Unwritten

by Danny Knobler

  “Why don’t we get a shot, Tommy?” Collins screams.

  “Because that makes it worse,” Hallion says. “Terry, that makes it fucking worse.”

  “I know it,” Collins says. “But MLB did nothing to that guy! Nothing!”

  “You know I can’t control that,” says Hallion. “I’m telling you, our ass is in the jackpot now.”

  In other words, the umpires felt they had no choice but to eject Syndergaard, because they and everyone else watching understood the Mets pitcher was absolutely throwing at Utley. The Mets were upset their player got hurt on Utley’s slide, and they were doubly upset that Utley never served a suspension for the play. MLB initially suspended Utley for two games, but it was withdrawn without ever being served.

  Even without a suspension, Utley didn’t play in the two games that followed the Tejada injury. He pinch hit in the ninth inning of Game 5, but with a one-run lead the Mets weren’t going to risk putting him on base. Instead, they threw at him seven months later.

  As it turned out, Utley got some revenge of his own. After ­Syndergaard was gone from the game, the Dodgers second baseman hit two home runs to lead his team to a 9–1 win.

  Hunter Strickland waited more than two years to get back at Bryce Harper for a perceived slight.

  Harper hit two long home runs off Strickland in the 2014 National League Division Series between Harper’s Washington Nationals and Strickland’s San Francisco Giants. They were big home runs, and Harper stopped to watch them before circling the bases.

  Not much was said about what Harper did, but Strickland obviously noticed. He didn’t face Harper again until May 2017. With two out and nobody on in the eighth inning that day, he threw a 97.8 mph first-pitch fastball aimed directly at Harper’s right hip.

  Harper seemed to know immediately what it was about. He pointed his bat at Strickland, then tossed the bat away and charged the mound.

  “History,” Nationals television analyst F.P. Santangelo said immediately.

  “He hit me in the right spot, so I do respect him for that,” Harper said. “He didn’t come up and in toward my face like some guys do, so I respect him on that level.”

  But Harper thought Strickland was wrong to do it, because it had been so long and because the Giants had gone on to win the 2014 series despite Harper’s home runs.

  “It just wasn’t relevant,” Harper said. “Like I said, it was three years ago, over a thousand days ago I guess. I don’t know why he’s thinking about it.”

  Strickland never addressed why he was thinking about it. He followed the pitchers’ code of not even admitting he was throwing at Harper, probably hoping MLB would go easier on him if he didn’t acknowledge the obvious. As it was, he still got suspended for six games (while Harper got four for charging the mound).

  Was it worth it? Only Strickland can answer that question.

  Did he wait too long? Baseball history suggests it’s never too late to right a perceived wrong.

  Pitchers never forget. In September 1975, in the final game of his 17-year Hall of Fame career, Bob Gibson allowed a grand slam to Pete LaCock. It was nearly the final batter Gibson faced. He got the third out of the inning, on a Don Kessinger groundout, and that was it. Except the way LaCock told the story years later, he and Gibson were playing in an old-timers game in Kansas City sometime in the 1980s. Bob Feller was pitching, but when Gibson saw LaCock at the plate, he insisted on taking the mound—and he drilled LaCock in the back!

  “I’ve been waiting years to do that,” Gibson yelled.

  And the unwritten rules don’t include anything saying that’s too long to wait.

  20. When Even Teammates Don’t Like It

  WHEN A PITCHER THROWS AT A HITTER AND HE is seen as following the unwritten rules, the pitcher gains respect. And not just from his teammates.

  In many cases like that, the batter understands and takes his base with nothing else said.

  But when a pitcher throws at hitters for the wrong reasons, or when he throws in the wrong spot—i.e. too close to the batter’s head—not even his own teammates will feel bound to defend him.

  Take what happened in the final week of the 2009 season. The Minnesota Twins and Detroit Tigers were involved in an ­American League Central race that would go to a one-game playoff in Game 163, but the dispute that day wasn’t between teams.

  Apparently upset that the Tigers twice took second base on defensive indifference in a game the Twins led 8–2, rookie Twins reliever Jose Mijares threw a fastball behind Tiger shortstop Adam Everett’s back. When Tigers pitcher Jeremy Bonderman responded by hitting Twins outfielder Delmon Young on the leg, Young knew exactly who to blame.

  He got up and pointed, but not at Bonderman or anyone else with the Tigers. He pointed at his own dugout, at Mijares.

  “He needs to understand how to play the game,” Young told reporters later. “This isn’t the minor leagues over here.… You can’t throw behind their players and expect nothing to happen.”

  Young’s teammates seemed to feel the same way, with shortstop Orlando Cabrera calling what Mijares did “a selfish act” and Twins manager Ron Gardenhire calling his Tigers counterpart, Jim Leyland, to apologize.

  “Our pitcher lost his cool out there and made a mistake,” ­Gardenhire told reporters. “[The Tigers] did what they had to do, and it’s over with and they did the right thing, what they had to do, and we screwed up.”

  In Mijares’ case, his screwup only cost Young a painful fastball to the leg. Young was angry, but he stayed in the game and was back in the lineup the next day, too.

  That’s better than what happened to Derek Bell when he was playing for the Houston Astros in 1995.

  Doug Brocail was pitching for the Astros against the Atlanta Braves that day, and in the second inning, Brocail gave up a long home run to Braves outfielder David Justice.

  “It was probably eight rows from hitting the back wall behind the seats,” Brocail remembered years later. “If it’s in Boston, it’s probably one seat shy of hitting that red seat that Ted Williams hit. He hit the ball and went, ‘Whewww!’ I didn’t like it, so later in that game I smoked him.”

  He sure did, for no reason other than being upset by the home run and Justice’s reaction to it. The problem with that was that Bell ended up paying the price.

  Justice was the Braves right fielder that day. Upset that Justice was hit, Braves starter Steve Avery responded by throwing at the Astros right fielder: Bell.

  Avery followed the unwritten rules. He didn’t throw at Bell’s head. The pitch hit him in the left thigh. That’s normally a safe spot to get hit, but in this case Bell eventually needed surgery to repair a blood clot in the thigh and didn’t play the rest of the season.

  “I ended up being the bad guy,” Brocail said.

  That said, he still doesn’t regret hitting Justice.

  “Absolutely not,” he said. “If he had just hit the ball and run around the bases, everything would have been fine. I still to this day think I would probably plunk him.”

  To this day, hitters get upset if they get plunked simply because their own pitcher was upset about giving up a long home run. They get upset with their own pitcher, though, as opposed to the pitcher who threw at them in retaliation.

  “I know sometimes I have to wear it,” said Eric Thames, who knew he could become a target for retaliation in 2017, when he hit 31 home runs and was batting in the middle of the order for the Milwaukee Brewers.

  It can get complicated, because if the whole team thinks an opposing hitter is showing them up, they’re going to be fully behind any one of their pitchers who retaliates by throwing at him. But if that pitcher is responding to a perceived slight that his teammates don’t feel, or if he is simply hitting a batter because he’s tired of giving up runs, he can have big problems with his own hitters.

  In the first case, it’
s the wildly celebrating hitter who is seen as breaking the unwritten rules. In the second, it’s the wildly sensitive pitcher.

  It can make all the difference in the world.

  21. Don’t Call Me Coach (But You Can Come Talk to Me)

  MOST OF THE UNWRITTEN RULES CHANGE WHEN players change. They’re the ones who decide something offends them, and they’re the ones usually in charge of doling out baseball justice.

  Managers can tell their pitchers they don’t believe in ­retaliation, as Torey Lovullo does now and as Earl Weaver did years ago. But it’s still the pitcher with the ball in his hand.

  Managers can decide some offense screams out for retribution, but it’s still the pitcher who must do it. Mickey Lolich wrote in his 2018 book Joy in Tigertown that he always refused such a request, because he felt so bad about seriously injuring a batter he threw at in a Babe Ruth League game while growing up. Lolich wrote that when Billy Martin managed him with the Detroit Tigers in 1971–73, Martin threatened to fine him.

  “It will cost you $100 if you don’t drill him,” Martin told him. “And if you don’t do it the second time I tell you to, it will cost you $200. It will keep going up.”

  “I didn’t care,” Lolich wrote. “I refused to throw at hitters.”

  For the most part, though, the manager is the boss. He’s also not called a coach. That’s one of the first things every player learns after getting into pro ball. You call the manager by his first name or his nickname, or you call him “skip” (short for skipper). You don’t call him “coach.”

  But just because you’re on first-name terms with him doesn’t mean he’s not in charge.

  The best managers have the ability to stay out of the clubhouse and still stay on top of everything that goes on in there. Veteran infielder Martin Prado never forgot what Hall of Fame manager Bobby Cox said in an early meeting when Prado was a rookie.

  “You won’t see me around this clubhouse,” Cox told his team. “This is for the players. But if you see me around, you’d better worry, because something’s going on.”

  Before games, Cox would be in his office or in the dugout, or in a little room he used just behind the Braves dugout at Turner Field.

  “He created this environment where everyone respected him,” Prado said. “Everyone wanted to do something to earn his respect.”

  Watch the next time you see the Braves play during the day. You won’t see any player or coach with his sunglasses over the top of his cap. It was a Bobby Cox rule, one Brian Snitker kept going when he became Braves manager. You don’t cover up the Braves’ “A” on the front of the cap.

  It’s all about respect.

  The best managers end up forming close relationships with many of their players, but they stop short of ever being buddy­-buddy with them. The best managers gain so much respect from their players that the players don’t even want to cross them.

  Juan Samuel tells the story of coming to Sparky Anderson’s Tigers as a 33-year-old veteran in 1994. Samuel quickly became friends with Cecil Fielder, and the two of them liked to go out for a drink every now and then. The Tigers had a rule banning alcohol on team flights, but Sammy and Cecil would sneak a bottle of vodka and some orange juice onto the plane in brown bags.

  They thought they were getting away with it until one day Sparky called the two into his office.

  “I know what you’re doing,” he said. “And it’s okay. But don’t let any of the young players see it.”

  From that day forward, Samuel and Fielder didn’t bring alcohol onto a Tigers plane again.

  “We felt like we’d be letting Sparky down,” Samuel said. “And we couldn’t do that.”

  Anderson was from a different era, but the story tells you a lot about the player-manager relationship, right up until the present time. Managers will always allow veteran players a little leeway, but they and the players understand what lines can’t be crossed.

  Player-manager relationships have changed over time, but the need for a manager to understand his players in order to get the most out of them has never changed.

  “I treat all of my players the same, and I treat all of my players differently,” Jim Leyland liked to say during his 22 seasons as a major-league manager.

  All of his players mattered to him. But some of them responded best to a kick in the butt, while others performed best with a pat on the butt.

  “My job is to push them when they need to be pushed, to hug them when they need to be hugged, to believe in them always, and set a culture where they’ll believe in themselves and they’ll prioritize winning,” A.J. Hinch said in a press conference a few minutes after his Houston Astros had won Game 7 of the 2017 World Series.

  When Joe Maddon took over the Cubs before the 2015 season, one of the first things he did was fly to Puerto Rico to meet Javier Baez. Baez had just just turned 22. He had played just 52 games in the major leagues.

  “The big thing was to get to know him because he was going to be part of the future soon, to develop a relationship with him,” Maddon told Tom Verducci, describing the visit for Verducci’s book The Cubs Way: The Zen of Building the Best Team in Baseball and Breaking the Curse.

  Maddon has always had unique ways to reach his players. In 2018, he started something new, arranging to go to dinner with a player when the Cubs had an off day or a day game.

  “I really like the concept a lot,” Maddon said. “Any time you can get with your players away from the field, in a more casual setting, in a more social setting, I think the conversation has a chance to reach a level it can’t reach in my office, or it can’t reach walking around the outfield. I take some of my coaches with me. I like to take the more entertaining coaches.”

  Maddon turned 64 years old in 2018, but his style of managing fits the modern game and modern players. He’s also old enough to remember when the game was different.

  “I remember I had one manager who said, ‘There’s 25 of you and only one of me, so you’d better learn me,’” Maddon said. “I think if there’s 25 of you and one of me, I need to learn 25 of you. But that was directly said to us, and I’ll never forget that. You learn from the people you had in the past that you never want to be like, and that was one right there.”

  Maddon has long believed in listening to his players, back to the days when he coached and managed in the Angels system. Clint Hurdle, who turned 61 in 2018 and is from the same generation, has adapted over time.

  “Society has changed,” Hurdle said. “I have a 33-year-old daughter and that’s very helpful, because she’s the same age as some of the players. I talk to her about how to communicate with them.”

  When Torey Lovullo took over as the Diamondbacks manager in 2017, he understood that modern players weren’t as willing to just accept anything the manager told them. Lovullo had great respect for Anderson, who was his first manager with the Tigers in 1988, but a decade later when he was in his final year as a player with the 1999 Phillies, Terry Francona showed him a different way.

  “He kind of took it to the next level, where he explored what I was thinking and what I was feeling, and I enjoyed that,” Lovullo said. “I think the players today enjoy that, too. Players have become very expressive and they want to share, and that’s important. Really what I’ve said from Day 1 here is what the player thinks matters. I really believe that. That’s how this game has evolved.”

  Lovullo now likes to think of his Diamondbacks as an organization that listens to its players. He points to how the team treated Jake Lamb when Lamb was about to come off the disabled list in May 2018. Rather than simply decree whether Lamb would do a rehab assignment in the minor leagues before returning, the D-Backs asked him what would best get him ready.

  Lamb chose the rehab, telling the team he wanted to get in the routine of preparing for a game, rather than staying at the training complex and getting more at-bats.

  “There
are certain guidelines, team rules,” Lovullo said. “But in an interaction with a player who feels like he’s not getting the right amount of playing time, in my generation you’d probably get thrown out of the manager’s office immediately upon walking in there. Today, when someone comes into my office, I sit ’em down and let ’em purge. I try to relate to them. And then I tell them what my thoughts are.”

  And what would Sparky have done?

  “He would have said, ‘Young man, I’ve been in this game a long time. You see where your locker is? Go sit in front of your locker, and I’ll get you when I need you.’”

  22. The Kids Are Alright (and It’s Okay to Hear from Them)

  ONE DAY IN LATE MAY OF 2018, JUSTIN UPTON sat in the Los Angeles Angels clubhouse and glanced up at a television. The MLB Network was playing, as it does regularly before games in every major-league clubhouse. Scrawling across the bottom of the screen were names of the projected top picks in baseball’s amateur draft, which was a little more than a week away.

  Thirteen years earlier, Upton himself had been the first overall pick in the draft, chosen by the Arizona Diamondbacks out of a Virginia high school in June of 2005. There was no MLB Network then. The draft wasn’t shown on television. It was conducted by conference call. The players chosen weren’t well known, although in the years to come they would be. After Upton, players like Ryan Braun, Troy Tulowitzki, Ryan Zimmerman, Jay Bruce, Jacoby Ellsbury, and Alex Gordon were taken in the first round.

  Upton signed for a $6.1 million bonus. He was in the major leagues just two years later, at age 19.

  And compared to those still-to-be-drafted players scrawling across the screen in front of him, he was still relatively ­anonymous.

  “They’re under more of a spotlight than I ever was,” Upton said. “I almost feel sorry for them. They’re not allowed to be kids. When I came to the big leagues, I could go have lunch without anyone noticing. I could roam around Arizona. I could do whatever I wanted.”