The Unwritten Rules

So, the Yankees and Tigers had themselves a couple of dance parties on Thursday.  There were hit batsmen and benches-clearing incidents, allegedly to clear the air of lingering issues.  Bokolis would say this happens about once or twice each season in Major League Baseball, where the tension becomes an issue with whole teams, rather than between a pitcher and hitter.

However, it is inevitable that the writers will not distinguish between the Yankees-Tigers situation and what happened with Bryce Harper and Hunter Strickland.  It is partly because the writers see what they want to see and partly because it is too difficult and/or inconvenient for them to distinguish between benches-clearing incidents.

This is surely the case with Jeff Passan's post-mortem on Thursday's events.  Passan uses pitch data* to decide that Dellin Betances was clearly trying to put one in James McCann's earhole, but doesn't stamp it as such.  Instead, he takes all of the most likely possibilities and throws that blanket in the hopes of capturing the truth.


Passan then goes on to bemoan the way baseball and its players handle this kind of shit.  The first few comments accuse him of whining and, right on time in this day and age, comments come in that attribute his whining to it being inherent in his supposed liberal leanings.  Bokolis didn't stick around that long, but I imagine the Jewish train came in just behind it.

But, he did whine.  The writer must've set his Word to auto-whinge on this one.  Rather than take a position on what this was- a botch- he throws several possibilities out there as if to find out which one passes the smell test or which one sticks.

Let's back up- Bokolis has decided this is the most proper point to tell the backstory.  This goes back- which Passan does not acknowledge- to a game on 7/31 at Yankee Stadium.  The Yankees hit Mikie Mahtook with two pitches, the second in the head.  One of the unwritten rules of baseball is, while two hit batsmen in a game could possibly be overlooked, if you hit the same guy twice, I don't give a fuck if it was by accident or with two curve balls, there is going to be a response.  So Michael Fulmer duly plunked Jacoby Ellsbury.

At that point, the prevailing sentiment from both sides was surely, all right muthafucka, all right...all right, we'll see wassup.

Of course, these days, things don't blow up during the next game between the two.  It usually gets left to the final game of the series and, in this case, the season series.

Gary Sanchez was the driving force in the Yankee wins in the first two games of the series.  After another HR in the third inning of this game, Michael Fulmer, again on the mound, decided it was time, and put one right on Sanchez' hip.  It was about as intentional as intentional gets.  But, just as he did with Ellsbury, Fulmer did it right.  Nonetheless, Sanchez shot a little look...all right muthafucka, Dominicans don't play, puto you gonna see

Mind you, the umpires are a step behind here, as they likely didn't know the priors, or didn't care.

Now we get to Miguel Cabrera thrown at in retaliation for Sanchez.  Kahnle missed, but got tossed anyhow.  Gerardi, who didn't get tossed with Kahnle, came out to argue and Austin Romine went after the HP umpire.  Cabrera, who has been seen before involving himself in affairs that were not his own, tried to involve himself in their argument, and was apparently told by Romine to mind his own fucking business.

This is what led Miggie to ask Romine, upon returning to the plate after Chapman had warmed up, if he had a problem with him.  Romine still had his mask on so, the best Bokolis can figure, Romine summoned Samuel L. Jackson and told Miggie something he should have already known- this ain't about you, muthafucka!

There is no other plausible reason for Miggie to say anything unless he was looking to start some shit.  Romine's mask came off- his lips revealing that he told Miggie that it wasn't about him- Miggie set it off.  Sanchez fed one to Miggie while he was engaged on the ground, then fed one to Castellanos- the equivalent of the third man in- while he was engaged on the ground.

Back to Betances.  By 'botch,' Bokolis means that Betances was trying to send a message- to jackknife or flip the batter, to hit him somewhere below the shoulders, to start a full-scale brawl- that didn't work as planned because he hit the batter in the head.  I''m guessing they couldn't parse the data for Passan to see how Betances fared when he was trying to make a batter wear one.

The Tigers' reaction indicated to Bokolis that they knew it was a botch and were too shocked and/or disgusted to even brawl about it- when a botch like that occurs, the issue goes beyond something that a fight will resolve.

When the Tigers next hit Todd Frazier in the thigh, it was almost as if to say, that's how you fucking do it, assholes.  Frazier's body language indicated that he knew he was supposed to go out, but that he's getting too old for that shit and he isn't going to be on the team next year anyway, so why bother.

Passan didn't tell us any of that shit, opting instead to politic against the baseball's 'antiquated' ways of policing itself.  The problem isn't with any antiquated unwritten rules; it is with baseball players being unable to fight without tons of backup.

The unwritten rules indicated that their last meeting of the season was the day to settle all lingering issues.  The unwritten rules is why Romine- even though Miggie was the prick here- didn't throw a punch at Miggie's face, even after Miggie threw a couple (of what looked like show punches) at his.  Don't downplay that.

The unwritten rules also mean everyone in a logo has to run out- not a good look when it means 70+ people- and (at least) show the flag.  More often, someone is grabbing someone to pull them away or latching on to someone to deter involvement, and the first one there is often a middle-aged base coach, about to get hit by the swarm of arriving ballplayers.  Unfortunately, it's going to take someone rolling over a by-standing star player's ankle to break it for MLB to react and set brawl protocol.  As it is, more guys get hurt in those stupid walk-off celebrations.

Sure, MLB could've made a rule prohibiting anyone but the managers coming out of the dugout/bullpen and impose penalties accordingly, made it 50 years ago.  That potentially leaves 9 defensive players against (most often) one player and two coaches.  Even if no one from the defense jumps in, it means that the umpires are going to have to break up the fight, or risk having one guy pummel another.  Do you have faith in Joe West or (name your fat fuck) to jump on a pile without hurting himself?  MLB, together with the player's union, have decided to let it play out.

Of course, one guy- Sanchez, who clearly isn't the sharpest tool- didn't understand the rules, thinking instead that the point of this fight is to beat up the other team.  So, business is not settled, as Sanchez will likely answer (to the Tigers) for throwing punches at Miggie and Castellanos while they were otherwise engaged.  When Castellanos took his next at-bat, he turned toward Sanchez and told him, you throwing joints at me when I'm on the ground? all right, muthafucka, all right.

It's almost always the Latin guys, not having grown up in America, who don't understand the point of the brawl.  Bokolis refers you to the fight between Derrek Lee and Chris Young, then of the Cubs and Padres, respectively, on 6/16/2007.  Young comes up and in to Lee and hit's him in the hand.  After throwing junk to get the count to 1-2, Young clearly had a purpose to bust Lee inside.  It was highly unlikely that he was trying to hit Lee.  But, he missed upstairs and hit Lee, knocking him down in the process.

These are two big, but pretty low-key guys.  They were talking on Lee's way to first.  It seemed calm enough, but Young kept walking toward Lee.  Maybe Young found it innocent, but walking toward a guy you just hit is a major breach of protocol.  In fact, Young was in the middle of, I wasn't trying to... when Lee threw a haymaker.  Young responded with his own haymaker and was prevented from throwing another by his teammate, Marcus Giles.  In an instant, it seemed as both men decided, I've done enough here, and allowed themselves to be covered by their teammates.  The only guy amped up was known hothead Carlos Zambrano.  Not to pick on Latin guys, as Alfonso Soriano was laughing like a drunk socialite for most of the episode.

It is cowboys like Sanchez who do things that lead to the legislating of rules, (way) too much of which is what they did in Soviet Communism- Fascism in disguise- or what they do in the NFL.  It the street, guys like that didn't last long, so he's lucky it's baseball.

So, when you hear a young guy who thinks he knows it all- and, as young guys, didn't we all think we knew it all?- bemoan these unwritten rules, remember that, in 10 years, that same guy will have come to understand that those rules serve as a steam valve; they exist to prevent shit from happening when it isn't supposed to happen, and to let shit happen when it must so that a worse incident doesn't happen, so your dumb ass doesn't get smoked.  When they eventually legislate all that out of the game, just as outlaws find other ways, the players will dig deeper to find ways to take shots.

Try telling that to a muthafucka with an agenda.