Utley Rule must come, and fast
The Chicago Cubs arrived to work Sunday morning at Wrigley Field and couldn’t keep their eyes off the clubhouse television sets, watching the replay over and over and talking about it again and again.
It was the Chase Utley slide, one that broke the leg of New York Mets shortstop Ruben Tejada and could forever change the way baseball is played.
The one man who didn’t want to see the slide, and was even guarded talking about it, was Cubs outfielder Chris Coghlan.
It was his slide, aggressive but clean, that broke Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop Jung Ho Kang’s
leg three weeks ago, ending his season and damaging the Pirates’ World Series hopes.
“I got a bunch of death threats from Korean people everywhere,” Coghlan said quietly after the Cubs’ workout. “It’s just tough to deal with. People just don’t understand.
“I get it, as a fan. You’re a fan of a player, you never want to see someone get hurt, especially when you have a nation behind you. But my slide was not dirty, and it’s completely legal. So I have no remorse over the slide. I just wish he hadn’t gotten hurt. I wish he would have jumped over me or gotten out of the way.”
The Pirates and Kang declined to blame Coghlan, saying it was a hard-nosed play.
The New York Mets, of course, have a different view, calling Utley, the Los Angeles Dodgers second baseman and old rival, a dirty player, making him aware there could be repercussions.
Major League Baseball would rather Utley not show up — chief baseball officer Joe Torre suspended Utley for Games 3 and 4, calling it a violation of the major league rule that prohibits “this type of rolling block that occurs away from the base.” The Mets certainly agree. “It was dirty,” Mets infielder Kelly Johnson said. “There are so many things wrong with that play. Our starting shortstop is out of the playoffs with a broken leg.”
In the seventh inning of Game 2 of their National League Division Series game at Dodger Stadium, Tejada took the flip from second baseman Daniel Murphy for what was expected to be one out, and when he turned his back, Utley steamrolled into him, starting his slide well past second base. Tejada flipped in the air, screamed and when he came down had no feeling in his leg. Broken right fibula. The Mets called it dirty. The Dodgers said it was aggressive.
There’s a faction of the baseball fraternity saying he should be immediately suspended. There’s another faction congratulating him for playing the game as hard as anyone who put on a uniform.
“I don’t know how much could be been done to prevent it, but I definitely think the slide was late,” Cubs pitcher Dan Haren said. “I played against Chase for 12 years, and he plays the game hard. Sometimes, almost to the extreme.
“You can’t prove he was trying to hurt him, but Utley has the reputation of going pretty hard to second. ... Maybe too hard.”
When Coghlan broke Kang’s leg with his slide three weeks ago, the Pirates declined to fault Coghlan. He did the same thing in his rookie season in 2009 while playing with the Miami Marlins, sliding into Tampa Bay Rays second baseman Akinori Iwamura, who suffered a torn anterior cruciate ligament. Iwamura was out of baseball in a year.
“I never cried about that,” said Cubs manager Joe Maddon, who was managing the Rays at the time. “It happens. Listen, everybody wants to put everybody in a bubble.
“I’m really not into that. I don’t like the knee-jerk overreaction to anything. Utilize the rules that are in play, but don’t overreact.”
Maddon never offered an opinion on whether he thought Utley’s slide was dirty but said he thinks it was within the rules.
Maddon thinks the Buster Posey Rule should go away, too. Home-plate collisions have been prohibited the last two years after Posey, the San Francisco Giants’ All- Star catcher, broke his left leg and suffered three torn ligaments when Marlins outfielder Scott Cousins bowled him over in 2011.
“I hate it,” Maddon said. “I don’t like it at all. I think the rule at the plate is ridiculous. That needs to go away. It was one play, and it was based on bad technique.”
You can be assured that changing the rule will be the hot topic of offseason talk among MLB and the union. By the start of the 2016 season, expect a rule change. It makes no sense to change the rules to protect catchers without doing so for middle infielders. Maybe, not soon enough. “I think in the postseason it’s only going to get worse,” Cubs shortstop Addison Russell said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a slide that looks worse than that.”
Yet even as a 21-year-old rookie with a promising career ahead, Russell adamantly says there’s no need for a rule change. He even called Utley’s play clean, saying it’s the infielder’s job to get out of the way of baserunners. “Hey, it’s baseball,” he said.
Only to soon be a bit different, thanks to the Chase Utley rule.