At least until he got to the ballpark.
In 2007, rookies were still expected to be rookies, in the traditional sense.
“When I first came up, you didn’t talk,” said Peter Moylan, who debuted with the Braves in 2006 and was back pitching for them in 2018. “You just sat in your locker, sat on your hands.”
“That was so hard for me, because I have such an open personality,” said Sergio Romo, who came to the big leagues for the first time with the 2008 San Francisco Giants. “I didn’t say a word. No knock against the veterans we had, but it was, ‘Congratulations, you’ve made it to the big leagues, but you haven’t done anything yet.’”
It was part of the unwritten rules of the game, as it had been for years and years. Justin Verlander came to the big leagues in 2005, and after he’d had a few years of service time he thought nothing of looking over at a mouthy rookie and saying, “Hey rook, know your place.”
By 2018, those unwritten rules had changed. Verlander said he wouldn’t issue such a directive anymore.
“A lot has changed,” Verlander said. “It’s younger guys acting like veteran guys. When I came up, if a young guy hit a homer and pimped it, he was going to get hit. If a veteran did it, it was okay. I think a lot of it may be because of MLB Network and the availability of social media. Guys get sensationalized at a younger age. You get here and you’ve already got all this hype. You’re not a nobody.”
For the most part, the younger players still rely on the their older colleagues to teach them the unwritten rules and the way to act in the big leagues. There are still stories of older players taking a just-arrived rookie to go shopping and then putting down his own credit card to make sure the kid has nice clothes to wear on the team plane. But there are also stories like the one that became public in July 2018 with the St. Louis Cardinals.
Bud Norris was a 33-year-old reliever for the Cardinals, and Jordan Hicks was a hard-throwing 21-year-old who jumped straight from Class A to the major leagues. Norris took it on himself to make sure Hicks understood he had to show up on time and do all the things required of a big-league player.
Norris didn’t always express himself in the best way, sometimes yelling across the clubhouse at Hicks. Hicks didn’t always appreciate what Norris was trying to do for him.
And Cardinals manager Mike Matheny, who had empowered Norris to become the leader of the bullpen, backed his veteran in an interview with Mark Saxon of The Athletic.
“I think the game has progressively gotten a little softer,” Matheny said. “Man, it had some teeth not that long ago.”
The Cardinals fired Matheny four days after the story appeared, not because of that quote but because his team was underachieving. But in a game where there are more and more young players and those players have more and more status, Matheny probably didn’t help himself by encouraging veterans to show those “teeth.”
Young players today feel much more free to express themselves, in the clubhouse and on the field. Freddie Freeman, who at 28 qualified as a veteran on a young Braves team in 2018, marveled at how one of his young teammates reacted to getting a hit in a regular-season game at Yankee Stadium.
Freeman was raised in a culture where emotions were to be kept in check. He learned from Chipper Jones, and he learned you were supposed to be the same guy when you went 0-for-20 as you were when you were rolling along with 10 hits in your last 20 at-bats.
Now he sees 20-year-old Ronald Acuna Jr. raising his arms and celebrating at first base after beating out an infield hit.
“I’m all for that,” Freeman said. “It’s fun. It’s a breath of fresh air. He’s just excited to be playing baseball. Believe me, I’m never going to do that, but I’m not going to be the one taking anything away from these guys.”
Veterans like Freeman will still take a young player aside if they see a celebration getting out of hand, or if it crosses the line to where it could be seen as disrespecting an opponent.
But fun? If there was an unwritten rule before against showing you had fun playing the game, that’s gone now. Even most of the veteran players are fine with that.
“The whole game trending younger is great for the excitement,” Moylan said.
Most older players in the game today welcome the change. Some have even worked hard to encourage young players to feel comfortable, as CC Sabathia has done with the New York Yankees.
In a story Marc Carig wrote for The Athletic in 2018, Sabathia said he never wanted a young player to experience what he had when he joined the Cleveland Indians as a 20-year-old in 2001.
“You didn’t feel welcome,” Sabathia said. “It was hard. I didn’t enjoy my first couple of years in the big leagues.”
Sabathia told Carig he got hassled by older Indians players simply for sitting on a sofa in the middle of the clubhouse. He said he was determined to change the culture when he got older. As it turned out, Sabathia became a veteran as baseball’s overall culture was changing, and he helped the Yankees lead the way.
“They made it a point to say, we don’t care if you’re a rookie,” Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge told Carig. “We don’t care if you’re a free agent or if you’ve been traded over. You have the pinstripes on, you’re going to help the team. We’re going to do whatever we can to make you comfortable so you can go out there and perform at your best.”
More and more, young players have become key to lineups and rotations. More and more, rookies don’t feel alone in their own clubhouse.
“There’s a lot more young teams,” said Jason Heyward, who was 20 years old when he debuted in 2010 but by 2018 had begun to feel like an older veteran at 28. “Clubhouses are getting younger. It’s hard for somebody that’s 24 and has two years in or is 25 and has three years in to tell a guy just coming up that ‘You need to calm that down.’ That’s just part of the game. Things evolve.”
The Braves team Heyward joined included a 37-year-old Chipper Jones, a 33-year-old David Ross, and a 33-year-old Troy Glaus. The Braves starting pitcher in Heyward’s first game was 36-year-old Derek Lowe.
“They wanted me to laugh,” Heyward said. “But I’d sit at my locker. For the most part, that was the only place I sat. Speak when spoken to. Got on the plane last. I remember the day Troy Glaus pushed me and said, ‘You’re good now, you can go.’ I came up with some veterans and some good veterans.
“And they had it way worse than I did when they were coming up.”
Baseball’s attitude toward younger players had already begun to change by the time Heyward arrived in the big leagues. The changes continued, and after the 2016 season MLB’s new Collective Bargaining Agreement put an end to some of the rookie hazing practices that had become standard over the years.
While teams could still have rookie dress-up days, they were no longer allowed to force players to dress up as women or do anything else that would be considered offensive.
Baseball was simply adapting to societal norms, but the effect was to change some rituals that had gone on for years. Veterans had to find other ways to encourage team bonding, and to get young players to understand the way they were expected to act.
“I had Eddie Guardado around my first spring training,” said Drew Storen, who was a first-round draft pick out of Stanford when he showed up in Washington Nationals camp in the spring of 2010. “He told me to respect the guys who have been around. I always had to have gum in my back pocket for him. Did he ever chew the gum? Probably not, but that wasn’t the point.”
It turned out the Nationals would release Guardado before spring training even ended that year. He wouldn’t ever pitch professionally again, but Storen never forgot the lessons he learned that spring.
That passing on of knowledge and of the game’s tradition still happens, but as rosters and clubhouses get younger, the rookies of today aren’t always as willing to defer to their elders.
“I
came up with Cal and Eddie,” said Gregg Olson, who in 1988 joined an Orioles team where Cal Ripken Jr. and Eddie Murray were established stars. “They were never rude, but other guys would let me know, ‘Hey kid, sit down and zip it. Nobody wants to hear you.’ I didn’t say a word for a year.”
And Olson was the American League Rookie of the Year in 1989.
It wasn’t just a matter of not talking. Young players were expected to defer to veterans in the clubhouse, on team planes and buses, and even in training rooms and batting cages.
Mike Greenwell fought Mo Vaughn at the batting cage when Vaughn was a Red Sox rookie in 1991, at a time when Red Sox veterans thought Vaughn was taking liberties before he’d earned them. The two later went on to become good friends, and were inducted into the Red Sox Hall of Fame on the same day.
When Tino Martinez took over as hitting coach of the Miami Marlins in 2013, he was a very respected player who was working as a coach for the first time. It didn’t go well, in part because in his view the Marlins’ young players weren’t following etiquette in the batting cage before games.
The way Tino described things in a story by Ken Rosenthal, then of Fox Sports, three Marlins players didn’t pick up balls in the cage, and didn’t take it kindly when he told them they should. That’s how Martinez had learned to do things. That’s the way he’d seen things done with the Yankees, who were filled with veteran stars.
“If Bernie Williams is hitting in front of me and I’m waiting with Paul O’Neill or whoever, there are no questions asked,” Martinez told Rosenthal. “You help pick the balls up, and the next guy hits. Whoever is hanging around helps pick the balls up. It’s standard.”
When Martinez saw Marlins players standing around letting others pick up the balls, he called them out on it. He admitted to using some rough language when he did it, but nothing you wouldn’t hear in a baseball clubhouse every day. He also admitted grabbing Derek Dietrich by the jersey when Dietrich refused to help. And when it came to a head and the players complained about Martinez being too combative, Martinez resigned.
Sometimes, though, the young player is taught a lesson that sticks. Take what happened to Noah Syndergaard in his first major-league spring training with the New York Mets.
The Mets were playing an intra-squad game. Syndergaard wasn’t scheduled to pitch in the game, but as a rookie he was expected to be in the dugout supporting his teammates. Instead, he was in the clubhouse sitting down to eat.
Mets captain David Wright got his at-bats, and when he was done he grabbed his bats to take them back to the clubhouse. There was Syndergaard sitting there at a table with his lunch in front of him. Wright told Syndergaard to get back to the dugout, immediately. Veteran pitcher Bobby Parnell, who also walked into the clubhouse, picked up Syndergaard’s lunch and dumped it in the trash.
Syndergaard learned his lesson. It’s fine for a kid to eat, but as a young player he was expected to be in the dugout supporting his teammates first. Not everyone is in the dugout at all times during every game, but if a young player is missing there had better be a good reason.
“I’m hungry” is not a good reason, especially not from a kid who hasn’t yet paid his dues.
23. Watch What You Say (or Tweet)
WHENEVER VETERAN PLAYERS OF TODAY complain about how young players act when they come to the big leagues, someone invariably brings up the other side of it.
“I’m sure glad social media didn’t exist when I was young,” the older player will say.
And then he’ll look up from his iPhone or iPad.
Some players pride themselves on ignoring Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, just as some players in the past never wanted to read the newspapers (or said they didn’t). Others keep a Twitter feed for marketing purposes but don’t touch it themselves, preferring to hand it off to an agent or other aide.
But in the modern world, no one escapes social media entirely. Every player knows it is there, for better or for worse. It’s nice for players to be able to communicate directly with fans. It’s not so nice when somebody’s camera phone captures an embarrassing moment and that person shares it instantly around the world.
It’s even worse when your own Twitter feed includes something truly offensive, as happened to three young players in 2018.
Milwaukee Brewers reliever Josh Hader was enjoying his first trip to the All-Star Game when a Twitter user dug into his past and found tweets that were racist and homophobic. The tweets were six and seven years old, posted when Hader was still in high school, but that hardly excuses them.
To his credit, Hader never claimed his account had been hacked. He never even asked how in the world someone found the old tweets. He apologized, as fully as anyone can at a time when he is also admitting to once typing the vilest of words into his phone.
“I was young, immature, and stupid,” Hader said.
Soon enough, he wasn’t alone.
The same day Sean Newcomb was taking a no-hit bid into the ninth inning for the Atlanta Braves, someone else was digging into his Twitter past and finding racist and homophobic tweets from his high school years. Newcomb also apologized, as did Trea Turner of the Washington Nationals when his own ugly old tweets were shared on the Internet.
“I’m truly sorry for what I said, and I want to take full responsibility for that,” Turner said at a Nationals Park press conference.
The unwritten rules of the game are simple here. Be careful of anything you say or do, because somebody will find out and then everybody will know. And if anything like that does come out, offer up as quick and sincere an apology as you can.
Be careful with what you say. Be careful with what you post. Be careful, even, with what you “like.”
In the aftermath of Game 2 of the Yankees-Indians division series in 2017, when Yankees manager Joe Girardi didn’t use a replay challenge when he should have and the Yankees lost the game, a Yankees fan went on Instagram and posted: “Let’s hope Joe’s contract is not renewed after the season. He’s a complete imbecile.” No big deal, except someone noticed that the account @_thecubanmissle54 “liked” the post. @_thecubanmissile54 is Aroldis Chapman, the Yankees closer.
It’s possible some public relations person runs Chapman’s account for him. It’s possible Chapman hit the wrong button. Girardi accepted Chapman’s apology and his explanation it was “an accident.”
In 2015, Pablo Sandoval got in bigger trouble over an Instagram “like.” A Red Sox blogger checking out the social media site noticed Sandoval had “liked” two provocative pictures of a young lady. No big deal, except he did it during a game! Sandoval admitted it, saying he had gone to the bathroom and checked his phone on the way. The Red Sox benched him for a game as punishment.
But even in the era before social media got so big, players had to watch how they acted off the field. Even then, stories would circulate if a player got in a fight in a bar, or even if a group of players were hanging out in the clubhouse while a game was going on.
Players aren’t required to be in the dugout at all times, and there are often good reasons for a player to go to the clubhouse. Some pitchers who are charting games find it easier to do off the television feed. Some players will watch video, either of their at-bats or of pitchers they may face. A designated hitter may ride an exercise bike to stay loose between at-bats.
All good reasons, and all perfectly acceptable. But sometimes what happens in the clubhouse finds its way into print or onto the Internet, and sometimes it can be embarrassing.
After the Red Sox collapsed in September 2011, going from having the best record in the league at the end of August to not even making the playoffs, a story appeared in the Boston Globe. Among other things, it said pitchers Josh Beckett, Jon Lester, and John Lackey spent much of the month eating biscuits and fried chicken and drinking beer in the clubhouse during games. In many fans’ minds, it became the reason the Red Sox col
lapsed, even though some things like that have gone on in many clubhouses. The biggest difference with the 2011 Red Sox was that someone actually talked about it.
“I can guarantee that these guys drank less beer than a lot of other teams,” manager Terry Francona wrote in the book he did with Dan Shaughnessy, Francona: The Red Sox Years. “I was most disturbed by the idea that stuff wasn’t staying in the clubhouse. They weren’t protecting each other. If somebody was drinking, they weren’t drinking a lot. I’m not saying it’s right, but I was more disturbed by our lack of unity.”
Francona understood that if stuff like that was getting out, it meant the team had bigger problems than just a few pieces of chicken or a few bottles of beer.
The 1999 Mets had a similar issue, when it came out that Rickey Henderson and Bobby Bonilla were in the clubhouse playing cards during a game in the National League Championship Series against the Braves. The Mets lost the series in six games.
Bonilla explained in a radio interview years later that Henderson was upset with manager Bobby Valentine for double-switching him out of the game in the eighth inning.
“Rickey says to me ‘Bo, get the deck of cards, let me just relax my mind.’ And we had actually played cards all year long,” Bonilla said on WFAN. “He was so upset, so we can’t say ‘So what,’ because you don’t want anything escalating after, so I just took care of the problem and let it go.”
But for years, many Mets fans came to believe that Henderson and Bonilla cared so little about an important game that they were playing cards as it went on.
24. Why Can’t We Be Friends?
GREGG OLSON WAS JUST 21 YEARS OLD WHEN he debuted with the Baltimore Orioles in 1988, less than three months after the Orioles made him the fourth overall pick in that summer’s amateur draft. Olson joined a team that began the season with a 21-game losing streak and finished it with a 54–107 record, but he quickly enjoyed personal success.
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