No room for rough play in baseball
The recently retired baseball star didn’t care for the cleaned-up version of the game. He liked baseball better when it was rowdy. The sport had gotten “too tame.”
So said Christy Mathewson. In 1918. Think about that when you hear old guys talk about how soft their sport has gotten. Think about that when someone criticizes the Chase Utley Rule. Or the Buster Posey Rule. Or any rule that
baseball imposes to turn away the ruffians who want to chip away at this game of skill.
Old players have always railed against modern inducements to civilize the game, be it 2016 or 1918 or even the 19th century, when John McGraw’s Baltimore Orioles popularized spiking opponents and grabbing baserunners by the belt and turning the basepaths into an obstacle course.
The way-things-usedto-be crowd eventually drifts away as baseball endures and usually thrives.
Now baseball is all aquiver over obstruction calls on consecutive days.
Tuesday night, Toronto’s Jose Bautista was ruled to have interfered with Tampa Bay second baseman Logan Forsythe on a slide. Upon replay review, the Rays were handed a game-ending double play and a 3-2 victory, from what had been a 4-3 deficit.
Monday night, Atlanta’s Nick Markakis was ruled to have made an illegal slide into Washington second baseman Daniel Murphy, resulting in a seventh-inning double play for what became a 4-3 Nationals victory.
“Maybe we’ll come out and wear dresses tomorrow,” said Blue Jays manager John Gibbons. “Maybe that’s what everybody’s looking for.”
Or maybe everybody’s looking for 21st-century baseball to be played without 19th-century shenanigans. Bautista clearly used his hand in trying to trip Forsythe. Didn’t really work, but Bautista tried to trip an opponent.
Sorry, John Gibbons, but that’s not baseball. Baseball is not a collision sport. It’s not a contact sport. It’s a game of skill.
Pitchers firing baseball into tiny little targets with all kinds of movement on the ball. Hitters with impeccable hand/eye coordination reacting to the pitch and adjusting their swing in a milisecond. Outfielders running down balls across a massive acreage and relaying the ball back to the safety of the infield in no time at all. Infielders scooping up hard-hit grounders and making accurate throws to beat a runner by a step, inning after inning, night after night, summer after summer.
Baseball is athletic precision. Golf, with the ball moving and players all over the field reacting to it and each other.
Baseball is not Chase Utley barreling into Ruben Tejada in the 2015 playoffs. Baseball is not Scott Cousins running inside the baseline so he can lower his shoulder and collide with catcher Buster Posey, shattering Posey’s leg in 2011. If you want to be Brian Urlacher, go play football.
Some in baseball probably have anxiety that their sport doesn’t include the physical confrontations of football or hockey or even, at times, soccer and basketball. Some probably feel that baseball needs is a little less manly.
That’s nonsense, of course. Standing in a batter’s box while someone throws a baseball 100 mph within inches if your bones provides as much courage as William Tell’s son. And wiser heads always prevail.
So now we have the Posey Rule, which added to the rule prohibiting catchers from blocking the plate without the ball, saying that a runner “may not deviate from his direct pathway to the plate in order to initiate contact with the catcher.”
And we have the Utley Rule, which really is not a new rule but distinguishes what is a legal slide, which occurs when a runner makes contact with the ground before reaching the base, is able to reach the base with his hand or foot, is able to and attempts to remain on the base after completion of the slide and slides within reach of the base without changing his pathway for the purpose of initiating contact with a fielder.
Initiating contact clearly is what Markakis did Monday night. He was trying to slide into Murphy. Which has always been illegal and has always called for umpires to not only rule out the runner, but the batter on his way to first base. The new distinction was necessary because umps weren’t enforcing the rule.
Baseball can be goofy. Some of its staunchest defenders want to enforce a bunch of unwritten rules while not enforcing a bunch of written rules. That’s madness.
The macho crowd, while claiming a connection to the good old days, really has no sense of history and would want no part of bare-knuckles baseball.
Baseball historian Bill James has written that “basepath obstruction … was a major problem in the 1880s and ‘90s, when baseball was in danger of becoming a contact sport. In 1897, the rules on obstruction were tightened up, and the principle of free access to the bases met with general acceptance at the other three positions. There was always something of a problem with catchers blocking the plate, but there were always limits.”
Players for a century have stepped over the line. James wrote about the famous first meeting between Ty Cobb, as an old veteran in the California Winter League, meeting Rogers Hornsby for the first time. Cobb slid into second base with his spikes high.
“Hey, you, where did you get that stuff?” Hornsby demanded.
Said Cobb, “Say, you, watch your step if you don’t want to get your legs cut off.”
Rogers Hornsby was a crusty personality who was nobody’s idea of charm. But even he was taken aback by Cobb’s willingness to turn baseball into bloodsport.
Baseball has managed to mostly police such anarchy, but it gets lax. It starts failing to enforce clearly written rules, and suddenly it’s open season on catchers, and second basemen become bullfighters with Tornado barreling into the bag.
Then Buster Posey and Ruben Tejada suffer broken legs, and baseball remembers that it is a game of exquisite skill.