1. Warning: Unwritten Rules Ahead
Jose Tabata, villain for either (a) leaning into or (b) not getting out of the way of a hanging slider and ruining Max Scherzer’s perfect game?
Or the latest victim of the Internet rushing to a speedy and unfair judgment?
Here’s the thing about Tabata, as opposed to the horde that instantly condemned him online in the hours after Scherzer’s pitch went plunk! and a historic perfect game went splat!: He had a split-second to react. Everyone else had time to fix a sandwich, grab a fistful of Cheez-Its, rewind the video a few dozen times and chew on the play from a dozen different angles.
The best reaction I saw all weekend came from a pitcher, who, surprise, surprise, actually was siding with the hitter:
That was my initial reaction watching the play, and it was still my reaction after rerunning it half-a-dozen times.
Tabata looked like a hitter staying in against the slider, expecting it to break. He moved with the pitch and, when it didn’t break, yes, his elbow had dropped a couple of inches, and, no, he didn’t back away.
Why? Because Scherzer’s slider had been so precise all afternoon. Time after time, Pirates hitters saw that slider come in and then break, and they looked like slow men chasing a fly with a fly swatter.
Tabata had battled his rear end off in that plate appearance, by the way. If you listened to a large part of the social media narrative afterward, he sounded like a man who went to the plate looking to get hit by a pitch.
Wrong. It was an eight-pitch at-bat, during which Tabata fouled off five Scherzer offerings. He put up one heck of a fight.
Yet when Scherzer hit him, on the Nationals broadcast, analyst and former infielder F.P. Santangelo said, “That is just the worst way ever to lose a [perfect game]. Are you kidding me?”
Agreed, it was a wholly unsatisfying moment given the mounting drama.
But perfect games are extraordinarily difficult, which is why there have been only 23 of them completed in more than 100 years of baseball.
Have we been so conditioned in our instant gratification, politically correct, everyone-goes-home-with-an-orange-slice world that when a pitcher is on the verge of history, hitters should go into politeness mode and not dare to do anything to offend? Just roll over and take it?
Horseradish. You keep playing, and whatever happens, happens. Say what you will, but Tabata did not dive into the pitch. Which, incidentally, is why plate umpire Mike Muchlinski was correct as well. Some blamed him for not stepping in and disallowing the hit-by-pitch when it simply was not as egregious and obvious as so many were willing it to be.
“I wanted to get a hit,” Tabata told reporters in a Spanish-language interview the next day. “People don’t understand that those were the instincts people have. I wasn’t looking to get hit. I wanted to get a hit. I wanted to get on base.”
Meantime, no surprise that Scherzer, as classy a player as there is in the game, told multiple outlets afterward that he held no ill will toward Tabata.
“It was a slider that was in,” he told MLB Network Radio’s Jeff Joyce. “I kind of lost a little control over it. It backed up on me. I have no qualms about it whatever. That’s just baseball. He did what he needed to do. So kudos to him, actually.”
It reminded me of another controversial incident in May 2001, when the Padres’ Ben Davis bunted for a base hit when the Diamondbacks’ Curt Schilling was five outs from a perfect game.
Schilling and some of the D-backs were “a little stunned” at this breach of baseball etiquette. But it was May, the eighth inning of a 2-0 game and early enough in the season that the Padres were just one game out of first place in the NL West at the time.
“I guess they wanted us to drop our weapons and raise our hands,” then-Padres manager Bruce Bochy said. “We’re trying to win the ballgame and we got the tying run up to the plate. We almost won the ballgame.”
Baseball etiquette and the unwritten rules can get awfully confusing at times. But here is something that should never be confusing: Play the game, from start to finish.
It’s called integrity.
2. Royal All-Star Voting Crisis
So MLB canceled more than 60 million votes for fear of improper All-Star voting. Nevertheless, as one American League player who is not with Kansas City told me the other day, he continues rooting madly for the Royals to continue to dominate the vote.
Why?
To throw the system into complete chaos, the player said. Because, he said, he thinks everything about the All-Star voting process needs to be re-evaluated.
The player is not alone, and as MLB continues to lurch toward what will wind up being a humiliating situation if seven or eight Royals are voted in as starters, the bottom line remains that MLB must decide once and for all what it wants from the game.
Should it be a meaningful contest that decides World Series home-field advantage?
Or should it be a midsummer carnival, an overall celebration of the game?
I lean toward the former. But that means the players, such as Mike Trout and Bryce Harper, should play seven or eight innings, many others won’t get to play and when players are removed, they should stay in the dugout and not go interact with fans on Twitter.
For the fans, it would be great theater.
For the players who spend their midsummer’s break traveling to the game and sitting on the bench, it would be a bummer.
As things stand, though, I don’t blame Kansas City fans for voting relentlessly. They’re just doing what baseball is telling them to do. Flipping through various games Sunday, I got to Cincinnati’s, and on the field is a logo that read “#VoteReds.” I got to Kansas City and saw a logo on the field reading “#VoteRoyals.” I got to Washington and saw a logo on the field reading, “#VoteNats.”
Over on MLB.com, I clicked on Arizona’s site and read “Help send the D-backs to the All-Star Game by going to MLB.com/Vote to put your stamp on the Midsummer Classic…”
I clicked on Philadelphia’s site, home of baseball’s worst team, and read, “Help get your Phillies into the NL All-Star starting lineup at Great American Ball Park…”
And so on.
Instead of urging fans to vote for the game’s best, each precinct is urging fans to vote for the hometown players.
Absolutely nothing wrong with that…if the All-Star Game is going to go the carnival route, celebrating everything about the game. But if the World Series is to remain attached to it, then baseball should be pushing for fans to vote for the best players, period.
So maybe while fans in Kansas City continue to vote feverishly, MLB can finally decide once and for all how to conduct the game.
3. Hacking: Cardinals Are Down but Not Out
No question, the alleged hacking into Houston’s Ground Zero computer system has tarnished the pristine reputation of the Cardinals.
The FBI and Department of Justice are investigating, and the Cardinals are conducting their own in-house investigation. Early indications are that owner Bill DeWitt Jr. and president/general manager John Mozeliak knew nothing about the hacking and that it was the work of some rogue, lower-level IT guys.
Based on what we know now, this is not something that is going to leave a permanent scar on the St. Louis organization.
Nevertheless, as you would expect, some folks are going way overboard. Like, way overboard. Like this Los Angeles columnist, who made the absolutely ludicrous connection between the hacking scandal and the Cardinals’ schooling of the Dodgers in each of the past two NL Championship Series.
Yup, just because St. Louis bludgeoned Clayton Kershaw and broke Hanley Ramirez’s ribs with a pitch, suddenly it is fair game to wonder if it did that by cheating, too.
“If the Cardinals would sneak into an opponent’s computer, which is a federal crime and far worse than deflating a few footballs, what else would they do to gain an edge?” Bill Plaschke wrote. “If they would cheat against a long-struggling team such as the Astros, why wouldn’t they cheat to beat the richest team in baseball and their Cy Young Award winner Clayton Kershaw?”
Please. As the New York Times noted in the story that broke this thing wide-open, it has been believed all along that the hacking “Was executed by vengeful front-office employees for the Cardinals hoping to wreak havoc on the work of Jeff Luhnow, the Astros general manager, who had been a successful and polarizing executive with the Cardinals until 2011.”
Except for in the minds of wildly imaginative folks, there is zero evidence of on-field cheating by St. Louis.
4. He’ll Be Here All Night, Folks
Not to give injured Dodgers starter Brandon McCarthy too much love in one Starting 9 notebook, but I can’t resist pointing you toward a second tweet of his this week because it’s just so funny and perfect:
5. A-Rod and the Sounds of Silence
Hello darkness, my old friend…
Has there ever been a 3,000th hit ignored by so many? Alex Rodriguez smashing his 3,000th, a home run Friday night against Detroit’s Justin Verlander, might have been a big deal in the moment in Yankee Stadium.
Nationally, however, it probably was the least impactful 3,000th hit ever. And even in A-Rod’s subsequent at-bats that night, as B/R colleague Danny Knobler noted, “It may as well have been another day in August, for as little reaction as there was from the fans.”
The reaction from the New York tabloids was decidedly different. For your viewing pleasure:
6. Edgar to the Rescue in Seattle
So the weak-hitting Mariners followed the Yankees and Mets by firing their hitting coach over the weekend. The new guy is someone you might have heard of: Outside of Safeco Field, there is a street named after him, Edgar Martinez Way.
Inside of Safeco Field, there is a restaurant named after him, Edgar’s Cantina and Home Run Porch.
It will be very nice to have Martinez back in a Mariners uniform for all concerned. He is an all-time great who knows a few things about hitting.
He also is the sixth hitting coach in GM Jack Zduriencik’s seven years on the job. The Mariners have been an utter disappointment this season, and when they sacked Howard Johnson to name Martinez, their offense ranked last in the majors with a .233 batting average and last in the American League, averaging 3.36 runs per game.
7. Weekly Power Rankings
1. Max Scherzer: Has allowed just one hit over 18 innings in his past two starts, against the Pirates and Brewers, while striking out 26 and walking one. Can a guy be underpaid at $210 million?
2. Pete Rose: Poised to star in The Notebook II with Rachel McAdams and James Garner?
3. Astros passwords: Maybe CarlosCorreaRocks isn’t a good idea.
4. McDonald’s: Closing more restaurants than they’re opening in the United States this year for the first time since 1970. Sounds like the way the Phillies are going.
5. Giants manager Bruce Bochy stranded at Dodger Stadium: Team bus left thinking everyone was aboard. The skipper was forced to call a cab. The way the Giants have been pounding the Dodgers this year, Tommy Lasorda should have called Bochy a cab to get him off the Dodgers’ property.
8. The Angels and the 1 Percent
The most bizarre story last week was off the field, when Robert Alvarado, the Angels’ vice president of marketing and ticketing sales, resigned.
Speaking to the Orange County Register last month, he said the Angels were OK with a downturn in ticket sales in 2015 if they sell higher-priced tickets to higher-income fans. Alvarado told the newspaper:
We may not be reaching as many of the people on the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder, but those people, they may enjoy the game, but they pay less, and we’re not seeing the conversion on the per-caps. In doing so, the ticket price that we’re offering those people, it’s not like I can segregate them, because I’m offering it up to the public, and I’m basically downselling everybody else in order to accommodate them.
As far as ticket plans go, I’ve heard better.
9. Matt Harvey at 50
Fifty games, that is. The kid is just 26 but through his first 50 games, he ranks with some pretty heady company. Check out this from stats guru Bill Chuck:
9a. Rock ‘n’ Roll Lyric of the Week
Presumably, Pablo Sandoval and Hanley Ramirez are not under this “angels” umbrella, but James Taylor has released a new album featuring a song about the Red Sox, Angels of Fenway (and the reviews are brutal):
“We were living on a tear and a sigh
“In the shadow of the Bronx machine
“Man, you could feel it smolder
“The whole town had an attitude
“Then you’d get a little chip on your shoulder
“Say something that’s downright rude
“Oh, damn them Yankees
“Outspending everybody two to one
“Picking up on the cream of the crop
“Stealing everyone’s favorite son
“Angels of Fenway, hear our prayer
“We have been chastened
“We have been patient”
—James Taylor, Angels of Fenway
Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.
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