The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball Blog

A reader suggested checking out a weird spot on Bobby Jenks’ cap. In the tradition of the K-rod photos, I present this low-quality still:

I would say “now that’s what a light dusting of resin looks like”. Other cloud-like interpretations welcome.

Nice interview on MLB.com with umpire Rick Reed regarding Hargrove’s argument, which resulted in Reed calling the game one pitch away from potentially being official, with the Indians up 4-0.

Withers: What happened in the fifth inning, and what was [Mariners manager Mike] Hargrove’s complaint?

Reed: We were trying to get the game official if we could. Hargrove’s argument was that his hitter could not see and complained to him. He went to home plate to give us his viewpoint, and [Indians manager] Eric [Wedge] came out to support his team.

Both had legitimate gripes. Was the snow heavier at that point than at any other in the game? It was close. As we were having our discussion, which I think was fairly lengthy, we were all covered with snow.

The Red Sox didn’t miss going to the World Series, they missed winning the World Series. The caption should read either “haven’t been to the World Series in 18 years” (1986) or say “We have a chance to win our first World Series in…”

I blew that.

One of the themes in The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball is that the greats who really study and know how to take advantage of the rules contribute to the game’s advancement. Today, I wanted to bring up Paul Richards. Richards loved finding ways that he could gain an advantage. I love this quote from his Hall of Fame Veterans Committee profile, from baseball historian Warren Corbett:

“He pushed the envelope,” Corbett said. “He was always looking for an edge. He would skate up to edge of rule. Sometimes he would skate over the rule.”

He encouraged his players to get hit by a batted ball if it would break up a double play, for instance, which resulted in a rule change. But that’s not what I wanted to write up.

In the rules, there’s an interesting aside in Rule 3.03, which covers defensive switches.

Rule 3.03 Comment: A pitcher may change to another position only once during the same inning; e.g. the pitcher will not be allowed to assume a position other than a pitcher more than once in the same inning. Any player other than a pitcher substituted for an injured player shall be allowed five warm-up throws. (See Rule 8.03 for pitchers.)

8.03, if you’re curious, covers how many warm-up pitches they can take.

This is in order to prevent a team from (say) having a right-handed pitcher and a left-handed pitcher in the game at once, hiding one in left field while the other pitched and swapping them back and forth so that right-handed hitters only faced righties, left-handed hitters only faced lefties, and switch hitters would presumably get whoever the manager liked more in that situation.

You will occasionally see a pitcher head to the outfield for a batter and then resume pitching, but that’s it: at that point they’re forbidden from moving him again.

I mention this because Keith Scherer pointed me to this as at least party the result of the antics of Paul Richards, who was notorious for using bait-and-switch lineups and stuff like this. Richards is generally noted as the inventor of the oversized catcher’s mitt used when they draw the short straw and have to catch a knuckleballer.

Unfortunately Retrosheet doesn’t have a box score for these.

June 25, 1953, he brought Harry Dorish in, moved pitcher Billy Pierce to first (!) for two batters. On May 15, 1957, there’s another Dorish/Pierce move. Richards took the unusual move of putting pitcher Harry Dorish at third so that Billy Pierce could face Ted Williams. As much as the Williams shift (where teams put as many fielders as they dared on the right side of second) made it seem tempting for Williams to pull the ball to the left, with a pitcher at third it’s almost comical. Williams popped up and Dorish returned to pitch.

September 11th, 1958 — well, here’s the Baseball Library write-up:

Orioles manager Paul Richards lists three pitchers in his starting line-up, hoping for a scoring chance in the first inning, at which point he can remove the extra pitchers for a batter of his choice. Billy O’Dell, batting 9th at P; Jack Harshman in CF, batting 5th; Milt Pappas at 2B, batting 7th. Only O’Dell bats as he goes to 14–11, losing to KC’s Ned Garver, 7–1. The A’s plate five in the 8th, paced by Bob Cerv’s 33rd home run.

That, along with Earl Weaver’s use of phantom DHs, helped create the rules around declared lineup restrictions and substitutions.

And, obligatory plug, if you enjoy finding out why the rules are this way, you’ll like the book.

People have emailed me to ask why comments are off on the K-Rod posts, and here’s the short version: when comments are on, they’re run heavy and contain almost 100% abuse, and I just don’t’ have the time or energy to keep the blog clean.

With comments off, I’ve received a lot of email, most of which is interesting discussions of other pitchers, mixed with maybe 10% of the “you live in your mom’s basement where you head a homosexual prostitution ring” trolls. The barrier from leaving an anonymous comment to actually sending an email seems to eliminate the vast majority of abuse.

By default, I allow comments on subjects until they become unmanageable. Thanks.

As predicted previously! The Angels claimed it was “built-up resin” and that MLB, has decided there’s nothing there. (original post)

From the AP story:

Angels GM Bill Stoneman said baseball disciplinarian Bob Watson called the team and said “there’s nothing to it, nothing to investigate.”

Nothing? That seems a little strong, given the strength of the high-quality ESPN footage they were running yesterday. If I was going to deny it, I’d have at least acknowledged there was something. But then, that’s Stoneman quoting Watson.

From the LA Times:

“It’s easy for a guy sitting at his desk, watching television, to put pictures on the Internet,” Rodriguez said, according to the Los Angeles Times. “But I hope he has something better to do than to mess with people. He has no clue what he’s writing about. I don’t even know who he is.”

Zumsteg, reached by e-mail, told the Times “I understand where from his side it seems like he’s been singled out and persecuted for what’s a fairly common practice, and if baseball’s going to crack down on him they should certainly look around the league at other pitchers with pine tar on their hats. I brought this up as something I found interesting in connection with my work on the book, and it’s not at all personal.”

Here’s the thing. First, assume that my initial post was totally right, and on Opening Day when he was really working it over he put a little something on the ball, that makes K-Rod one of easily a half-dozen top-tier perpetrators (and I’ll talk about those later, I promise). He’s cruising along and then someone tells him “Hey, some guy on the internet put up pictures of you from Opening Day and thinks you’re doctoring the ball”.

He’s thinking Comic Book Guy caught him. I’d be pissed about that. And he’s certainly not going to go “whoops! Some dude with an MLB.tv account got me!” So okay.

And take anything in the rest of the possibility spectrum, from it’s a personal stash of resin (which Orel argued every pitcher does) to it being totally innocent resin buildup that he didn’t even know about. Then out of all the pitchers doing this, he’ll feel like he’s been singled out because there happened to be a really good set of camera angles on him on Opening Day. He’s going to be twice as pissed, because now Comic Book Guy’s caused all these reporters to hassle him, and he’s on ESPN and they’re showing video with the underside of his hat brim highlighted…

Here’s the thing, though, and this is an important distinction: I didn’t say K-Rod’s a bad guy, or he kills puppies, or whatever. The original post says “Hey, I think Rodriguez doctored some pitches, here’s some awful stills of him going to his hat, here are timestamps so you can go look at it yourself, I think he got some extra movement on those pitches, and here’s the shot of the white stuff.”

I try to make a clear distinction in my baseball writing between what I know - the performance, the actions, and so on - and what I don’t - the personal lives of the players.

Anyway, I digress. I think it’s clear in the book that I have a lot of love for the cheaters (except the game-fixers and drug users), and I bear them no ill will. It’s not personal, certainly not in the way we usually think about that (”Player X is a bad person”).

I also think there are outstanding questions about this, quickly buried by MLB’s InstaInvestigation, which I’ve brought up in previous posts. And we’ll see if Rodriguez, and others like him, have a little cleaner uniforms from here on out as baseball continues to weigh how to enforce those rules.

In The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball I have a chapter on “Delaying the Game for Fun and Profit” and today we got to see a real-life example. In Cleveland, conditions were terrible (see these pictures) and the game was first delayed 57 minutes because of the conditions. Then during the game, there were delays of 22 minutes, 17 minutes, and a whole hour and seventeen minutes.

Then, potentially one pitch away from an official game umpire Rick Reed called off the game at 8:41.

Here’s how this ties into the game: the Indians were ahead 4-0, but Paul Byrd had walked the bases loaded. Facing Jose Lopez, he was up 1-2 in the count. All he needed was the out.

Mariner manager Hargrove went out to complain about the conditions. From the Seattle Times blog “Hargrove said plate umpire Alfonso Marquez wasn’t listening to Jose Lopez when the latter complained he couldn’t see.” He argued with the umps as conditions got still worse, and the game was called. Never happened. He was down 4-0 and likely to lose the game, and now, he gets a fresh shot at it. The errors his players committed are wiped off the book.

Now, Hargrove couldn’t have known that arguing would work, but it’s also clear that in that situation, there’s no reason not to: an out and he loses. If he gets tossed and the game forfeited to the Indians, he loses. If he tries and it works, though, he’s saved the team a loss. I’m sure he seized on the slightest pretense to go out and make his argument, and made it as long as he could.

In the book, I argue that any rule short of always suspending will encourage this sort of thing. If there’s such a huge incentive for a team to stall and have a game called, of course they’re going to try it. If they’re just going to restart this game tomorrow, doesn’t it make more sense to start it from the point it was stopped?

There’s obviously a logistical problem - some suspended games are extremely hard to make up, and no solution for those cases is easy. No one wants to see a game that’s meaningful for one team played after game 162 in September, with the other side sending a squad of not-yets and never-beens from the minors, potentially changing a pennant race. But then, how is that significantly different than today, where the Indians might lose tomorrow a game they should have won today, if the end of the season makes that game meaningful in the AL Central standings? Given the quality of teams in that division, it’s entirely possible the finish could be that tight.

If the Indians lose the restart and that keeps them out of the playoffs, will anyone remember today, when Hargrove came out to complain and won his team a new start? Will it finally get us some rules reform on these rules?

I gave this some thought on my way into Seattle today, and here’s what I think happens from here:

1) MLB looks into it, talks to various players (or waits a day)
2) MLB announces that after a thorough investigation, there’s insufficient evidence to take action

Now, unannounced, we may have MLB call the Angels up and say “Come onnnnn” and the Angels say “What?” and MLB says “Come onnnnnnnn” and the Angels say “Fine” and K-Rod stops showing up with strange stuff under his hat brim.

The least likely is that MLB watches the footage from the opening game, sees how blatantly he worked the thumb in there, sees the movement, and takes any kind of action.

And here’s why: even though Rule 8.02 (a)(4) says you can’t put any substance on a ball, no matter and get wacky movement is not a criteria. But 8.02 (e) states

The umpire shall be sole judge on whether any portion of this rule has been violated.

Plus, as I discuss in the book (and Orel just echoed on ESPN) generally speaking, using something to get a better grip on the ball is winked at. However, Orel’s argument - that it’s okay to use something in order to get the same kind of grip as you would in normal conditions - doesn’t seem to apply here, since Opening Day it was in the mid-60s in Anaheim when the game started. This wasn’t a night game in Detroit in late fall.

But I digress. There’s a huge barrier to taking action on the doctoring-the-ball part of this, for those reasons.

Which brings us to those who argue that it’s rosin and therefore no foul. There’s actually a rule on this:

(b)Have on his person, or in his possession, any foreign substance. For infraction of this section (b) the penalty shall be immediate ejection from the game. In addition, the pitcher shall be suspended automatically. In National Association Leagues, the automatic suspension shall be for 10 games.

Rosin is a foreign substance, same as pine tar. Now, players have pine tar on their helmets and uniforms, and that goes unenforced. But this is where they might take action: it’s clear that there was something on his cap, whether they find evidence that it was applied to the ball at any point. But it seems like it’s a lot more likely that the most dramatic action they’d take is a warning.

Part of this is political: if the league takes action on something that’s perceived as coming from the internet, MLB might see it as opening the floodgates for every fan to start making rules complaints, and there’s no way they want that.

From the Dallas Morning News:

Major League Baseball confirmed Thursday morning that it is investigating if Los Angeles Angels closer Francisco Rodriguez doctored the baseball during two appearances against the Rangers this week.

Cool.

A Web site, The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball Blog, accused Rodriguez of having a substance under the bill of his cap and using it as he closed games Monday night and Wednesday afternoon.

I’d have divided this as “Francisco Rodriguez had a substance under the bill of his cap and is accused of using it on the ball…” since it’s entirely clear there’s something there. I know, the screencaps were from a 400k mlb.tv stream, but the press has access to better video and video equipment than I do. It’s totally there.

And I don’t mean to be a stickler, but I’m a person, not a website. But okay.

Interestingly, there’s also this:

Rangers general manager Jon Daniels said he was alerted to the site on Wednesday, but he said the team didn’t contact MLB about Rodriguez.

When I heard about this, I heard that the Rangers complained to the league about it, and I should check it out. I’ll update if I find anything out.

(times are Pacific)
9:05 am: XM, Jeff Erickson’s Fantasy Focus
~1pm: NPR’s Day-to-Day