This one had it all—flexing after home runs, mocking the opposing dugout mid-HR trot and even the ultra-rare pause during a different trot so said trotter might have some words with a fielder. We saw emptying dugouts and the highest order of New York drama.
All because of a whistle.
The Yankees and Mets beat the stuffing out of each other all weekend, with the Yanks’ 8-7 Saturday victory built atop a five-run second inning. The Mets suspected foul play.
“Something out of the ordinary was going on,” said Francisco Lindor, discussing the incident with reporters after Sunday’s game. Whatever it was, he said, “I took it personal.”
What he took personal was a series of whistles coming from the Yankees’ dugout, which the Mets took to be pitch signaling—particularly against Saturday’s Mets starter Taijuan Walker, who gave up three homers in that fateful second frame. Jonathan Villar went so far as to call a mound meeting because he thought that Walker might be tipping pitches and that the dugout whistles could be keyed to that detail.
Jonathan Villar told me that he called a mound meeting last night because he thought Taijuan Walker was tipping pitches when the Yankees took a 5-0 lead. He realized during an Aaron Judge at bat that the Yankees dugout seemed to use different whistles to identify pitches.
With this in mind, the Mets were paying attention on Sunday. Sure enough, there was reliever Wandy Peralta, whistling away in their dugout in the early innings. When reporters asked about it later, Yankees players did not even try to hide it. Their excuse: Peralta was just trying to “bring some noise.”
Giancarlo Stanton said that the Yankees were not whistling to relay signs/pitches. Instead, Stanton said that Wandy Peralta was the one whistling in the dugout the first few innings "to bring some noise." https://t.co/CiLzQ2ALCb
Joey Gallo: "It's just Wandy trying to liven up the dugout. It's definitely not for pitch-tipping or anything like that. It's just him trying to bring energy to the dugout. It's been hurting my ears, honestly."
Lindor was having none of it. When he connected for his second homer of the game in the sixth inning—notably, against Peralta—he stared directly into the Yankees dugout while rounding the bases, and mimed a whistling motion.
Last night the Mets thought the Yankees were stealing pitches by whistling so after hitting his second home run tonight Francisco Lindor was doing a whistling motion toward the Yankees as he rounded the bases pic.twitter.com/gZEjss59RM
In the scope of possible responses to signaled pitches, this one was mild. Nobody was thrown at and no on-field shouting matches ensued. Still, the Yankees were displeased. So displeased, in fact, that when Giancarlo Stanton hit his own homer in the seventh, he all but stopped between second and third base to give Lindor a piece of his mind. The players never came into physical contact—Lindor was out near the grass when it happened—but dugouts and bullpens emptied in response. Lindor and Javy Baez made keep-on-chirping puppet signals with their hands toward the Yankees’ scrum.
Today’s focus is on the fireworks, but the lasting import from yesterday’s game is that the Yankees’ upcoming opponents will now pay extra attention to possible signals from the New York dugout. If it exists, such a relay system doesn’t break any rules, but it’s certain to raise hackles in the opposing dugout.
For a team on the outside of the wild-card picture looking in, the Yankees need every advantage they can get. If similar whistling helped them at all during their 21-8 August, it’ll be a blow for them to curtail the practice now.
If one is to believe Francisco Lindor and Jeff McNeil, a four-legged invader found its way into the tunnel behind the Mets dugout at Citi Field on Friday night. Whether it was a rat or a raccoon continues to be a matter of speculation … at least among those who believe Lindor and McNeil.
Why this had to be addressed at all was that in the bottom of the seventh inning New York’s bench virtually emptied, players racing to the stairs to see whatever was happening below. This did not escape the attention of the TV broadcast.
What was happening below, of course, is up for debate.
Despite Lindor smiling through his description of the incident (it was a rat, he said), and McNeil doing similarly (might have been a raccoon), there is ample reason to believe that they’re both full of hooey.
Only moments earlier, Arizona’s Nick Ahmed had hit a ground ball up the middle, with Lindor and McNeil—the shortstop and second baseman, respectively—pausing in deference to the other before Lindor finally corralled it. By then, however, it was too late to get the runner. Something had gone wrong, a detail confirmed after the game by Mets manager Luis Rojas, when he said in a New York Post report, that “It’s happened a couple times where they both go into the same lane and they have to put on the brakes and the ball gets through.”
Despite Lindor faulting himself to reporters and McNeil calling it a miscommunication, it seems likely that emotions grew heated as soon as the inning ended, at which point the pair took their argument to a location hidden from view.
Coming up with alternative storylines is a time-tested method for diverting attention from intra-team squabbles. This very topic is covered in the introduction to The Baseball Codes:
That potential for discord exists within a clubhouse is hardly a secret—any group of twenty-five guys that spends as much time together as does a baseball team is bound to have conflicts—nor is it a secret that any leaks from within spell open season for the media. For proof of this, one has only to look at the rare instance when tempers boil over in the open, such as Jeff Kent pushing Barry Bonds in the Giants dugout, or Darryl Strawberry and Keith Hernandez coming to blows in front of a phalanx of reporters during Mets spring training. Stories deconstructing team strife followed each of those incidents for weeks; years after combatants have put their differences aside the press continues to look at any reconciliation with skepticism.
Among the stories recounted in the book is a 1973 hotel-room brawl between Davey Johnson, then a star second baseman for the Atlanta Braves, and his manager, Hall of Famer Eddie Matthews.
The way Johnson tells it, after an initial verbal disagreement the manager invited him into his room and challenged him to a fight. Johnson, reluctant at first, changed his mind when Matthews wound up for a roundhouse punch, then knocked the older man down. Matthews charged back, and as the sounds of the scrape flooded the hallway, players converged on the scene. In the process of breaking things up, several peacemakers were soon bearing welts of their own.
“The next day at the ballpark we looked like we had just returned from the Revolutionary War,” wrote pitcher Tom House (a member of the team, who, true to the code of silence, left all names out of his published account). “Everybody had at least one black eye, puffed-up lips, scraped elbows, and sore hands. It had been a real knockdown battle.”
This was something that couldn’t be hidden from the press. Matthews called the team together, and as a unit they came up with a story about a game that got carried away, in which guys took good-natured beatings. Flimsy? Maybe. Accepted? Absolutely.
“You can ask Hank Aaron and others on that team,” Johnson said, laughing. “Eddie said his biggest regret [in his baseball career] was not having it out with me again. That one never got out. It never made the papers.”
That Lindor and McNeil did their best to give similar treatment to whatever happened in that tunnel was not appreciated by Mets GM Zack Scott. At least not enough for him to support the ruse.
“You’d have to ask the players that, why they chose to handle it that way,” he said in the Post. “It’s definitely not how I’d go. … The best way to handle these things is be as transparent as you can be without divulging things that people don’t want out there, to address it, to hit things head on. I’m not saying that to criticize what the players did [Friday] night. Wouldn’t be my recommendation, and no one in the organization would make that recommendation to handle it that way, but what’s what they chose to do for whatever reason.”
Well, the reason is obvious. Its utility might be dubious—especially with messaging from team brass running counter to that from players—but things seem to have settled down since that point. Lindor homered just moments after the “rat sighting,” and New York beat the D’Backs 5-4 in 10 innings. Then the Mets won both of the weekend games to put them at 16-13 and one game up in the National League East.
They already have a faux hitting coach. Maybe the Mets should thank their faux rat for their recent win streak, as well.
On one hand, there’s Let the Kids Play, wherein major league hitters are given leeway by the home office to preen and bat flip, free of judgement and repercussion. Pitchers have responded to this informal edict by beginning in increasing numbers to celebrate similarly, particularly following big strikeouts.
The equity of the system is logical, although observing logic has never been a strong suit for ballplayers. The topic has come up several times over the last week alone.
It started with Trevor Bauer vs. Fernando Tatis, which set the bar pretty high. After Tatis doubled down against Bauer, making fun of the pitcher’s previous antics as part of two home run trots in the same game, Bauer credited him publicly for his efforts. (Tatis’ alleged peeking: not so much.)
When the celebrations spun in the opposite direction, however, things got salty.
Start on Friday, when Philadelphia pitcher Jose Alvarado rejoiced after fanning Mets left fielder Dominic Smith to end the eighth inning in what would be a 2-1 Phillies victory. Alvarado spun toward second base and did a couple of low-slung flex pumps, then turned back to the plate and continued the act. Smith took exception and benches cleared.
On Saturday, Cincinnati’s Amir Garrett acted similarly, so angering the Cubs that Javier Báez —who wasn’t even on the field—hopped the railing to approach the pitcher, spurring another dugout-emptying incident.
There is, of course, one notable difference between the Tatis incident and the latter two.
Start with Alvarado, who came into the game irked after being chirped at by the Mets on April 13 for two pitches to Michael Conforto—one of which ended up near Conforto’s head, the other of which hit him. Among the loudest voices in New York’s dugout that day was Dominic Smith.
So when the pitcher fanned Smith in a big moment, he let Smith know all about it. Alvarado shouted at the hitter as they walked off the field, then did a you-talk-too-much pantomime with his hand when Smith responded. At that point, the two approached each other with an abundance of macho posturing and not much will to actually fight. (After the game, Smith did offer to meet Alvarado under the stands “if he really wants to get after it.”)
Garrett’s incident was similar. After fanning Anthony Rizzo, Garrett pounded his chest and yelled directly at the hitter. Again, history fueled his decision. Garrett, for whom displays of emotion are commonplace, pulled a similar act with Báez in 2018, and spurred a similar incident with Chicago’s Kyle Schwarber in 2019.
This is where we delve further into the gray area that is Major League Baseball in 2021. Are celebrations to be tolerated? According to the league, as well as to the majority of pitchers tasked with enforcing decorum, they are. So now we must ask what types of celebrations are to be tolerated.
What Tatis pulled against Bauer is apparently kosher, mostly because the pitcher deemed it so. The reasons he did this are obvious: Bauer has long been an outspoken proponent of bringing life to the sport via personal flair, and is even-handed with his opinions about who gets to exhibit said flair, even when he’s on the wrong end of it. Even more importantly, Tatits’ stylings, while aimed at Bauer, were also playful and firmly rooted in memes that the pitcher himself had started.
Alvarado and Garrett, on the other hand, were firmly focused on showing up the opposition. Their intentions were obvious and petty, and the responses they elicited should not have been difficult to predict. Which may have been the point.
Báez, a man known for his own celebratory prowess, laid down the opinion for his caucus after Saturday’s game.
“I’m not going to let [Garrett] or anyone disrespect my teammates or my team,” Báez said in a Chicago Tribune report. “It was not a big situation. I’m going to try to stay professional with this but … he needs to respect the game. If you don’t respect the game and if you don’t respect us, then that’s going to happen. Because he’s doing it to us. He’s not doing it to his teammates to pump them (up).”
So it seems that the answer to the question about where we are, exactly, on this topic is … we still don’t know. The underlying tenet of baseball’s unwritten rules, be they the modern-day version or the buttoned-up overkill from generations past, is respect. The threshold has changed markedly, but it still exists, and lines continue to be crossed. With attitudes shifting so quickly, it’s now mostly a matter of keeping up with where things stand at any given moment.
The Phillies and Reds gave us some clear-cut examples. Hitters have achieved so much celebratory leeway that it’s now pitchers who tend to give us pause. This might be because they don’t have a home run to admire or a trot to enact; their focal point for strikeout success is and will forever be the plate. Frequently their theatrics don’t mean anything more than the theatrics from their offensive counterparts … but sometimes they do. To judge by last week, some pitchers may hav trouble distinguishing bat flips from direct, one-on-one showdowns. (For what it’s worth, MLB agrees that what Alvarado did was not Letting the Kids Play: the pitcher was subsequently suspended for three games.)
In this context, I can’t help thinking that Báez’s response to Garrett sounds remarkably similar to comments from players of previous generations who were busy decrying things like sideburns or pants being worn too long. You know: Kids these days.
The more things change, it seems, the more they stay the same.
In lieu of actual baseball, I’ll be posting snippets that were cut from The Baseball Codes as a way of amusing myself and, hopefully, you. Today’s theme: showboating and celebrations These old stories help show just how far baseball has come.
In 2006, 21-year-old Mets rookie Lastings Milledge hit his first-ever home run, against the Giants, then high-fived the front row of fans at Shea Stadium as he ran to his position in right field to begin the following inning.
The outcry from San Francisco players was swift. “We weren’t too happy about that,” said Giants pitcher Steve Kline afterward. “I think he genuinely knows he did wrong.”
To avoid further bad blood, Mets manager Willie Randolph said publicly that he would talk to Milledge to assure that such behavior would not be repeated. Teammate Cliff Floyd also mentioned the potential consequences of such actions, telling reporters, “If that’s what you want to do, you do that. But at the same time, if you want guys throwing at your head constantly, you proceed to do it that way.”
At the very least, a guy across town had Milledge’s back. “I was so happy when I hit my first home run,” Derek Jeter told the Morrisown Daily Record. “If there were fans on the way back to shortstop I would have high-fived them. I don’t blame the kid.”
Before we get into umpire warnings and how they might or might not be useful, let’s start with Wilmer Font.
Font is the definition of a journeyman pitcher, playing for five teams in a five-season big league career, with one Tommy John surgery and a few minor league campaigns in the middle of everything. In May, the Rays offloaded him to the Mets for next to nothing, at which point Font’s career ERA was 6.51.
Still, he throws with decent velocity, employs five different pitches and can be stretched out as a middle reliever. And in New York, things seem to have changed. Over the last month, Font has racked up a 0.69 ERA in 13 innings across seven appearances. The Mets bullpen has been in shambles, and the right-hander looked ready to pounce on the opportunity to gain some organizational trust.
Until yesterday, anyway. Font was inserted into the sixth inning of a game against the Phillies with runners on second and third and one out, and the Mets holding a 5-2 lead. The first hitter he faced, Jay Bruce, brought home a run with a groundout. The next hitter, Cesar Hernandez, brought home another run with an infield single. The next batter, Maikel Franco, gave the Phillies the lead with a two-run homer. The next batter, Brad Miller, extended the lead with another home run, then clowned his way to first base. In the span of four batters, Font’s ERA jumped from 4.58 to 5.50.
Of course he was frustrated. Maybe that’s why he sent a fastball at Scott Kingery’s head.
Kingery’s crime, of course, was
merely hitting behind Franco and Miller. A leap and a shrug by the batter
managed to help him deflect the pitch with his shoulder, but the intent was
clear. Font put a pitch someplace that no pitcher ever should, and the Phillies
were furious.
Enter plate ump Joe West, and the discussion about umpire warnings. West saw the pitch for what it was, but instead of tossing Font he opted for warnings to both benches. The umpire no doubt knew about the recent history between the teams, notable for a game back in April in which the Mets threw at Rhys Hoskin’s head in response to an ill-considered stolen base.
Still, issuing warnings to both teams precluded any sort of response from Philadelphia for an egregious act, never mind that, apart from Miller’s antics while heading toward first base, they’d been entirely clean. Phillies skipper Gabe Kapler was commensurately upset and came out to argue. It took West literally six seconds to toss him.
As pertains to the Mets, West’s decision to warn Font rather than tossing him had no effect whatsoever on the game, given that Mickey Calloway pulled the reliever anyway. For the Phillies, however, it generated some constraints.
Never mind the idea of retaliation; with a two-run lead in the late innings, any possible head-hunting notions they may have harbored would likely have been tabled until another day anyway. The warning did, however, increase concern among Phillies hurlers about utilizing the inside corner. Kapler noted as much after the game, saying in a Philadelphia Inquirer report, “I felt like it was going to put us at a disadvantage throwing up and in.”
So what’s the right answer? Generally speaking, clued-in umpires tend to delay warnings until an aggrieved party has a chance to respond. Also generally speaking, Joe West is not always considered to be clued in. Overly quick warnings, like West’s on Tuesday, simply delay gratification for those with retaliatory tendencies. This means that instead of bad blood being contained to a single game, it spills into multiple days.
We’ll see if that’s the case with Philadelphia. Given that two Mets have thrown at the heads of their hitters so far this season, it’d be shocking if we don’t see some sort of response … maybe as soon as tonight.
This season has already given us one of the great minor league troll jobs in recent memory, and it wasn’t even directed at a specific player or team:
Here's one we're very excited about: Beginning Opening Night, fans can pick our opponents' walk-up music. $5 ensures the song will be assigned to a random player, while $10 allows fans to pick a specific player in the lineup. All proceeds benefit the Anchor Fund, the Ports 501c3. pic.twitter.com/CuSY0T9QyC
On Monday, we got another, when the Lehigh Valley IronPigs—the Triple-A affiliate of the Philadelphia Phillies—hit Jacob Rhame where it hurt.
Rhame, of course, was recently featured in these pages for his role in a kerfuffle with Philadelphia’s Rhys Hoskins, which started with Rhame’s head-high fastball and ended with Hoskins blasting a homer against him, then taking a trip around the bases so slow that it made Bengie Molina look like Tim Raines. (Actually, it ended when Rhame was suspended for two games, then sent to the minor leagues. But still.)
Rhame, now with the Syracuse Mets, was called into Monday’s game against Lehigh Valley during the sixth inning, and as he warmed up, the IronPigs’ video board showed a clip not only of Hoskins’ homer, but of his ensuing 34-second trot. Syracuse.com takes it from there:
IronPigs president and general manager Kurt Landes came into the visiting manager’s office and got an earful from Mets manager Tony DeFrancesco after the game. DeFrancesco told Landes the team was upset with the stunt, because whatever happened between the New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies last week at Citi Field had nothing to do with what transpired on a field in Allentown, Pa., the following week.
Hitting coach Joel Chimelis said someone needed to be held accountable for showing the video. Landes apologized and said he was unaware the video was going to be shown.
Rhame and DeFranceso did not want to talk about the incident after the game.
In the big-league version, Hoskins punished his assailant with success, by homering off of him. The Mets’ minor-league counterparts did similarly, returning from a one-run deficit for a 7-4 victory, then beating the IronPigs again on Tuesday, 18-5, and Wednesday, 8-2, the latter victory vaulting them into first place. That makes a cumulative 30-7 score since the video was shown.
“They didn’t respect (us), not only the pitcher, they don’t respect us as a team,” said Syracuse outfielder Carlos Gomez (who’s been at the center of an abundance of unwritten-rules related dustups himself) in the Syracuse.com report. “They should not have played that video. We’re all professionals here.”
Did the IronPigs learn their lesson when it comes to trolling the Mets? The IronPigs did not learn their lesson:
Normally we don't do this, but we've been getting a lot of questions about the Mets' lineup.
It’d be easy to think that the Mets threw at Rhys Hoskins on Tuesday in response to the passel of New York hitters—five in five games, including two a day earlier—drilled by the Phillies over the early part of the season. As is frequently the way with these kinds of things, however, there’s more to the story. There was another trigger, too, far more central to baseball’s unwritten rules.
It happened during the sixth inning of Tuesday night’s game, with the Mets leading, 8-0—the kind of score that mandates its own unwritten rules about piling on. The idea, of course, has to do with restraint from embarrassing an opponent you’re already beating soundly.
There has always been debate about how big a lead is sufficient to take one’s foot off the gas, and at what point in the game it should happen. The Mets clearly felt that eight runs in the sixth was within those boundaries. As such, after J.T. Realmuto singled to center with one out, New York first baseman Pete Alonso opted against holding him on as a matter of professional courtesy. At that point in the game, the Mets were gearing toward ending things as quickly as possible, letting players on both teams get home to regroup and go at it again fresh the following day. Positioning Alonso in the hole, where he could cover more ground, was a step in that direction. The expectation was that the Phillies would not take advantage.
Realmuto took off on the first pitch.
This, according to some in the New York dugout, flew against the code. It’s an interesting dynamic, this idea of not pressing the issue. The impetus is pure—respect for an opponent who’s having a bad day—but its execution can sometimes be confusing. What if the Phillies disagreed that the sixth inning was too early to give up their running game? What if the 12 outs remaining seemed like a reasonable number with which to stage a rally or two? With guys like Hoskins and Bryce Harper in the lineup, scoring batches of runs was not out of the question.
The other possibility is that Realmuto, not being held on and with second base an easy 90 feet away, decided to run of his own accord. Despite nothing happening on the play—Hoskins fouled the ball off and Realmuto returned to first—the Mets were displeased. Rather than opt for a message pitch, they responded with some of the same. After the Phillies went down in order, with Realmuto failing to advance, New York found itself in a similar situation during the bottom half of the frame: Juan Lagares on first base with two outs. With the Phillies also opting against holding the runner, Lagares motored into third base on Robinson Cano’s single, despite the unwritten rule mandating that teams holding huge leads play station-to-station baseball, advancing only one base on a single, two on a double, etc.
Now it was the Phillies’ turn to be angry. New York’s next hitter, Michael Conforto, walked on four pitches, primarily because two of them appeared to have been intentionally thrown up and in. At first base, Hoskins discussed the situation with Conforto.
In a tit-for-tat world of code violations and the responses to them, the ledger appeared to be even. Then, with two outs in the ninth—the Mets having increased their lead to 9-0 on a single that drove in Legares from third (which wouldn’t have happened had he held at second)—Mets reliever Jacob Rhame threw a 97-mph, first-pitch fastball directly at Hoskins’ head. (Watch it here.)
That the hitter was able to duck out of the way helped prevent the situation from exploding, but only some. The delivery of a fastball above the shoulders is never acceptable in modern baseball, especially in response to an event that already appeared to have been answered. (For those who point to the dual HBPs the previous day as potential impetus, both were clearly unintentional. One loaded the bases, and the other, with the bases already loaded, drove in a run.)
Hoskins, angry, took a step toward the mound, triggering players from both dugouts to prepare to charge. Plate ump Scott Barry, however, quickly took control of the situation, issuing blanket warnings. Hoskins ended up walking on six pitches, every ball outside the strike zone coming in high and inside. He gave Mets catcher Travis d’Arnaud an earful while making his way to first base.
“I don’t get it,” said Bryce Harper after the game, in the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I understand that two of their guys got hit yesterday, but, I mean, if it’s baseball and you’re going to drill somebody, at least hit him in the ass. Not in the head. You throw 98, it’s scary now. You could kill somebody. Lose your eyesight. That’s bigger than the game.”
It’s possible that Rhame was wild, as he claimed after the game—although that sort of denial is standard fare—especially given that he walked two of the four batters he faced, with 10 of his 19 pitches coming in outside the strike zone. Even if this is true, however, he’d find few defenders in Philadelphia’s clubhouse.
“He didn’t miss up and in or out and up to a lefty the rest of the inning, so I’ll let you decide,” said Hoskins after the game. “But I understand baseball. They got hit a couple of times yesterday.”
If there’s a happy ending to this story, it’s that Hoskins was able to exact retaliation of his own, homering in the ninth inning of Wednesday’s game, against Rhame of all people.
That was the first part of his revenge. The second part was a glacially slow trot around the bases—at 34.2 seconds, the slowest in the five years since Statcast has been tracking such things. (It is also the longest such circuit in the history of TaterTrotTracker, which ceased tracking tater trots in 2016, save for one by Luke Scott, who was injured as he rounded the bases.)
To Rhame’s credit, he calmly rolled with the insult.
“He got me,” the pitcher told reporters after the game. “If I make a better pitch, he doesn’t get to run the bases. It’s his job, man. I’m not really thinking about any of that. … Going through my mind is, I shouldn’t throw one right down the middle to him. That’s about it.”
This will hopefully be it for this episode of Bad Blood Central, NL East Edition. The Mets and Phillies next meet in late June.
We officially have our first pine-tar incident of the young season. Less of an incident, actually, than a series of suppositions borne by conspiracy theorists who are parsing two seconds’ worth of potentially incriminating tape like it’s the Zapruder film. Starring Thor.
That’s because on Monday night in Philadelphia, Noah Syndergaard appeared to dab the first two fingers of his pitching hand into the heel of his glove while on the mound, the reason for doing so—at least according to the Internet—being to apply a foreign substance to his fingertips.
Does anyone see what I see here? What’s up with Noah’s 2 fingers in the glove during the 5th inning 1 out? #NYMvsPHIpic.twitter.com/ZaZvKclBez
It makes sense. On cold or wet nights, pine tar is a pitcher’s best friend—not to lend an advantage per se, but simply to restore whatever grip may have been lost to the conditions. Monday night in Philly saw 50-degree weather and 24-mph winds at first pitch. Things only got colder from there.
Generally speaking, hitters don’t mind a bit of pine tar around a pitcher’s mound now and again. Giving a guy who throws as hard as Syndergaard—whose four-seamer averaged almost 99 mph on Monday—an extra measure of control certainly has merit. (Then again, it can also lend snap to breaking balls, and Syndergaard’s were working nicely on Monday, to the tune of nine strikeouts in five innings—four of which came on sliders and one on a curveball.)
The issue, as pertains to Syndergaard, seems largely to be … well, let’s leave it to Philadelphia first baseman Rhys Hoskins, who explained things about as clearly as they can be explained.
“As a hitter, with a guy that throws as hard as he does, I would rather him be able to feel the ball than not,” Hoskins said in a Delco Times report. “But I think there’s some unwritten rules. Just don’t make it so obvious. Obviously that was what [Michael] Pineda did a couple of years ago, that was quite obvious. But as long as it’s not obvious … I guess? I don’t know. It makes you wonder.”
Hoskins’ confusion about the subject is understandable given the nebulous nature of enforcement. Pitchers across baseball use foreign substances, particularly pine tar, especially early and late in the season during inclement weather. Opponents almost inevitably look the other way, at least partly because they likely have pitchers on their own staffs doing similar things, with the expectation that bad behavior will be curtailed at least temporarily as a matter of goodwill should a perpetrator get caught. “Most pitchers are using it,” said an anonymous Mets player in defense of Syndergaard, in the New York Post. “Check every reliever that comes in there and you will find it.”
That’s hyperbole, but probably not by much. When Detroit’s Mike Fiers tossed a no-hitter against Los Angeles in 2015, he did so with a shiny substance that many took for pine tar adhered to his glove. Dodgers players knew all about it and didn’t say a thing. When Kenny Rogers was caught with pine tar on his hand during the 2006 World Series, Cardinals manager Tony La Russa didn’t even have him ejected, wanting only to make sure that the pitcher’s hands were clean (literally and figuratively) and that the cheating stopped. When Clay Bucholz was caught with slick stuff loaded onto his arm in 2014, his opponents—despite what seemed like the entire mediasphere piling on—refused to indict him. Bucholz was never checked, and everything proceeded more or less apace. Even the instances in which players are called out tend to back up this mindset. After Braves manager Fredi Gonzalez had Brewers reliever Will Smith tossed from a game in 2015, all he said afterward was, “Every pitcher does it—just hide it better next time.”
Hell, Pineda himself was outed by the Red Sox only after they’d carefully warned him via public comments about being so obvious about it, before he went out and did it again anyway.
This all might be why nobody on the Phillies called out Syndergaard in an official capacity during the game, leaving comments by Hoskins and manager Gabe Kapler (“Everybody becomes more aware,” he said afterward. “You just pay closer attention to it, that’s all”) to serve notice that Thor will have to play it straighter the next time around.
***
For a fuller look at what various substances can do, and how various pitchers feel about them, see the piece I wrote a few years back for SportsIllustrated.com, or Dirk Hayhurst’s compendium at Deadspin.
Way back in 2016 I wrote about Noah Syndergaard’s ejection against the Dodgers, for a pitch he threw behind Chase Utley in response to Utley’s having broken the leg of shortstop Ruben Tejada during the previous season’s playoffs.
Which brings us to video of umpire Tom Hallion trying to cool the situation, and barely succeeding. (The clip came out last June, but is somehow making the rounds again now. Which is reason enough to dive in with gusto.)
Excellent clip of 1B umpire Tom Hallion mic'd up after Noah Syndergaard throws behind Chase Utley, 5/28/16. (Warning: Language 🤬) pic.twitter.com/5THhlU5FAp
The umpire seems to understand that baseball has a method for delivering retaliation, and even appears receptive to looking the other way. Except, he tells the pitcher, “that’s the wrong time to do it.”
This is where things get confusing. There was one out in the third inning of a scoreless game when Syndergaard threw his pitch well behind Utley. The right-hander had already faced him once, leading off the game, and struck him out. There was also the not-inconsequential detail that the Mets had faced Utley five times, covering 19 plate appearances—including five the previous day—since he’d injured Tejada without so much as a whiff of controversy. If Syndergaard’s timing was wrong, what timing would have been better?
When Terry Collins gets involved, he tells Hallion: “You gotta give us a shot!”
Hallion’s response: “You get your shot. You had your shot right there. … You know the situation, Terry.”
Collins was, of course, talking about a repercussion-free shot, not one in which one of his aces gets tossed in the third inning after throwing only 33 pitches. The best guess here is that Hallion didn’t mean a word he was saying, and was just trying to cool the situation as quickly as possible.
The most vital part of the conversation—and this cannot be understated—came when Hallion broke out the phrase that has since gained him infamy: “Our ass is in the jackpot.” Twice.
The situation is old, the insight is new, and spring training is in full swing. Welcome back to baseball, everybody.
On Monday in Los Angeles, Mets third baseman Todd Frazier barreled into the stands along the third base line to make a spectacular catch of a foul ball. He returned to the field, held it aloft, absorbed the “out” call from umpire Mark Wegner, and tossed the ball into the stands.
It was, of course, a sham. Frazier muffed the catch as he hit the seats, out of view of both Wegner and the TV cameras, but had the wherewithal to grab another ball nearby, made of white rubber, which he subsequently displayed as proof of his catch. Upon returning it to the crowd, Frazier effectively erased all evidence of his malfeasance. Only through the crack reporting of SportsNet New York were we even able to discern that something untoward had taken place.
So: Was Frazier cheating? In baseball, where this kind of ploy has longstanding history, the answer is an unqualified no. George Bamberger summed it up neatly when he said, “A guy who cheats in a friendly game of cards is a cheater. A pro who throws a spitball to support his family is a competitor.”
There is plenty a competitor can do to fool an umpire. Outfielders hold aloft balls they know they’ve trapped. Batters who haven’t been hit by inside pitches jump back in feigned pain. Even Frazier’s tactic of switching baseballs isn’t original.
During the second inning of a spring training game in 1966, San Francisco’s Jim Ray Hart smashed a drive to the wall at Phoenix Municipal Stadium; in trying to chase it down, Cubs center fielder Byron Browne crashed into the wall. Despite the ball having bounced far away from the collapsed fielder, Browne somehow—without moving from his spot—picked it up and threw it to shortstop Don Kessinger, who relayed it to third base ahead of the hard-charging Hart. Umpire Mel Steiner called the runner out.
Players in the Giants dugout found the play to be curious. Willie Mays, paying close attention, quickly identified the problem. “He threw the wrong ball!” he yelled. “The wrong ball!”
In fact, Browne had gathered up a ball that had somehow gone uncollected from the outfield after batting practice, which happened to lie within arm’s reach of where he’d landed. Were it a regular-season game, perhaps he wouldn’t have attempted this. Were it a regular-season game, perhaps his teammates wouldn’t have tried quite so hard to cover it up. As it was, left fielder George Altman, while running over to check on Browne, pocketed the real ball.
At the behest of Giants manager Herman Franks, the umpires began a search of Cubs players. Behind his back, Altman passed the ball to second baseman Glenn Beckert, who in turn shoved it into the pocket of trainer Joe Proski.
When plate ump Stan Landes compared the grass-stained practice ball with which the putout was made with the spotless white one that was eventually confiscated from Proski, he sent Hart back to second with a ground-rule double.
“All I know is that I hit the fence and bounced away and there was a ball right there, so I threw it,” Browne said after the game in an AP report. Altman similarly admitted to his coverup with the real baseball, telling reporters that “I didn’t know what to do with it, so I put it in my pocket.”
As for the current imbroglio, Frazier admitted on Wednesday to his indiscretion, calling it “unbelievable.”
“I was flabbergasted that I even got away with it,” he told reporters. “It was one of those things where any third baseman—or any player—trying to win, if there’s a ball in front of you, you try to play it out. You do it as a little kid with your dad and mom, or your buddy down the street.”
Or in front of a stadium full of people and TV cameras. Either way, that’s baseball.
"It's Hollywood, sometimes you have to act out a little bit"@FlavaFraz21 breaks down how he tricked an umpire with a rubber ball, and how he thought about giving it to Jacob deGrom to pitch pic.twitter.com/CFokpzPZER
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