Unwritten

by Danny Knobler

  Showalter had made up his mind. Bonds would be intentionally walked, forcing in the Giants’ seventh run but taking away Bonds’ chance to tie or win the game.

  “It was the best opportunity to win the game,” Showalter said.

  Sure enough, it worked. After Olson intentionally walked Bonds, he got Brent Mayne to line out to right field to end the game.

  At Candlestick Park, the visiting dugout was on the third-base side. The visiting clubhouse was down the right-field line, accessible by a door that led directly to the playing field. Olson went straight there after the final out, not even bothering to stop by the dugout to pick up his jacket.

  “As I came in, [teammate] Willie Blair handed me a Bud Light and said, ‘Damn, you’re fun to watch.’” Olson said.

  Olson sat down and tried to process what he’d just done. Eventually, reporters told him it was the first bases-loaded walk in a major-league game since 1944, when New York Giants ­player-manager Mel Ott ordered pitcher Andy Hansen to walk Bill Nicholson of the Chicago Cubs. Ott himself was the last batter before that intentionally walked with the bases loaded, in 1929.

  When the reporters left, Olson went in to talk to Showalter.

  “The next time we do something that hasn’t been done in 54 years, can we have a mound conversation to talk about it first?” Olson asked. “I could have just hit [Bonds], and no one would have said anything about it.”

  In reality, Olson doesn’t mind his small place in intentional-­walk history. He’s not even the last to issue one with the bases loaded. In August 2008, then–Tampa Bay manager Joe Maddon had pitcher Grant Balfour give one to Josh Hamilton, then with the Texas Rangers.

  That one worked, too.

  Still, it’s been another decade since 2008, and no one else has tried it. But Showalter ordered another unconventional intentional walk late in the 2017 season.

  It was the ninth inning. Showalter’s Orioles led the Yankees 6–4 with two out and a runner on second base. Aaron Judge was coming to the plate.

  Showalter ordered him intentionally walked.

  He put the tying run on base. He brought the winning run to the plate. He chose to do it, violating the unwritten rule that says you never put the tying or winning run on base with an intentional walk.

  Showalter had his reasons. Judge had killed the Orioles all season, with 11 home runs and 24 RBI in 19 games. The ­Orioles hadn’t exactly handled Sanchez, either (he was hitting .368 against them with 12 RBI in 10 games), but he hadn’t killed them as much as Judge had.

  Anyway, Showalter broke the rule and got away with it. Britton struck out Sanchez, the game was over, and the Orioles had a win.

  “They’re both really good hitters,” Showalter said. “You’re really just picking your poison.”

  That’s true, but one poison risks tying the game. The other risks immediately losing it.

  Showalter’s choice between facing Judge and facing Sanchez wasn’t as clear as between facing Bonds and facing Mayne, but Anderson likely would have approved. Sparky always believed that the intentional walk gave a manager a choice of avoiding the other team’s most dangerous hitter.

  In his nine seasons managing the Cincinnati Reds, Sparky had Willie McCovey walked 22 times. He said years later he wished he had done it even more, no surprise given that McCovey still managed to hit 23 home runs and drive in 65 runs in 118 games against Sparky’s Reds.

  “Who do you think I am, Babe Ruth?” McCovey asked ­Anderson, in a story Sparky loved telling later in his career.

  “No,” Sparky replied. “You’re better.”

  Once Anderson moved to the American League with the Detroit Tigers, George Brett became his favored target. Anderson had Brett intentionally walked 28 times in 15 seasons. He also walked Eddie Murray and Don Mattingly 20 times apiece, and Ken Griffey Jr. 19 times (in just seven seasons).

  Anderson ordered his pitchers to avoid Griffey even when they weren’t intentionally walking him. In one three-game series in May 1993 at Seattle’s Kingdome, Griffey walked six times in 15 plate appearances. Finally, in the eighth inning of the final game of the series, Griffey came to the plate with runners at first and third and the Mariners just having taken a 6–5 lead.

  It made no sense to walk him in that spot, and Anderson had Bill Krueger pitch to him. That went even worse, with Griffey hitting a long three-run home run. As he crossed the plate after rounding the bases, Griffey grabbed his crotch and stared at Anderson in the Tigers dugout.

  As Larry Stone wrote 11 years later in the Seattle Times, Griffey and Anderson had history that went beyond a few intentional walks. Griffey’s father played for Anderson with the Reds, and Anderson had Merv Rettenmund pinch hit for him with the winning run on base in the 10th inning of Game 3 of the 1975 World Series.

  Later in that 1993 season, after the Tigers had thrown a few inside pitches to Griffey Jr., Ken Sr. told the Seattle Times: “Sparky wanted to get revenge. He has always been a vindictive [bleep]. I played for him for six years, so I know.”

  That may well have been true, but Anderson didn’t keep walking Junior because of old feelings about his father. He walked him for the same reason he walked McCovey and Brett: They were the hitters he didn’t want beating him.

  Anderson would even use the intentional walk in the first inning. He did that twice with Brett and eight times with McCovey.

  Just before Game 1 of the 1984 American League ­Champion­ship Series, Anderson was talking to Mike Downey, then a columnist with the Detroit Free Press. He told Downey he’d even be willing to walk Brett with the bases loaded, although he never ended up doing that (at least not intentionally).

  “That’s the way they pitched Ted Williams,” Downey told him.

  “This guy may be Ted Williams,” Anderson responded.

  “I ain’t sayin’ don’t never pitch to him,” Anderson said, as recounted by Downey a decade later. “I’m sayin’ don’t let Brett beat ya. If my team’s winnin’ and it’s late in the game and Brett’s got a chance to beat me, I ain’t pitchin’ to the guy, no way. Bases loaded, shoot. I’ll take my chances with whoever the hell’s on deck.”

  The funniest part of all this: Brett didn’t have a single walk in that ALCS. Not an intentional walk. Not an unintentional walk.

  Then again, Brett also didn’t beat Anderson in that series. The Tigers swept the Royals in three games and went on to beat the San Diego Padres in the World Series.

  Mike Scioscia did walk Alex Rodriguez intentionally three times in the 2009 American League Championship Series. A-Rod wasn’t always a big postseason threat, but that October he hit .455 with two home runs in the Division Series against the Minnesota Twins and .429 with three homers against ­Scioscia’s Angels.

  The first of those home runs came off Angels closer Brian Fuentes in the 11th inning of Game 2, tying a game the Yankees would go on to win in 13 innings. And it was that home run that set up an unusual strategy Scioscia would use twice in the next three games.

  In Game 3 and again in Game 5, first in a tie game in the ninth and the second time with the Angels leading by a run in the final inning, Scioscia would have Fuentes walk A-Rod intentionally with nobody on base.

  He was putting the winning run (in Game 3) and the tying run (in Game 5) on base. He was breaking an unwritten rule of the game.

  Scioscia understood as well as anyone that what he was doing was unconventional. He was also completely convinced he was doing the right thing.

  “In that situation you just want to keep Alex in the park,” Scioscia said after Game 5.

  In Game 3, it worked perfectly, with Fuentes retiring the next batter and the Angels going on to win in 11 innings. In Game 5, it nearly backfired. Fuentes followed the intentional walk with an unintentional walk and a hit batter to load the bases, before Nick Swisher popped up a full-count pitch to end the game.

  The ga
me would be remembered more for John Lackey yelling “This is mine!” when Scioscia came to the mound to take him out. The postseason would be remembered more for the Yankees winning their 27th World Series title.

  But in that ninth inning, the story was Scioscia going against the unwritten rules and surviving for another day.

  48. You Can Break Up a Double Play

  ADAM EATON’S PAGE IN THE WASHINGTON Nationals 2018 media guide lists him at 5’9”, 176 pounds. His stats page on Baseball-­Reference.com will tell you Eaton has hit 41 home runs, not in one season but in all seven of his major-league seasons put together. While he’s fast, he’s not Billy Hamilton fast or Trea Turner fast. According to MLB.com’s Statcast, Eaton’s average sprint speed of 27.5 feet per second ranked 246th in the major leagues in 2018.

  If Eaton is going to have value to justify the $8.4 million the Nationals are set to pay him in 2019, he has to generate it in other ways. He has to play the game hard while still playing it fair.

  He has to do things like he did in the first inning of an August 1, 2018, game at Nationals Park. Eaton had led off the inning with a single, and when Turner followed with a ground ball to shortstop, Eaton understood his one and only job was to make sure the Mets couldn’t turn a double play.

  Ever since Mets shortstop Ruben Tejada suffered a broken leg on a Chase Utley slide in the 2015 playoffs, breaking up double plays has become trickier. What once was a staple of baseball’s unwritten rules—the runner went in as hard as needed and it was the middle infielder’s responsibility to get out of harm’s way—became much more complicated when the so-called Utley rule went into effect before the 2016 season.

  In the simplest terms, a runner now must begin his slide before reaching the base, must be able to reach the base with his hand (and attempt to do so) and not slide past it. He also can’t change his path to move toward the fielder rather than the base.

  It doesn’t say you can’t break up a double play, but many baserunners seem to have no idea how to use a slide that is legal under current rules. They either don’t try, or they do what Manny Machado did in the 2018 National League Championship Series.

  Machado, playing for the Los Angeles Dodgers against the Milwaukee Brewers, twice slid into second with his arm raised to interfere with infielder Orlando Arcia. The second time, when Machado actually grabbed Arcia’s knee as he slid past, replay officials awarded the Brewers a double play.

  Eaton made a point of learning what he could and couldn’t do.

  In that 2018 game against the Mets, Eaton went in hard but he went in consistent with the current rules. Mets second baseman Phillip Evans suffered a broken leg on the play, but only because he set up on the first base side of the bag as he took the throw from shortstop Amed Rosario.

  The Mets challenged the play, insisting Eaton would have slid past the base if he hadn’t run into Evans first. But the umpires on the field and in the replay center ruled Eaton’s slide legal, and Major League Baseball issued a ruling agreeing with that call.

  “Really the only contact left in the sport is at second base,” Eaton said. “There’s still contact. I think they’ve allowed middle infielders to kind of fall asleep at the base thinking guys are going to go off and not slide in. But realistically, we can still hit people as long as we touch the base and slide into the base. If you’re in our way, then you can get hit.

  “There’s still contact, but middle infielders can get away from it. As long as they step and step far enough away from the bag, I can’t touch you.”

  Eaton has learned to stay within the rules while still going in with the intent of making it harder to turn two.

  “It gives me value,” he said. “Some of the guys that aren’t as fast can’t get to the bag as quickly and can’t break it up. It adds value to little players that can get a good jump and break up a double play. Maybe he throws it into the bench and now all of a sudden we’ve got a guy at second base. When you take that away, it devalues the guy who is kind of scrappy and grindy that wants to go out there and do the small things.”

  Eaton is right that because of the new rule, most baserunners don’t even attempt to interfere with the second baseman or shortstop. Because of that, more and more middle infielders play as if the rule itself will protect them.

  The best baserunning coaches, though, make sure their players know what they can and can’t do. The best infield coaches make sure their players protect themselves as if every baserunner is still coming at them.

  “To be honest, I haven’t changed the way I coach it,” said Perry Hill, widely acknowledged as one of the game’s best at coaching infielders. “I like the throw to be at the back of the base. I want him to be able to catch the ball and let the base protect him.”

  If the infielder is at the back of the base, the runner would need to go through the base to take him out. That’s much less likely to happen, and also much harder to do under the current rules.

  Some players and coaches grumbled when the new rule went into effect, believing not only that it took away from the game but also that it was unnecessary. On the Utley play, they argued, Tejada only got hurt because he put himself in a poor position as he took the throw from Mets second baseman Daniel Murphy. Tejada took the throw as he was coming across the bag, with no real chance to double up Howie Kendrick at first. But rather than continue past the base, he did a spin so that his back was to Utley as the baserunner made contact.

  Utley’s slide was hard, and it may even have violated the previous rules for breaking up a double play. The umpires on the field let it go. MLB later handed Utley a two-game suspension, but dropped that before an appeal could even be heard.

  “There wasn’t anything clear-cut [in the old rules] to say that play violated a rule,” MLB Chief Baseball Officer Joe Torre told the Los Angeles Times.

  Since Utley went far beyond the base after making contact with Tejada, his slide clearly would have violated the new rule. But even though that rule was intended to limit injuries and keep more of baseball’s stars on the field, it still hasn’t been fully accepted by everyone in the game.

  “I’m not a big fan,” said Hall of Fame shortstop Alan ­Trammell. “Being brought up in the era I was, we were taught to be aggressive but fair. And there’s a way to do it.”

  Trammell cited Kirk Gibson, his former teammate and close friend, who was known for his willingness to take out a second baseman or run into a catcher to score a run.

  “He was trying to get you, but he was trying to do it clean,” Trammell said. “And that’s how he was. You know what, middle infielders respect that. I don’t want to get hit, but I’m going to try to get out of the way as well. Sometimes you’ve got to stand your ground.”

  As Trammell knew, there were ways for middle infielders to keep runners from bearing down on them too hard.

  “We were taught, all the way back to when I was in youth baseball, to throw the ball right at their head,” Trammell said. “They’ll get down. Trust me.”

  Trammell retired long before the rule was changed, but his view is similar to the one veteran second baseman Dustin Pedroia expressed after a play he was involved in in May 2017. Manny Machado, then playing with the Baltimore Orioles, went in hard on Pedroia to break up a double play. Pedroia’s Boston Red Sox manager John Farrell argued that Machado’s slide violated the new rule (and a Red Sox pitcher later threw at Machado in a bit of retaliation that Pedroia quickly distanced himself from).

  “I don’t even know what the rule is,” Pedroia told reporters at the time. “I’ve turned the best double play in the major leagues for 11 years. I don’t need the [expletive] rule, let’s be honest. The rule is irrelevant. The rule is for people with bad footwork, and that’s it.”

  A colorful answer, but Pedroia basically said what Hill and other infield coaches have said, which is that infielders who made the play right could usually find a way to stay out of danger
. And if they couldn’t, so be it.

  Former major-league manager Bobby Valentine agreed, saying he loved the athleticism required of middle infielders and calling the rule change “the biggest mistake baseball ever made.”

  Valentine had plenty of company the first year after the change, when uneven enforcement let to more confusion and more complaints.

  “It’s a joke,” Toronto Blue Jays manager John Gibbons said, after umpires ruled a Jose Bautista slide illegal and gave the Tampa Bay Rays credit for a game-ending double play. “Maybe we’ll come out and wear dresses tomorrow. Maybe that’s what everybody’s looking for.”

  Eventually the complaints became rarer, in part because it became rarer to see a runner try to go in hard at second base. All too often, runners give up on plays, not understanding that the new rules do give them somewhere to go.

  You can still break up a double play. Just ask Adam Eaton.

  49. You Can Argue a Call (but Many Don’t)

  NEXT TO THE BAT RACK AND THE SHELVES where the ­batting helmets are kept, there’s a small card taped to the wall in the New York Mets dugout. It lists the umpires for that day’s game, with the first names in large print.

  Major-league umpires appreciate when players call them by their names. Some demand it.

  “We’re all professionals here,” said one umpire, who makes sure he knows how the players want to be addressed on the field, too.

  You wouldn’t always know it, but the relationship between umpires and many players and managers often is a lot more cordial and collegial than adversarial. Arguments still happen, because it’s an emotional game and careers can turn on wins and losses. But Major League Baseball introduced video replay to review home run calls in 2008, and went to a much more extensive replay review system in 2014. Players and managers can still complain about balls and strikes, which aren’t subject to review, but it’s much less common to see a manager on the field ranting and raving at an ump.