and the at-bat resumed, Ortiz popped up Gregg’s next pitch to right field. As he ambled toward first, Gregg lit into him verbally, inspiring Papi to cut short his trot in favor of a sprint toward the mound. (Watch it here.)

Enter the unwritten rules.

• When your pitching staff can’t seem to slow down the opposition, make things uncomfortable. Boston had abused Baltimore pitchers to that point, scoring 20 runs over two games. (It was part of a five-game streak in which the Orioles gave up 10 or more runs four times.) A pitcher can hardly be blamed for trying to gum up a roll like that.

What’s unknown is whether Gregg requested entry into the game specifically for this purpose. As it was, the right-hander did everything by the book. Drilling a hitter for his team’s success is usually unnecessary. The pitcher’s job in such a situation is to move a hitter’s feet, make him uncomfortable, get him out of his groove. Gregg wanted Ortiz to think about something other than hitting another homer, and in that regard he was wildly successful.

“I take offense to every run scored off every one of our pitchers . . .” Gregg said after the game, in an AP report. “You get tired of getting your butt kicked every night when you come in here, and I’m going to stick up for what’s ours and try to get the plate back.”

This leads to a corollary rule, exhibited here on a purely theoretical basis owing to the fact that Gregg probably wasn’t trying to hit Ortiz (but presented in case he was):

• Hitting a guy intentionally is harder than it looks. “As a pitcher, your preparation and your mechanics all prepare you to throw the ball to a spot, usually to the catcher’s glove, and that’s where your focus is,” said former pitcher Shawn Estes, who famously missed Roger Clemens while trying to retaliate for the Rocket’s shenanigans against Mike Piazza in the 2000 World Series. “Well, it’s tough to take your focus off that and try to hit a moving object. . . . It’s not as easy as it looks.”

If Gregg missed his target—three times—he wouldn’t have been the first to do so.

Other pieces of the Code in question on Friday:

• Don’t swing at a 3-0 pitch with a big lead late in the game. The fastball that Ortiz popped up came on a 3-0 count, with his team holding a seven-run in the eighth. That’s domain in which a pitcher unequivocally expects a freebie. (With such a lead, say the baseball Gods and Kevin Gregg, it’s the least a hitter can do.) “It’s 3-0, they’re up seven, and I think there are some ethics to this game and guidelines that you have to stay within,” Gregg said in the Boston Herald.

There’s little question that the pitcher was sending a message with his inside fastballs. With that swing, Ortiz sent one of his own.

• Run to first base like you care. This is where things got sticky. Ortiz, clearly unhappy to have hit a short fly ball, took a few sad steps toward first before starting to trot. Had Gregg not been predisposed to friskiness, it’s unlikely he would have taken umbrage. But keyed up as he was after Ortiz’s 3-0 swing, the slight delay provided all the provocation necessary for the right-hander to profanely urge Papi to step it up.

Plate ump Mike Estabrook tossed Gregg immediately, but it wasn’t enough to keep Ortiz from turning and charging. He ended up throwing several punches (none of which connected), and benches again cleared. Ejections (primarily Ortiz and Gregg) followed.

• Everybody joins a fight. This is a no-brainer. From The Baseball Codes: “Most of the Code is about respect for the opponent, but this rule is about respecting teammates. It’s the most basic of sacrifices, and the fact that the majority of baseball fights don’t involve much actual fighting is almost incidental; it’s a matter of loyalty that can’t be ignored. Hall of Famer Ernie Banks called a player’s failure to join a fight ‘the ultimate violation of being a teammate.’ ”

On Friday, Boston’s Josh Reddick took this rule to an extreme. He was on third base when Ortiz hit the ball, and tagged up. Once hostilities erupted, however, he headed for the mound rather than the plate. That was enough for the umpires to declare him to be the third out of the inning.

As if to take things a step further, Red Sox infielder Marco Scutaro—all 5-foot-10 of him—was the first guy to reach Gregg (6-foot-6, 230 pounds), and as such was tasked with trying to slow the big fella down. It can only be seen for a moment in the game footage, but Gregg offers an inadvertently impressive show of strength, tossing around a clinging Scutaro basically by waving his arm.

We could also get into the concept of waiting for retribution, as Sunday’s series finale featured three HBPs and one near-HBP, most of which were likely unintentional. (It was Red Sox pitcher Kyle Weiland’s first big league start, and neither of his hit batsmen bore any hallmarks of intention; also fitting that bill was Orioles pitcher Jeremy Guthrie, who hit Kevin Youkilis with a changeup.) If there was a message pitch, it came from Mike Gonzalez, who in the sixth threw a fastball behind Ortiz.

After that, though, all remained quiet. Gregg had his say, Ortiz had his own, each club followed up and everybody moved on. Wildness has its time, but so too does order. It’s the Code at work, and it’s a beautiful thing.

7
Don't Play Aggressively with a Big Lead, Swinging 3-0

The Differences Between Spring Training and the Regular Season Sometimes aren’t so Different After All

Posted on by Jason Turbow

Buck Showalter: Not a fan of the 3-0 swing.

As March draws to a close, it’s a good time to ponder the meaning of spring training games.

They exist to help players prepare for the season, that much is obvious. But what of their actual function? Because they don’t count, they’re handled differently than other contests.

Managers regularly empty their benches with steady streams of substitutions. Pitchers don’t fret about poor outings—at least early on—under the hypothesis that they’re working out winter kinks; if they feel like throwing 10 curveballs in a row then by gorum that’s what they’ll do, regardless of what hitters are doing to those curveballs.

But still, they are games. And games are played with certain elemental consistencies.

The last two weeks have seen separate incidents that bring to the fore the question “What’s appropriate in spring training and what’s not?” Both, coincidentally, involved catchers for the Orioles.

On March 15, Pittsburgh’s Andrew McCutchen tried to score from first on a hit by Baltimore’s Matt Diaz, but was tagged out when Matt Wieters blocked the plate, forcing McCuthen into his shin guards.

“I don’t know what (Wieters) was thinking,” McCutchen said afterward in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. “It’s spring training. We’re not trying to get hurt. I wasn’t expecting that much contact. I’m OK, though.”

It harkens back to Pete Rose bowling over Ray Fosse in the 1970 All-Star Game. How much is too much when it comes to hard-nosed baseball during the course of an exhibition?

In this case, however, it was McCutchen himself initiating the contact; Weiters did nothing more than react precisely as a catcher should—protecting both himself and the baseball.

As Yahoo’s Kevin Kaduk observed, “Why did McCutchen slide if he was uninterested in making contact? There’s two bangs in a bang-bang play and McCutchen could have easily withheld one by simply peeling off if he felt the run wasn’t that important in the whole scheme of things.”

On Monday, another Baltimore catcher, Jake Fox—who leads the Grapefruit League with 10 home runs—showed that he’s not much afraid to take his hacks, regardless of the circumstances. With runners on second and third and nobody out in the eighth inning—and his team holding a 13-3 lead against the Tigers—Fox swung 3-0.

One of the clearest-cut sections of baseball’s unwritten rulebook mandates that when one’s team holds a big lead late in a game, one does not, as a hitter, swing at a 3-0 pitch. We’ve gone over it in this space before, but the prevailing notion holds that any pitcher in the wrong end of a blowout game is not on the most solid of footing to begin with. With that in mind, and because the last thing a manger wants to see with his team down by double digits (or something close to it) is a bubble reliever trying to get fine, the next pitch is almost certain to be a fastball down the heart of the plate.

Because of this, hitters are expected to back off and give the pitcher sufficient leeway with which to regain his footing.

Were this the regular season, Fox’s actions would have drawn unequivocal ire, but did the fact that they came in a spring training game affect things? Jake Fox is a journeyman, has played for three teams since 2007, and last year was the first in which he logged no time in the minors. While his prodigious display of power this March has all but locked up a roster spot, one can never be too careful, right? The more numbers he puts up, the better his chances of earning a real payday.

Then again, he was facing a minor leaguer in Chance Ruffin. And regardless of circumstance, proper etiquette is proper etiquette. Ruffin was wearing a big league uniform and facing a big league hitter, and deserves an according level of respect. As does the game itself.

Two people who agree were Jim Leyland and Buck Showalter. Once Fox walked, Leyland raced to the top step of the dugout and berated him for his transgression.

Showalter took things a step farther, yanking off his hat and enumerating at high volume to those in the dugout the ways in which Fox had soiled the reputation of the game. He then sent in a pinch-runner, and made sure to meet Fox in the dugout, where he then unloaded on him. Wrote Jeff Zrebiec of the Baltimore Sun, “It apparently wasn’t the first time this spring where Fox ignored a clear take situation.”

If Leyland feels that there’s a lesson to be taught here, it shouldn’t take long—Baltimore and Detroit meet in the teams’ second series of the season, starting April 4.

– Jason

2