Major League Baseball’s season had been under way for less than a week before two teams became mired in familiar debates about the sport’s “unwritten rules.”
The Minnesota Twins carried a 7-0 lead into the bottom of the ninth in their Sunday matchup against the Baltimore Orioles. This essentially meant that the game was over; Baseball Reference, an online trove of historical baseball statistics, calculated the Twins’ win probability to be 100 percent. It was only a matter of how the final three outs would be recorded.
With one out in the final frame, Orioles’ rookie catcher Chance Sisco, playing in his second-ever major league game, came up batting left-handed. He faced Jose Berrios, the Twins’ starter who was still in the game having given up only one hit thus far — a double to Sisco. The Twins employed a defensive shift, moving their third-baseman over to the right side of the field and leaving his post unmanned. Sisco, seeing the Twins’ defensive vulnerability, laid down a bunt and hustled it out for a single. This was followed by a walk and a single, which in turn were followed by a popout, a strikeout and the end of the game. The Twins congratulated themselves on the field and then headed for the showers.
However, Sisco’s bunt apparently left the Twins a little miffed. Minnesota second baseman Brian Dozier gave reporters a taste of his opprobium, sounding like a parent who had thought better of scolding someone else’s misbehaving child.
“Obviously we’re not a fan of it,” Dozier said. “He’s a young kid. I could very easily have said something about it at second base, but they have tremendous veteran leadership over there. I’m sure they’ll address that. It’s all about learning. You learn up here.”
Left-fielder Eddie Rosario struck a similar tone: “Nobody liked that. No, no, no. That’s not a good play.” Berrios cast Sisco’s small ball as an offense against the sport itself. “I don’t care if he’s bunting,” the pitcher said. “I just know it’s not good for baseball in that situation. That’s it.”
Just about every baseball fan with a twitter account took to the cloud to defend the Orioles’ rookie. Sabermetrics’ founding father Bill James tweeted “I think the Commissioner should suspend any veteran player or m’ger (sic) who makes comments suggesting that a young player is doing something improper when he is simply trying to win. That’s intolerable.”
The silly suggestion aside, James’ critique embodies what has become a widespread frustration with what many scornfully call the “unwritten rules” of baseball. Any time a player claims one of his opponents has violated an implicit rule of conduct, the accuser is subject to public derision of the kind that James dished out via twitter. The unwritten rules have fallen far out of favor. Their defenders are cast as stuffy, patriarchal fuddy-duddies, who probably spend their weekends kicking kids off of their lawns and pontificating on the demise of the fullback. “Let the players have fun” is the traditional cry against these imagined old men.
Such complaints are, for the most part, spot on. The debate over baseball’s codes of conduct could well be the subject of an anthropology class. Major League Baseball’s player pool consists mostly of American-born players steeped in the southern culture of honor and Latin-American players, who learned the game in leagues that boast nothing like the MLB’s tradition of quasi-chivalric codes. The meeting of these groups, even with the good faith present among most of today’s players, predictably causes moments of miscommunication.
The most commonly-contested unwritten rule is the prohibition on celebrating home runs. This aspect of the code considers “admiring a home run” — standing at the plate to watch the ball clear the fence before beginning the trot around the bases — a severe affront. It “shows the pitcher up,” humiliating him in front of his teammates, the crowd and the television audience. The punishment for this offense? A fastball to the ribs. And that’s if you’re lucky.
There’s a certain lawlessness to this idea. Must celebrating success really be met with a response that, at least in theory, can end a career? To those of us who were not raised in the culture of honor, the answer obviously is “no.” As legendary a figure as he was, Bob Gibson’s days are behind us. Yet the unwritten rules have been given something of a short shrift, at least analytically. It is worth thinking about both the purposes they can or did serve and the reasons players believed them to be necessary.
Home run admiration presents a fascinating case study. The matchup between pitcher and batter is a unique one-on-one standoff in a team sport. It has “three true outcomes” — strikeouts, walks and home runs. When a pitcher walks a batter or gives up a home run, he failed on his own. Nobody can even begin to point to a failure on the part of his teammates. The pitcher “didn’t give the defense a chance.” A batter who stands at home plate after smashing a homerun highlights that fact, that the pitcher let his team down. He reminds the pitcher and everyone else that he can stand at the plate as long as he wanted, and nobody can get him out.
The defense has been taken out of the equation, and the pitcher must stand, humiliated, in the center of the infield until the next batter steps into the box. This is why celebrations by closers, after sealing the team’s win, are more common and better received. The celebration is less personal. It highlights a team’s win, not an individual’s failure. Accordingly, nobody on the losing team will feel a need to heal his wounded honor.
The bunting situation is a little more practically concerned. From what the Twins said, it seems to be much more in the spirit of “let’s all go home” than any rules about honor. The game was all but over. All Sisco’s bunt did was prolong the inevitable, keeping both teams in the ballpark and not at the airport. Further, it threatened to push Berrios over the pitch limit the Twins’ coaching staff probably had set for him. This would start the time-consuming process of bringing in some middle reliever who would likely give up several hits before finding the team’s last couple outs. He might then be sent down to the Twins’ AAA affiliate in exchange for a fresher arm.
Unlike the home run bat flip, this was not some complicated question of honor. It was a predictable difference in attitude, between a never-say-die rookie in his second MLB game and a grizzled veteran, who is playing his third of 162 this year. One wanted a hit. The other wanted a shower.
