Tag: baseball

Don't Swing on the First Pitch After Back-to-Back Home RUns, Gabe Gross

Don’t Swing at the First Pitch After Back to Back Homers: RIP

Posted on by Jason Turbow

Earlier this month, a reader pointed out that Oakland’s Gabe Gross had swung at the first pitch after Jack Cust and Kevin Kouzmanoff hit back-to-back home runs against the Red Sox, and wondered about the propriety of the action.

My initial response was that it was a 9-6 game, the ball was clearly flying at Fenway, and Gross had the leeway to take liberties.

Then I realized just how long I’ve spent with my nose in the Code. Much more important than Gross’ leeway is the fact that this rule barely exists anymore, if at all.

It serves as a great example of the evolution of the Code; in the 1970s, Sparky Anderson lived by the rule, as did many of his disciples. Now that power numbers play such a vital part in contract negotiations, however, it’s fallen into such disuse that finding a player who has even heard of it is a feat.

Gross certainly hadn’t.

“If I have a 3-0 count in a blowout game, I don’t swing,” he told me recently. “That, I understand. But the first pitch thrown over the plate after back-to-back homers . . . With all respect to Sparky, I don’t see any reason to be taking it. I’d never heard of that before.”

The swing in question—Gross fouled the pitch off—was not meant to disrespect the pitcher, Manny Delcarmen, nor did Delcarmen take it that way.

Heck, just across the bay, it recently happened with the Giants—twice. Both times, Aubrey Huff and Juan Uribe went back-to-back; both times, the next hitter (Pat Burrell and Pablo Sandoval, respectively) swung at the next pitch.

Let’s have a moment of silence. As charming as this rule may be, I officially pronounce it deceased.

– Jason

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This Week in the Unwritten Rules

This Week in the Unwritten Rules, Video Edition

Posted on by Jason Turbow

Going to the ballpark to talk to players and ex-players about the unwritten rules is an invigorating process. Sometimes, however, interviews turn out differently on the page than they do in person.

That’s why we’ve decided to bring you This Week in the Unwritten Rules, a semi-regular video segment we’re hoping to produce for the rest of the season. With video, we’re able to bring you some of the sport’s key characters, discussing the Code directly.

Enjoy.

– Jason

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Adam Jones, Changing a Ruling, Teammate Relations

A Change is Gonna Come – Just Not at the Expense of Your Teammate

Posted on by Jason Turbow

Buster Olney, in his ESPN blog today, relates the following:

The concern among rival talent evaluators about the Orioles is that constant losing is shaping the mindset of the team’s young players. For example, after the Orioles lost an early lead Sunday in San Diego and wound up getting crushed 9-4, sources say Baltimore center fielder Adam Jones directly lobbied for his first-inning bouncer to be changed from an error to a hit. The scoring on the play was changed, hours after the fact, and Jones got his hit, but for a player to make a direct appeal — especially in the aftermath of a one-sided loss — isn’t exactly conventional.

At issue, of course, is players becoming more concerned about their own numbers than the success (or, in Baltimore’s case, lack thereof) of their respective teams. (Scorers have a 24-hour window during which to alter a ruling.)

Should the inverse circumstance be invoked—a fielder lobbying to turn an error into a hit—the unwritten rules come into play on an especially prominent level. Maintaining respect among teammates can be vital, but such a decision, while it helps the fielder, offers nothing positive for a pitcher.

Take an instance in 1992, when Boston’s Wade Boggs—upset at what had been ruled his 16th error of the season—lobbied the official scorer to change the play to a hit, which he did. Boggs helped his own cause, but in the process turned the table on his pitcher, Roger Clemens, boosting the Rocket’s ERA as he gunned for the AL’s lowest mark in that category.

Needless to say, Clemens and a number of other Boston players did not take it well.

On the flip side of the equation, after a 1984 game against the Red Sox, Dave Stieb lobbied for opposition hits to be changed to errors. It was Stieb’s second-to-last start of the season, and he had given up six runs in a single frame. He was battling Mike Boddicker for the league’s ERA title, and the outing crippled his chances.

Such post-fact success, of course, would have come at the expense of his teammates’ fielding percentages. (Stieb’s request was denied, and Boddicker beat him, 2.83 to 2.79.)

“One thing I’ve noticed over the years, when a team is going badly, that’s when players get extremely selfish and want everything to go their way,” said longtime Red Sox official scorer Charlie Scoggins, in a Baseball Digest article by Larry Stone from 2004. “I find that when a team is in a pennant race, they hardly ever question my calls.”

Jones may well be innocent of all charges (at the very least, his lobbying did nothing to hurt the record of a teammate), but Scoggins description could fit the Orioles pretty well.

– Jason

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Don't Showboat, Don't Call out Opponents in the Press, Jose Valverde, Miguel Montero

War of Words Brews in Motown Following Valverde’s Dramatics

Posted on by Jason Turbow
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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This Week in the Unwritten Rules

This Week in the Unwritten Rules

Posted on by Jason Turbow

June 14
Mound conference etiquette says that a pitcher waits for his manager after getting yanked from a game. Compared to some, Tony Sipp got off easy.

June 15
Another bunter tries to break up another no-hitter. Nobody seemed to mind.

June 16
Adam Dunn taught a painful lesson to a rookie catcher who found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

June 17
As evidenced by Casey McGehee’s takeout of Erick Aybar, what might seem like clear Code violations aren’t necessarily so.

June 18
A war of words heated up between Carlos Zambrano and Jerry Blevins.

– Jason

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Carlos Zambrano, Don't Call out Opponents in the Press, Jerry Blevins

Zambrano: Blevins ‘Lucky’ to Retire Me

Posted on by Jason Turbow

While players are expected via the unwritten rules to refrain from slamming each other in the press, this particular piece of Code can offer wild entertainment when ignored.

Jerry Blevins and Carlos Zambrano gave us a brief taste this week, with a mini-war of words that played out on the pages of various newspapers.

It started when Zambrano claimed that Blevins—a left-handed reliever who had been inserted into Tuesday’s Cubs-A’s contest one batter earlier—“got lucky” by inducing him to pop out to second base to end the sixth inning.

Cubs manager Lou Piniella had let Zambrano hit for himself with two on, two out and the Cubs down, 5-2. The portly pitcher admitted that he was going after a home run.

Blevins didn’t appreciate the disrespect—especially coming from a guy who had given up five runs in six innings, and whose ERA stood at 5.66. Given the chance, he fired back.

“I did get lucky,” he said the following day in the San Jose Mercury News. “Any time they don’t pinch-hit for a pitcher to face me, I’m lucky. I’ve gotten a lot better hitters out than him. He’s a good hitting pitcher, but he’s still a pitcher. Yes I’m lucky—for them not pinch-hitting.”

In the pantheon of verbal battles, this is just a mild case of banter—although it did draw a rebuke from NBC Sports’ Hardball Talk, which asked, “What is it with A’s pitchers that make them so damn defensive? Is Blevins from the 209 too?”

When it’s done right, this sort of disrespect through the press can have disastrous results. Perhaps the most noteworthy incident occurred during the 1988 NLCS, when Mets pitcher David Cone published a bylined article in the New York Daily News (ghost-written by Bob Klapisch) that he quickly regretted.

The Mets had just touched Dodgers reliever Jay Howell for two runs in the ninth to take a 3-2 victory in Game 1. In describing the comeback to Klapisch after the game, Cone intoned that Howell kept going back to his best pitch, the curveball, again and again, failing to mix up his repertoire to a degree that would throw Mets hitters off balance. The strategy, Cone said, reminded him of when he was a high school pitcher, throwing curve after curve after curve.

From The Baseball Codes:

The sentence that made it to print read slightly differently: “Seeing Howell and his curveball reminded us of a high school pitcher.” Cone has never denied uttering those words, but has long stressed that the context was skewed. One lesson he learned when the paper came out the next day was that context doesn’t count for a hell of a lot in the face of opponents spitting fire over your sentiments. “All of a sudden,” said Cone, “it was me calling Jay Howell a high school pitcher.”

Just as suddenly, the Dodgers had new life. Manager Tommy Lasorda brought a copy of the Daily News—not so easy to find on the streets of Los Angeles—into the clubhouse and ran it through a copy machine. Before the game, he rallied the team around him and exploded. “When we got to the clubhouse that day, the article was posted all over the place—we couldn’t miss it,” said Dodgers catcher Mike Scioscia. “We had our pre-game meeting, and Tommy used it for all it was worth. He kept saying that [Cone] was calling all of us a bunch of high-schoolers, not just Jay Howell. He kept saying that they thought we were a bunch of high school kids, on and on. He was pretty emotional, of course, as only Tommy can be.” . . .

When Cone took the mound, the Dodgers bench, fired up by Lasorda’s speech, started riding him hard, offering up, said the pitcher, “bench-jockey insults that were as bad as I have ever heard.” It was vicious, it was loud, and it was relentless. “Everybody, right down to the trainer, was screaming at me,” said Cone, whose father, Ed, was sitting next to the Dodgers dugout and heard every word.

It worked. Cone, whose 2.22 ERA during the regular season was second in the National League, lasted just two innings, giving up five runs before being removed for a pinch-hitter in the third. It was the shortest outing he had ever made as a big-league starter.

Blevins v. Zambrano is a comparative blip, with no likely repercussions; barring a change of team for either pitcher, they won’t face each other again for years.

Still, it offers fabulous entertainment when watching from the outside.

– Jason

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Casey McGehee, Erick Aybar, Slide properly

Takeout Order: One Knee, to Go

Posted on by Jason Turbow

Baseball’s Code can be a tricky beast. Certain plays appear to be clear-cut violations . . . until they’re proven to be otherwise.

Let a play that happened Monday at Angel Stadium serve as an example.

With Milwaukee’s Casey McGehee on first, Carlos Gomez hit a grounder to first baseman Kevin Frandsen, who threw to shortstop Erick Aybar for the force at second. The throw, however, was well to the third-base side of the bag, forcing Aybar to stretch wide to field it, leaving him vulnerable to a takeout slide from McGehee. (Watch it here.)

In most situations, McGehee’s play would be entirely appropriate. It’s the job of the runner at first to prevent a double play, usually by taking out the covering infielder with a slide.

(Slide type is also governed by the unwritten rules. Barrel rolls and high spikes are not tolerated; flying through both base and fielder feet first and spikes down is expected.)

There were, however, other factors to consider. First, McGehee could well have been letting out some frustration; that he was at first base to begin with was because Angels reliever Trevor Bell had just drilled him in the ribs.

Moreover, Aybar was in no position to complete the play, even without interference. It was all he could do to merely record the out at second, and Gomez, was far too fast to be doubled up. Aybar was exposed—a fact that McGehee exploited to relatively disastrous results, hyperextending the shortstop’s left knee when he took him out with a slide slightly to the inside part of the bag, aimed directly at Aybar’s leg.

Aybar was removed from the game and hasn’t played since.

All of this when Milwaukee held a 9-2 lead.

It all goes to show, however, that even a seemingly clear-cut case of a Code violation might not be so. Two guys with a firm understanding of the unwritten rules dismissed any notion of impropriety—and they were in Aybar’s dugout.

“I thought it was a clean slide . . .” said Angels manager Mike Scioscia in the Los Angeles Times. “The slide was right over the bag, so I can’t find much fault with it.”

Angels center fielder Torii Hunter shared his manager’s sentiment in an ESPN Los Angeles report, calling that type of slide a “lost art,” and saying, “I like the way (McGehee) is playing the game.”

“Was I going in extra hard because I got hit?” asked McGehee. “No. Unfortunately, the guy was in an awkward position. Look at the video. I didn’t try to pop up on him or roll him. Unfortunately, he got hurt. . . . They’re known for playing hard-nosed, aggressive baseball, so hopefully they understand where I’m coming from. I play the game right.”

A compelling argument can be made that McGehee was in the wrong. Scioscia and Hunter, however, backed up their words with actions: McGehee came to bat 10 more times in the series, and was not drilled once.

When in doubt, defer to the experts.

– Jason

6
Adam Dunn, Carlos Santana, Running Into the Catcher

Freight Train Rolling; Dunn Offers Lesson to Rookie Catcher

Posted on by Jason Turbow

We got to see Stephen Strasburg strike out eight Indians Sunday in his second major league start, but he wasn’t the only highly touted recent call-up to make an appearance.

Cleveland catcher Carlos Santana was playing in just his third big league game, and learned a valuable lesson in the process.

In the second inning, with Adam Dunn on second base, Washington’s Mike Morse hit a single to right field. Although the throw home was cut off by first baseman Russell Branyan, the 6-foot-6, 285-lb. Dunn thundered into Santana, flattening the catcher without so much as leaving his feet. (Watch it here.)

It called into question the unwritten rules regarding collisions at the plate, one of which says that a catcher has no business being in the baseline if he’s not holding the ball.

Could Dunn have avoided the collision had he been paying attention? Probably. Was it incumbent upon him to do so? Absolutely not.

In that situation, there’s no reason for Dunn to pay attention to anything but the space in front of him; if the catcher is standing there, Dunn has two choices—go around him or through him.

When Dunn was with Cincinnati in 2003, he found himself participating in another incident at the plate, which also involved questions about when it is and isn’t appropriate to flatten a catcher.

With the Reds holding a 10-0 lead over Philadelphia, Dunn was waved home from second on a single because the outfielder’s throw missed the cutoff man and the second baseman had to scamper to get to the ball.

In this type of situation, an acceptable interpretation of the Code says that runners can be sent home if there will be no play at the plate. There shouldn’t have been a play, so third base coach Tim Foli waved Dunn in.

From The Baseball Codes:

There was no way the throw would come close to beating Dunn. Except that the runner, sensing Foli’s lack of urgency, slowed down considerably, allowing the defense time to recover. By the time Dunn recognized his mistake, he was just steps away from catcher Mike Lieberthal, who was standing in the basepath, ball in hand. At that point, Dunn—a former football player for the University of Texas— reacted instinctively, putting everything he had into a brutal collision. And though he didn’t succeed—Lieberthal held on for the second out of the inning—when Dunn next came to bat he was thrown at by reliever Carlos Silva, and charged the mound.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do there,” said the slugger after the game. “Stop and let him tag me out? Slide? I think I did the right thing.”

In that situation, Lieberthal was entitled to the baseline, and Dunn was entitled to separate him from the baseball. (Or at least he would have been, had the score been closer.)

Against the Indians on Sunday, Santana had no business being in the baseline; intentionally or not, Dunn reminded him of that.

It’s a mistake that Santana will not likely make again.

(Thanks to SB Nation for the GIF.)

– Jason

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Don't Bunt to Break Up a No-Hitter, Gordon Beckham, Ozzie Guillen, Ted Lilly

Bunt it Like Beckham; ChiSox Infielder Tries to Break up No-No with a Bunt

Posted on by Jason Turbow

There was a chance for unprecedented greatness Sunday night at Wrigley Field, as White Sox pitcher Gavin Floyd no-hit the Cubs into the seventh inning, while Cubs pitcher Ted Lilly took a no-hitter of his own into the ninth.

The unwritten rules, however, were exploited in the eighth inning, when White Sox second baseman Gordon Beckham tried to get his team’s first hit . . . with a bunt.

The precedent for this is well established—one does not bunt for his team’s first hit, unless the game’s close enough to merit a baserunner by any means possible.

This game was a pitchers’ duel with a pitchers’-duel score—the Cubs led, 1-0—affording Beckham the leeway to do whatever he could to reach base.

That wasn’t enough to satisfy the Wrigley Field crowd, which booed the play with vigor. The fact that Beckham didn’t even get the bunt down (it went foul), and eventually popped out, didn’t make a lick of difference.

The most interesting take on the situation came from Ozzie Guillen (no surprise), who chose to avoid walking the appropriate line (don’t bunt to break up a no-hitter except in close contests), the hard line (don’t bunt to break up a no-hitter ever) and the apathetic line (bunt whenever you want, under any circumstances).

Instead, he spouted an unwritten rule that he could well have made up on the spot.

“If you bunt in the ninth that’s not professional, but in the eighth . . . but Wrigley Field people, that’s the only thing they can do is boo,” Guillen said in the Peoria Journal Star. “They boo for every freaking thing here. That’s part of the game, but the ninth, that’s kind of a different thing.”

Guillen did have something of a point in that a recent example of such a play—Ben Zobrist breaking up the 2006 no-hit attempt of Seattle pitcher Jarrod Washburn with a sixth-inning bunt—drew condemnation from neither Washburn or his manager, Mike Hargrove, owing to the fact that it came in the game’s middle innings, with a 2-0 score.

There was a guy on the White Sox bench, however, who appeared to be cognizant of the actual Code. Juan Pierre broke up Lilly’s gem with a clean single in the ninth (watch it here), and admitted that he had ruled out bunting as an option.

”I wasn’t going to bunt there, and there was some pressure there because that was the first time I was involved in something that late in a game where a guy has a no-hitter against a team I’m playing for,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times.

While it’s possible that Pierre was referencing something strategic, there’s a good chance he was simply being cognizant of the Code. (Inquiries have been lodged. Updates as new information becomes available.)

Heck, Pierre might have a better grasp of this than his manager.

– Jason

4
Manny Acta, Mound Conference Etiquette, Tony Sipp

Forget Godot; Wait for Your Manager

Posted on by Jason Turbow
Tony Sipp

In the seventh inning of Friday’s game between Cleveland and Washington, Indians reliever Tony Sipp walked Adam Dunn, the first batter he faced, to load the bases. With that, Cleveland manager Manny Acta popped out of the dugout and signaled for Chris Perez to enter the game.

Sipp, clearly unhappy with the situation, descended the mound, ball in hand, and headed toward the dugout. He had better options.

The pertinent unwritten rule in this situation says that a pitcher must wait for his manager to reach the mound, then hand him the ball before being dismissed. Pitchers who fail to follow this pattern have found themselves in awkward and occasionally hostile situations.

A passage in The Baseball Codes describes Giants reliever Jim Barr, upset at being pulled from a game by manager Frank Robinson in 1983:

Frustrated, Barr didn’t wait for his manager to reach the mound before flipping him the ball—a clear act of insolence in the hard-edged presence of Robinson, who made it clear to his pitchers that they were to hand him the ball as they departed.

Barr planned on storming to the dugout, but was interrupted when Robinson caught the baseball, grabbed the pitcher by the arm as he tried to pass, spun him around, and dragged him back up the hill to await (reliever Greg) Minton’s arrival. Robinson had been the league’s most fiery player, and his managerial furnace burned nearly as hot.

As the duo waited for Minton to arrive, Robinson told Barr exactly what he thought of his stunt, poking a finger into the right-hander’s chest to emphasize his point. . . . On the mound at Shea, it was hard to miss the battle brewing, and the New York fans looked on in delight. All four members of the Giants infield raced in and surrounded the pair in an attempt to calm things down.

Barr didn’t help matters when he decided that if he wasn’t allowed to leave until Robinson gave him permission, he wouldn’t leave at all. This meant that when Minton arrived at the mound he found two people, Robinson and Barr, standing between himself and the catcher, which made it somewhat difficult to warm up. “It seemed like five minutes,” said Barr, “even though it was probably only ninety seconds.” Robinson finally led Barr back to the dugout, at which point both pitcher and manager had to be restrained from going after each other.

Unlike Barr, Sipp quickly recognized behavior that needed alteration. Unlike Robinson, Acta didn’t try to physically restrain his player.

All it took was a few steps for Sipp to realize that his manager was waiting for him on the mound, at which point he turned around and passed the ball off, as decorum dictated he should have in the first place.

The manager and pitching coach Tim Belcher sat down with Sipp after the game to discuss the issue and what’s expected of pitchers in that type of situation, but Acta ultimately came to Sipp’s defense.

”Tony’s not really a baseball-crazy guy off the field,” he said in the Akron Beacon Journal. ”He didn’t mean anything by it. . . . But we talked to him and told him it just doesn’t look good, that it gives the impression like, ‘you’re mad at me, even when you’re really not mad at me, and you’re just mad at yourself.’ It’s a part of unwritten baseball etiquette, some of these guys, at times, are just not as in tune with it.”

In six appearances since May 23, Sipp’s ERA has shot from 1.40 to 6.53. It’s pretty clear that Manny Acta is the least of his problems.

– Jason

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