The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball Blog

(Updated: reader Jeffrey Lang-Weir pointed out that there is a definition in 2, which led to this re-write)

Rule 2 defines interference.

INTERFERENCE
(a) Offensive interference is an act by the team at bat which interferes with, obstructs, impedes, hinders or confuses any fielder attempting to make a play. If the umpire declares the batter, batter- runner, or a runner out for interference, all other runners shall return to the last base that was in the judgment of the umpire, legally touched at the time of the interference, unless otherwise provided by these rules.

Rule 7.08 deals with when a runner’s out, and this is what those who would argue that A-Rod should have been called out are referring to:

7.08
Any runner is out when –
[...]
(b) He intentionally interferes with a thrown ball; or hinders a fielder
attempting to make a play on a batted ball;
Rule 7.08(b) Comment: A runner who is adjudged to have hindered a fielder who is attempting to make a play on a batted ball is out whether it was intentional or not.

Now, watching the replay it’s pretty clear that when he runs through, that’s okay: as long as he doesn’t get in the way of the fielder making the play, he’s fine.

The issue is – does yelling at the fielders count as hindering them as they attempt to make a play on the batter?

While what we see enforced in games is is that physically hampering the fielder is illegal (and almost never done) while vocally attempting the same thing is, at least, not enforced, it’s clear from the definition that confusing the fielder is illegal and offensive interference.

As long as it’s not enforced – like foreign substances on uniforms for pitchers – a runner would be dumb not to take advantage of it when it could so clearly help his team.

With two outs, too, what’s the harm? If it doesn’t work, inning over. If it works, huge benefit. There’s no reason for him not to try, and that’s why it’s a smart play on his part. I’m sure – to editorialize for a second – that if this had been Jeter, or if you don’t think Jeter would do that, pick a saavy popular veteran of your choice – that this would hardly be the subject of that much controversy.

Several readers sent this in: A-Rod, while a baserunner, called for a pop-up, orrr maybe he didn’t.

ESPN’s game recap

Rodriguez hit an RBI single with two outs in the ninth that made it 7-5. Jorge Posada followed with a high infield pop and Rodriguez ran hard, cutting between Clark and shortstop John McDonald.

Replays showed Rodriguez shouting something, and Clark backed off at the last second. McDonald was only a few steps behind Clark, but couldn’t make the catch and ball dropped for an RBI single.

“I just said, ‘Hah!’ That’s it,” Rodriguez said. “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”

also, if he did call for it, that’d be cool, right, because

Rodriguez said three or four times each week, opponents shout at him while he pursues foul pops near their dugout.

Not that he’s saying he did. It’s interesting, we talked about a similar play in a college game just last week.

It’s a nice play if you can get away with it. I’ll update with more quotes as, inevitably, this gets more press. Here, with the Yankees ahead 7-5, his action turned an out into a single on the way to a four-run ninth inning and a final score of 10-5. It didn’t turn out to be the difference maker, but it was directly responsible for giving the Yankees a chance tos core three more runs. That’s a huge swing.

Several readers have emailed, but Dave Steinberg managed to be first, so: check out this MLB.com story on Ryan Freel, who it turns out didn’t catch a ball — it was put in his glove by Reds outfielder Norris Hopper as Freel lay prone on the warning track.

Scary, funny, cunning, and a remarkable bit of clear thinking by Hopper, given the circumstances.

In the book, I talk a little about the hazy line between “what an athlete could achieve normally” and “cheating” in the context of nutritional supplements and other training devices.

I thought of this when I read this Wired article, “Wayne Gretzky-Style ‘Field Sense’ May Be Teachable”

Essentially, it appears that there are ways that you can help teach a player to have a better sense of spatial relationships, specifically in recognizing where a tennis serve will go with almost no information. Read the article – I found it fascinating.

But it raises the old issue: when does this get to the point of being an unfair advantage? We already see tennis prodigies raised by their parents to play (parents take jobs near supercoaches, drive the kids ridiculous distances, pay for tournament entries) that give them a huge head start over a similarly-talented kid growing up in rural Idaho, or Atlanta, who doesn’t have access to the same resources.

If you can teach young baseball kids better pitch recognition skills that make them dramatically better prospects, but the equipment costs $50,000 to use for a year, who does that help, and who does that hurt? Does it also severely unbalance the game in favor of rich countries?

We see some of this already in the construction of batting cages, but other sports – track and field, for instance, was the first to adopt use of hyperbaric chambers designed to allow athletes to sleep in low-oxygen environments without having to hike up a mountain. Now we’re starting to see basketball players use it.

Technically, you could travel up a mountain, sleep, come down for a game or practice or other training, and then go back up every night. It’s possible.

But if the issue is fairness, then equipment and training techniques like those detailed in the article make performance dependent in some respects on monetary resources over individual merit, and that’s not fair.

And if the issue is limiting the use of training techniques, where do you draw the line between teaching pitch recognition, like this, and batting cages? Are pitchers who can get full biomechanical workups early at a distinct advantage over those who don’t?

All these questions and more will have to be confronted in the coming years, and potentially could dramatically affect the way baseball recruits and develops its talent.

As I wrote earlier, one of the other sports I follow is also, drug-wise, historically been one of the dirtiest: professional cycling. Doping is rampant, players get transfusions of their own blood, other people’s blood, they take all kinds of crazy drugs, and competitions are battles in the long war between the sanctioning organizations and shadowy labs across the world.

Last year’s Tour de France winner tested positive for synthetic testosterone, though he says it’s a lab issue, and they’re fighting it out in court. Think about how crazy that is: we don’t know the winner of last year’s crown jewel of the sport. It’s like not knowing who won the last World Series because a home run call is tied up in court.

Recent revelations of past doping (including a Tour winner) have rocked the sport again.

And yet for all this, bicycling is one of the most aggressive sports trying to keep drugs out. Lance Armstrong, for all the allegations against him, was the most tested human on the planet. Last year’s Tour de France missed a huge chunk of the top competitors because they were potentially linked to a Spanish lab – and some were guilty, and others missed a chance to compete, in a sport where riders are really only competitive for a few years.

This is the dark side of baseball’s future: an arms race, continued suspicion, retroactive scandals, the innocent punished along with the guilty.

What’s interesting to me, though, is that bicycling, unlike the sports fans are generally more familiar with, tests for drug use in more than one way:
- Is there something weird in your blood or urine test, like a drug, or synthetic hormones, or whatnot?
- Is there too much of something to occur naturally?

It’s extremely hard to detect many of the drugs that cyclists take to increase their red blood cell count, for instance, so cycling tries to detect those but also says “If you have more than 100 cells per million in the test, you’re an alien and you can’t race.”

Naturally, they all test at 95-98… but they’re trying to define, in a way, what it means to be human.

There are interesting analogues for baseball:
- If your testosterone is over this level based on age, you’re on something
- If your blood has more HGH than you should have for your age, you’re on something
… and so on, all the way to potentially measuring performance metrics (If you can hit a ball more than 600 feet…) and now you start skirting the ridiculous.

But once you understand that it’s almost impossible to keep up with the drugs – and cycling made that realization a long time ago – you have to start looking at ways to at least limit the harm participants who do use can do, by regulating the effects of those drugs.

I wonder how long it will take baseball to look at that enforcement route, or whether they’ll be content to pursue the fight as lightly as possible, tightening controls only when change is forced on them by scandal or regulation.

I’ve been chewing on this for a while, trying to decide how to say this, but he’s right, and maybe not in the way he intended.
When I turned in the first draft of the book, the drugs and steroids chapter was flat and boring, reflecting my disgust with the whole topic. My editor called me about it, saying that compared the rest of the book it pretty much sucked. I replied that I was so disappointed, so angry about the whole topic that it was hard to write about. Write about that, she said, and see how it goes.

The result is the chapter you get: it’s a lot angrier and pointed compared to the rest of the book, a lot more pointed, and contains a giant statistical digression into one of Bonds’ seasons that’s a little eye-popping.

I would apologize if I were Selig. Not for the players, or the entire scandal, but certainly for the huge part baseball’s owners played in it. As it stands, baseball’s pretended that it played no part in tolerating, much less encouraging, the use of performance-enhancing drugs for twenty years, and now they’re shocked – shocked! – to discover it was as prevalent as it was.

I would say, not in so many words, were I Selig at this point:

“Baseball’s leadership failed to act early when we had the opportunity, and we wasted subsequent opportunities. Our poor labor relationship hurt cooperation on issues, like steroids, that hurt the game as a whole, and I’m personally responsible for one of the most egregious examples. In fighting so hard over baseball’s revenues, we hurt baseball’s future.

“Many people in baseball didn’t see what was happening until it was too late, but many knew and did nothing. Some actively helped. While they all bear some responsibility, those of us who led baseball created an atmosphere where it was acceptable to look the other way, where those who spoke up or attempted to raise warnings were ignored. We helped to create a game where those who did not participate were faced with a devil’s choice – to potentially operate at a competitive disadvantage, or to shrug and join in.

“As owners, we created an environment where players stood to benefit hugely from using steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs, while facing no potential penalties. If nothing else, if even in an ideal world we could not have struck a deal for testing, we as teams should have looked for ways to reduce the financial incentives to players, by being more cautious in how we valued players.

“Our errors encouraged a level of hysteria that undermined the game. How could we dispute that half, or even three-fourths of players, were using steroids if there was no testing, no surveys of any kind to offer us a more accurate picture? In the absence of truth, it’s no wonder that lies and rumors flourished, and that’s our fault.

“Baseball made many mistakes both in action and in standing by, that harmed our fans’ perception of the game. We accept the blame, and I’m sorry for my role. We can’t undo what’s happened, but we will do better.”

That’s what I’d say if I were Selig. But if I were Selig, well…

Selig’s ducking of the topic, and particularly the embarrassing spectacle of MLB trying to avoid Bonds’ pursuit of the all-time home run record, is ridiculous. As a baseball fan, it makes me want to put my head in my hands. This is what we’ve come to: one of baseball’s greatest marks is being challenged by someone who clearly owes that challenge to sometimes-legal, often-illegal performance enhancing drugs, and the commissioner is hiding in his office hoping Bonds gets hit by a bus or tossed in jail for perjury or something intervenes to save Selig from having to face up to his own culpability.

There are many parties who played parts in this farce. That they can’t coordinate a group confession doesn’t mean that individual acknowledgment and contrition wouldn’t be helpful.

Jason Ferguson sent a link to this story of attempted cheating in a UT-Missouri game this month. Check it out:

In the bottom of the sixth with UT leading 5-0, Peoples stood on third base with two outs. Chance Wheeless popped up along the third-base line near home plate, and Missouri catcher Trevor Coleman, his back to third, called for the ball.

So did Peoples, who was running toward home.

“I thought, ‘I’ll give it a shot,’” Peoples said. “I didn’t know it was that illegal.”

Coleman cleared out, believing an infielder was behind him. The ball dropped to the turf, and bounced foul. Home-plate umpire Ken Eldridge called Peoples for interference, and the inning ended. Coleman, after collecting his catcher’s mask, barked at Peoples.

“I couldn’t really understand him, but I’m sure he had a few choice words,” Peoples said.

This kind of verbal interference was entirely common in baseball’s early history (this is in the book), and it’s always nice to see some reach back for a classic. You never now – as we saw in that other “pop up” story, sometimes the umps don’t make the call and you get away with it.

Tonight’s game, Casey Fossum facing Kenji Johjima.

- Fossum throws a breaking pitch into the dirt that may (or may not) have hit Kenji’s foot.
- Kenji protests and starts to argue when the umpire doesn’t award him a base.
- His manager, Mike Hargrove, comes out to argue.
- The umpire signals to Fossum for the ball, presumably to look it over for evidence that it hit Johjima: scuffs, discoloration, etc.
- Fossum throws the ball over the catcher to the backstop, ensuring that it’s scuffed, discolored, and useless as evidence.
- No base is awarded to Johjima.

That’s a great heads-up play by Fossum there. Making the throw plausible meant he avoided being ejected on general principle, too.

In light of the Torii Hunter/Mike Sweeney champagne payoff, I wanted to ramble a little about how a different sport handles this kind of thing. Baseball, with an eye to the extremely corrupt era before the post-1921 cleanup of the sport, has extremely harsh rules about transactions between players — technically, the punishment for Hunter and Sweeney was a three year suspension — but other sports take a radically different approach.

Take pro bicycling. Bicycling’s a much more complicated team sport, with many teams of differing strengths and weaknesses competing against each other at once. Every day stage is like a game, every race like a season.

There, payoffs are entirely normal, and it doesn’t undermine competition at all. A small, underfunded team might be employed by one of the stronger teams to perform a certain task: to attack at a certain point, or to take the lead and buy the stronger teams’ riders an easier day to recover, and so on. It means that the smaller teams make money, helping their long-term fortunes, and the stronger teams end up spreading the wealth while adding an additional layer of strategy and competition.

I think there’s a perfect baseball parallel: September games. When teams get to carry 40 players on their active roster, the game changes. Teams out of contention field lineups that are intentionally, knowingly not the best present-day competitive squads, because they want to see what some 20-year-old outfielder has, and armed with twenty pitchers, they can afford to burn two every inning playing petty matchup games if they want.

You’ll hear about it if a competitive team faces a squad way out of any race: if the out-of-it manager is old school enough, he’ll put his veterans out there and try and put up a good fight to “preserve the integrity of the game” while other franchises will argue it’s in their best long-term competitive interests to field younger squads and screw around to see what their prospects have.

This can affect playoff races. Say a week into September, the wild card teams in the AL are Detroit, Chicago, and Oakland, and they’re separated by a game or two. The White Sox face the Twins, the Indians the Angels, and Oakland the Rangers.

What lineups those teams face could determine who goes to the playoffs and who doesn’t. If the Rangers try out some fresh-faced starters and get socked around by the A’s, if the Twins hand out playing time to prospects up from their deep farm system and the White Sox score at will on their way to a series sweep, or if the Tigers face a Mariners team eager to get on with rebuilding, well, any of those teams could swing the race.

Why not, then, allow teams to openly pay off a team to beat their opponent, even to – to borrow more directly from pro cycling – to hire them to play the team that has the best chance to be competitive?

It would provide a way for the A’s to ensure that if they lose the wild card, it won’t be because the Tigers rolled over a half-asleep Mariners team.

You’d have to work out a way to make it above-board and if not public, at least disclosed within baseball. You could file, for instance, with MLB, and say “We agree to pay the Twins $1,000,000 per win against the White Sox, with an additional $500,000 if they sweep the series.”

The downside, of course, is that a team like Kansas City might use that as blackmail, setting a price per game and threatening to run out some AAAA-level pitcher if their price isn’t met. You could simply prohibit any offer except by paying teams, though that wouldn’t stop the kind of negotiation-through-media we see in other situations.

And moreover, the other problem is that it could be (as it is in cycling) a larger advantage for rich teams in races against poorer teams: New York could easily afford to spend the money to make sure a wild card opponent faced stiff competition through the end of the season, but Minnesota doesn’t have the kind of budgets to pay teams off to play hard against New York in the same way.

Besides, I don’t think it’s that huge a deal: the difference between giving the Royals an incentive to run out a lineup with a better chance to win that day and saving the money wouldn’t be all huge a difference. It’s certainly a lot less than the interleague draw, for instance.

There’s no chance that anything like this happens, but what turns out to be really interesting is bicycling’s approach to another one of baseball’s deadly ills: performance-enhancing drug use. It’s even weirder, and I think it’s the direction baseball will end up having to head.

Derek Jacques pointed me to this a beautiful example of heads-up, if unsuccessful, cheating.

In yesterday’s Yankees @ Mets game, in top of the 6th, the Yankees have Jeter at first and Posada batting, with one out (the AB starts about 5m into the top of the 6th).

Posada hits a line drive, Reyes snags it in his glove, and clearly has control of it as he raises it and grabs it with his hand, then almost sets it down on the infield as he reaches all the way down to put the ball into the dirt, as — well he’s hoping it’s as if he dropped it. He lets it roll a few inches, picks it back up, and throws to second.

What he realized might happen, in that split-second after snaring it, is that if he dropped it, he could get the force on Jeter at second and possibly even start a double play to get two. The worst thing that could happen if the force is on is they replace Jeter, a good baserunner, with Posada, who is slow.

Fortunately for the rule of law, the second base umpire got a good look it, ruled the catch was made, and Jeter returned to first safely.

Like framing the pitch, or the good tag, or when outfielders trap the ball and hold it up as if they’ve caught it, Reyes made an attempt to deceive the umpires to help his team. It’s dishonest, and baseball has a rich tradition of plays just like this. Reyes had the right idea. Maybe next time he’ll make it look a lot better, or catch the umpire not paying as close attention, and help his team through deception.