Category: Evolution of the Unwritten Rules

Evolution of the Unwritten Rules

MLB’s Unwritten Rules Commercial Doesn’t Say What You Might Think It Says

Posted on by Jason Turbow

Puig tongue

As you’ve no doubt seen repeatedly by now, MLB has put out a let-the-kids-play commercial hyping the celebratory aspect of baseball. It seems like a decent opportunity for discourse on the nature of the unwritten rules.

 

The nearly universal takeaway of the spot is that it trashes baseball’s Code, dispensing with traditional decorum in favor of personality-driven enthusiasm—a direct effort to address the sport’s image problem. That’s because baseball tends to subsume its characters beneath the nature of the game, which has costs in terms of outreach and the marketability of its stars. The NFL—already at a wild disadvantage given that its athletes wear helmets and masks on the field—addressed a similar issue by reinstituting end zone celebrations, which in their wild creativity have brought new levels of attention to the sport. The NBA has no shortage of distinct and camera-friendly personalities. Mike Trout, meanwhile, can walk down Main Street in Anytown, USA, with a reasonable chance that he will go unrecognized.

None of this is in dispute. What the above theory misses, however, is that the commercial in question isn’t decrying the unwritten rules so much as marking their evolution. The Code is a fluid affair, as it’s been since the beginning, adapting to the times in whatever ways players see fit. Once, digging in against a pitcher would insure a knockdown pitch in response. Now, players dig in willfully and intentional knockdowns are nearly extinct. Once, barrel rolls into infielders and blowing up catchers were standard methods of operation. Now, spurred by changes to the actual rulebook, they’re seen in big league dugouts as acts beyond the pale. The Code is fluid.

The modern game obviously does not need to legislate on-field celebration. It’s a process that’s been building organically for years. Postgame midfield scrums surrounding walk-off heroes were once the strict purview of postseason play; now they happen during interleague games in May. Flipping a bat once assured a player retribution down the road, then along came Puig and everything changed. Pitchers bellow to the heavens and hitters, upon reaching base, make all kinds of hand signals—antlers, antennae, claws—to teammates in the dugout. Apart from the rare red-ass in MLB ranks, these acts go uncontested. This isn’t a challenge to the Code—this is the Code. The unwritten rules are whatever the majority of baseball players say they are.

So when MLB releases a commercial celebrating celebration long after such things have entered the mainstream, it’s merely acknowledging what already exists. The needle has moved, and that’s just fine.

Update: 3/27/19: Now there’s another one.

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Bat Flipping, Evolution of the Unwritten Rules

Hüsker Dön’t: Nebraska Coach Sets Tone For Plate Celebrations

Posted on by Jason Turbow

Husker points

For those who can’t stand the acceptance of bat flipping and related celebrations into major league baseball’s mainstream, I give you Darin Erstad.

Erstad, a two-time All-Star over his 14-year big league career, has been head baseball coach at the University of Nebraska since 2011. He is decidedly old school.

So when one of his players, junior infielder Angelo Altavilla, did this against Indiana on Friday …

 

… Erstad was not happy about it. (As evidenced in the video, neither was Indiana catcher Ryan Fineman.)

Erstad greeted Altavilla in the dugout with no small amount of displeasure—“Don’t do that again,” were his exact words, according to the Lincoln Journal Star—and then pulled him from the game.

Altavilla had been slumping, as had Nebraska, so they had reason to celebrate. Such details did not matter to Erstad.

It’s one thing to accept that players set the tone for Major League Baseball’s unwritten rules. When a critical mass accepts bat flipping as the norm, well, that’s what it is. In college ball, however, there’s an emphasis on learning unlike anything found in the major leagues. NCAA coaches are shaping ballplayers, but, given that only a tiny percentage of the collegiate ranks go pro, they’re also shaping people. And if a guy like Erstad wants to pass along lessons about respect and decorum that his players can take with them into civilian life, more power to him.

Succeeding with grace is in increasingly short supply in this country. Here’s hoping for an infusion of the stuff from Lincoln.

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Collisions, Evolution of the Unwritten Rules, Slide properly

Collision Course: The State Of Baseball, 2018

Posted on by Jason Turbow

Dietrich dustup

This is a story about baseball’s rulebook, and also about baseball’s unwritten rulebook. One, it turns out, feeds the other.

Yesterday, Marlins left fielder Derek Dietrich, racing home on a single, was easily beaten by the throw from Cubs right fielder Ben Zobrist. With his only hope at scoring being to dislodge the ball from the catcher, Dietrich plowed into Victor Caratini, just as generations before him have done.

Actually, it was a fair step milder than in previous generations, the collision being mostly arms, not even forceful enough to knock Caratini from his feet. Still, this is the no-contact era of major league baseball, a place where, following Scott Cousins’ takeout of Buster Posey back in 2011, the target on catchers’ backs was institutionally removed. This is a time in which a late slide from Tyler Austin—a slide that once wouldn’t have so much as raised an eyebrow in the opposing dugout—led to fisticuffs in New York.

So, when Dietrich took liberties with Caratini, Caratini responded in kind. The dugouts quickly emptied, and though the most significant moment of the resulting skirmish involved Kris Bryant tickling former teammate Starlin Castro, the event is worthy of exploration.

MLB rule 6.01(i)(1) instructs that any catcher ceding the baseline—standing in front of the plate and relying on a swipe tag to make the putout—is in safe waters: “A runner attempting to score may not deviate from his direct pathway to the plate in order to initiate contact with the catcher (or other player covering home plate), or otherwise initiate an avoidable collision.”

Dietrich did not deviate from his pathway because he did not have to: Caratini was planted firmly atop the line while awaiting the throw—going firmly against Rule 6.01(i)(2), which clarifies that “unless the catcher is in possession of the ball, the catcher cannot block the pathway of the runner as he is attempting to score.”

In this case, it appeared to be unwitting: Upon receiving the ball, Caratini turned to make the requisite swipe tag before realizing that he had overshot his positioning and was reaching into foul territory, away from the plate. He quickly drew his glove back into the runner.

It left Dietrich little choice about contact. The runner’s ensuing shove was purely elective, of course, though it was a far cry from the devastation possible had he opted to lower his shoulder. Dietrich even tried to make nice by tipping his cap to the catcher before Caratini got into his face.

We’re left with this: Victor Caratini is 24 years old and was playing in his 51st big league game. Posey-era rules are all he’s ever known. With little basis from which to understand the rationality of Dietrich’s decision, the catcher reacted angrily at being shoved, and a play that should barely have registered soon bordered on fisticuffs.

The sport’s unwritten rules can be seen in similar light. Take the aforementioned Yankees-Red Sox brawl back in April. On one hand, the Red Sox were overly sensitive about a slide that a generation earlier wouldn’t have drawn much notice. On the other, the slide was clearly outside of baseball’s recently established parameters, and Austin should have been prepared for the response that he received.

Ultimately, neither side had much clue about how to handle what was, before now, a fairly standard baseball situation, and things ended badly. They ended badly because many players no longer understand the intentions behind much of the Code, and react instinctively rather than rationally. It’s what enables sensitivity about the personal nature of an action that is not at all personal.

These are the unintended consequences of the sanitation of the sport. There are clear benefits—fewer collision-based injuries and a decline in retaliatory beanballs—but there are also growing pains. Yesterday’s collision was only one of them, with more certain to follow.

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Evolution of the Unwritten Rules

Baez Wags, Puig Grins, All is Well With Baseball

Posted on by Jason Turbow

Baez wags

In an otherwise dispiriting game for the Cubs last night, second baseman Javier Baez at least gave us this, the culmination of a play in which Yasiel Puig tried to stretch a base hit off the left-field wall in Wrigley into a double.

 

(Watch the whole thing here.)

It’s an undeniably fabulous moment, the reasons for which show exactly how far baseball has come in this regard. Baez knows exactly who he’s dealing with, and how his response will be taken—that there’s no chance Puig will cry “disrespect” in response. The runner does not disappoint, grinning once he realizes what’s happening.

Here it is from another angle:

This, then, is where baseball is headed, a game in which players making great plays are able to mess around with each other in mutually beneficial ways. To call it showboat-on-showboat crime would be inaccurate, because it’s not a look-at-me moment in any way. Far from a post-homer pimp—something which Joe Maddon is decidedly against—it is instead a means for Baez to connect with a like-minded colleague and make the game a little bit more fun for everybody.

Had it been Madison Bumgarner sliding into second, of course, Baez’s finger wag would have been way out of line (and he’d have heard about it in some potentially painful ways), but that’s the point. Bumgarner is among a shrinking cadre of red-asses who maintain that old-school is the only way to play the game.

In reality, however, there is ever more space for players like Baez, who simply glow with the joy of baseball—and allow others to do the same.

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Don't Swing on the First Pitch After Back-to-Back Home RUns, Evolution of the Unwritten Rules, Intimidation, The Baseball Codes

Brewers Never Answer the Question: How Many Homers is Too Many Homers?

Posted on by Jason Turbow

Harper mashesOnce upon a time, in a different era of baseball, pitchers thought nothing of throwing at hitters’ heads. That’s changed.

In a different era of baseball, pitchers would drill a guy not only for his own success, but for the success of his teammates. The player in front of you hits a homer? Expect to wear one. That, too, has changed.

Both of those developments are unequivocally for the better.

But then we have something like last night, when four members of the Washington Nationals went deep in the span of five batters—four of them in a row—during a single inning, part of an eight-homer day. It was a ridiculous show of firepower, and the Milwaukee Brewers didn’t do a thing to slow it down.

Before proceeding, I offer a snippet from an interview with former Brewers pitcher and current Phillies hitting coach Bob McClure, conducted years ago for The Baseball Codes:

We were in Yankee Stadium one time, and I gave up back-to-back home runs to two left-handers. I’d given up back-to-back home runs before, but not to two lefties. Dave Kingman was up next. [Catcher] Charlie Moore called for a fastball away. He knew better, anyway. He was just going through them all. Fastball away. No. Curveball. No. Changeup. No. Fastball in. No. And then he goes [McClure flicks his thumb from out of his fist, under his index finger, the universal symbol for knock him down]. So I threw it, and it was a good one—it went right underneath him and almost flipped him. He hit the dirt and was all dusty. His helmet was off. He grabbed his bat and his helmet and gets right back in there. I threw him a changeup and he popped up to first base.

The upshot, from McClure: “Back then, we were taught the 0-2 up and in. Home run, next guy: boom! Knock him down.”

McClure was not trying to hit Kingman, or to hurt him. He was trying to disrupt his comfort in the batter’s box. Be clear about that distinction, because it could have done Brewers pitcher Michael Blazek—who gave up every one of Washington’s fifth-inning homers yesterday—a bit of good. The Nationals were clearly relaxed in the batter’s box. Utilizing inside pitches—not to hit anyone, but to move their feet, back them off the plate and make them consider the possibilities—could have disrupted that comfort. It did not appear to have any place in Milwaukee’s game plan, and the assault continued.

Historically, the most glaring example of this type of thing came from Paul Foytack, the first of the four pitchers (including Blazek) ever to give up four straight homers. While with the Los Angeles Angels in 1963, against Cleveland, Foytack surrendered three straight—to Woodie Held, pitcher Pedro Ramos (batting a robust .109 at the time) and Tito Francona—and set out to knock down the next batter, rookie Larry Brown. Even that didn’t go quite as planned, as Brown ended up hitting his first career home run. “That shows you what kind of control I had,” Foytack told reporters later.

The modern game, however, has eschewed inside pitching to such a degree that the idea never appeared to cross Blazek’s mind, nor—given that it was the pitcher’s first-ever big league start—that of his manager, Craig Counsell. What we’re left with is a record-tying performance that Blazek would rather have no part of.

***

Those four homers gave us another example of the evolution of the unwritten rules, which had more to do with the hitters than with Blazek. A generation ago, the code dictated that a batter would take the first pitch following back-to-back home runs. It was a courtesy offered a struggling opponent.

Take it from three-time All-Star Hal McRae: “Someone would pull you to the side and say, ‘Look, there have been two consecutive home runs hit. The third batter doesn’t swing at the first pitch.’ Take the first pitch. Alert the pitcher that you’re not swinging, that you know he’s out there, you respect him and you respect the job that he’s trying to do. So you take the first pitch, saying, ‘I’m not going to try to come up here and try to hit the third consecutive home run.’ After the first pitch, it’s okay for you to do your job.”

Yesterday, Blazek’s first pitches to Wilmer Difo and Bryce Harper—the second and third of the quartet of consecutive-homer hitters—were out of the strike zone, and taken. His first pitch to the fourth member of that group, Ryan Zimmerman, was down the pipe, and blasted over the left-center field fence.

The interesting part of this is not that the Nationals didn’t observe an obscure unwritten rule, but the extreme probability that nobody in their clubhouse apart from manager Dusty Baker and perhaps a coach or two has even heard of it. The idea of sacrificing statistics for a bit of kindness to an opponent is so beyond the pale in the modern game (and, frankly, has been that way since the 1980s), that it’s almost beyond comprehension.

It does serve, however, as a marker for how far the game has come, and the extreme evolution of its moral compass.

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Evolution of the Unwritten Rules

The Unwritten Rules at the World Baseball Classic: A Lesson in Two Parts

Posted on by Jason Turbow

In many ways, the World Baseball Classic gave us baseball as it ought to be (and maybe once was)—a sport in which pride outstripped other motivating factors by a fairly wide margin, where the simple act of participation was its own reward. Strip away salaries, endorsements, public relations and other outside influences on modern players, and that’s what remains.

How that pride manifests, of course, differs from culture to culture, and it offered two prime lessons in the unwritten rules of the modern game.

Lesson 1: “The Right Way”

Ian Kinsler, who now plays for the Detroit Tigers but a week ago played for the United States in the WBC, made a proclamation in the New York Times that garnered some attention despite coming 19 paragraphs into a 20-paragraph story:

“I hope kids watching the WBC can watch the way we play the game and appreciate the way we play the game as opposed to the way Puerto Rico plays or the Dominican plays. That’s not taking anything away from them. That just wasn’t the way we were raised. They were raised differently and to show emotion and passion when you play. We do show emotion; we do show passion. But we just do it in a different way.”

Those on one side of the discussion openly yearned for the return to a time in which players put their heads down in response to moments of athletic triumph so as to avoid showing up those they’d bested. Those on the other propped up Kinsler as the face of an outdated code of conduct, a no-fun zone where excitement is stifled in the name of propriety.

As is frequently the case in these types of debates, they’re both right. At least to a degree.

So is Kinsler. He and many of his US-born colleagues were raised differently than players from Latin America. They were taught that solemnity on a ballfield equals respect, and that respect is paramount. The catch is that many of the Latin-born players to whom he referred agree entirely with the latter part of that equation. Respect is everything—it’s the unwritten rule upon which everyone eventually settles. The difference is that guys from the Caribbean and Central America cast a narrower net when it comes to interpretation of potentially impertinent acts. Which doesn’t make their celebrations disrespectful. After all, like Kinsler said, they were raised differently.

So when players in the Puerto Rico dugout hop around like little kids after one of their countrymen performs a feat of baseball heroism, it’s hardly a stretch to think that it has nothing to do with their opponents and everything to do with each other. This is how the game is played in their home country. While the big leaguers among them might tone it down a notch for their primary employers during the regular season, it’s difficult to fault the players for ramping it right back up when surrounded by their own. “We do a great job playing and having fun out there, said Javier Baez, he of The Tag. “That’s what it’s all about. This is a game. It’s not as serious as a lot of people take it, but, you know, everybody’s got their style and their talent. I have a lot of fun.”

The major leagues have adapted to the increasing influx of foreign players, largely though adoption of their habits. South Korea-quality bat flips might still elicit some anger, but the garden-variety toss has long since become status quo—brought to the fore by Cuba native Yasiel Puig. Puig’s habits have gained traction because they’re fun—and because the only ones taking it personally are those too curmudgeonly to see things any other way. Hell, four of my last five posts have been on that topic alone.

Playing the game “the right way” has long been a rallying cry for baseball traditionalists. But as players across the WBC continued to show us, their game is, more and more, what “the right way” is beginning to look like.

Lesson 2: Don’t Read Too Much Into Backstory Unless You’re Confident That You Know What You’re Talking About

After beating Puerto Rico in the WBC final, multiple U.S. players spoke out about being motivated by a perceived slight from their opposition. Said Andrew McCutchen in an ESPN report: “We heard and we saw T-shirts were made and printed out for the Puerto Rican team. We even heard a flight was made for them for that parade because they said they were going to win. That ignited us, we were ready to go.”

Added Adam Jones: “That didn’t sit well with us, so we did what we had to do.”

There is a long history of this type of bulletin-board motivation. One example, from The Baseball Codes:

In the victorious vis­itors’ clubhouse after the Indians won the 2007 American League Divi­sion Series at Yankee Stadium, Cleveland’s Ryan Garko told the press that celebratory champagne tasted just as good on the road as it did at home. A week later, however, when the Indians raced out to a three-games-to-one lead over the Red Sox in the ALCS, Boston players mistakenly—or perhaps intentionally—advanced the notion that Garko’s statement was not in reference to the Indians’ previous series, but to clinching the pennant at Fenway Park. With the quote posted on the inside of Boston’s clubhouse door as inspiration before Game 6, the Red Sox went on to win en route to the world championship.

Just as Garko intended no disrespect—indeed, his comment had to be skewed significantly to locate anything improper therein—the Puerto Rico team planned their parade independent of victory in the final game. They wanted to celebrate, win or lose, a detail that they did not attempt to hide. Drawing conclusions from the story’s bare bones was a fine way to motivate the American clubhouse—frequently, one needs little more than the ability to twist details to serve one’s own purposes—but the reality was that Puerto Rico’s parade was cast in the same vein as Puerto Rico’s approach to baseball itself. It had nothing to do with superiority or braggadocio or, heaven forbid, disrespect—and everything to do with embracing the fact that the country’s best ballplayers had gotten together and had themselves a time.

And what in the world is wrong with that?

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Evolution of the Unwritten Rules, Unwritten-Rules

Let me Tell you About Back in the Day …

Posted on by Jason Turbow

Gibson cardInteresting stuff up today over at Hardball Talk about the idea of Bob Gibson and Don Drysdale becoming a crutch for people trying to express how players of bygone eras wouldn’t put up with the shenanigans of today, even though they hit far fewer batters than their modern reputations would suggest. I’m sure that I’ve been guilty of this myself; each guy is an easy stand-in to illustrate points about player toughness and the kinds of things modern players get away with.

Still, how representative were they, really? Despite all the talk about Gibson’s intolerance, there’s little question that he and Drysdale were outliers, simply the meanest characters fronting the scariest trigger fingers of their era. Virtually nobody could match those two—less in terms of sheer body count than in putting the fear of God into batters via a steady stream of knockdown pitches. It’s why they’re still the faces of that particular franchise.

But then there’s this: During the 1968 World Series, in which Gibson played a significant part, Pee Wee Reese apparently bemoaned the lack of modern-day attention to the preponderance of showboating. It’s easy to forget that for all the “kids today are soft” conversations we may have, the previous generation had those same conversations about us, and their elders had the same conversations about them.

Change is inevitable, and, apart from seismic shifts in societal mores, rare is the person who thinks that things are better today than they used to be. Always has been, always will be.

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