Come on. If he said “Mine”, it’s the baseball equivalent to yelling “Fire” in a crowded theatre. You just don’t do it.
Yesterday’s play was perfectly fine and well within the ethics of MLB. Heck, we were taught to do that in little league. There are plenty of things that players do in MLB that may be considered unsportsmanlike in other leagues and sports. But MLB convention has developed over the course of 100+ years. Stealing signs, running over the catcher at home plate, and brushback pitches are all accepted. Remember, the only reason that MLB has an infield fly rule is because we all know that players would purposely drop balls to get easy double plays if the rule was not in place. The Blue Jays complaining about A-Rod was pure bush league. They should have kept their mouths shut and admit that they f-ed up.
You’re kidding, right?
The rule against yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater isn’t because it ‘isn’t done’, it’s because it gets people killed. Rodriguez is going to have to start aiming bats at heads and spikes at kneecaps before your claim of equivalence will merit more than a laugh.
If the shortstop doesn’t have the presence of mind to know that the guy who just yelled “mine” isn’t the 2nd baseman (you know, the guy he stands next to and practices with all year?), then he needs remedial-level help. Call Rodriguez’s gaming bush-league if you want, I may go along with that, but the shortstop is right in the same league for falling for it.
Christ. Notice I said, “baseball equivalent.” Did you miss that? It’s a perfectly good comparison, if you wrap your mind around altering its context.
If I hear “fire” in a movie theater, this tells me to alter my current physical state with urgency, to prevent inury.
If I hear “mine” while playing third-base, I will also alter my physical state with urgency, to prevent inury.
Why not ask for some fucking clarification before going on the attack?
Indeed. A-Rod is a punk and an embarrassment to the game. It’s unfortunate that someone so talented is such a dick. If the Yanks had any class, they’d fine him themselves for unsportsmanlike behavior.
First of all, some clarification: Rodriguez committed interference and should have been called out. The umpires were in error. Rule 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.
There’s no requirement that hindrance be physical, and players have been called out for that sort of thing before.
Alex Rodriguez has been in the major leagues for more than twelve years and I’m aware of two incidents of him pulling this sort of stunt, so I’m not prepared to say he is habitually a bad sportsman. But that was a VERY unsportsmanlike play - I’ve never seen or heard of a big league ballplayer doing that, and it would be considered unsportsmanlike in any league I’ve ever played or umped in.
Marley:
The rules do not prohibit players on the bench from acts of verbal interference, so far as I can discern.
Similarly, the Lonnie Smith fake out play in 1991 is perfectly legal because there’s no rule against it.
Sublight, it was the third baseman, not the shortstop, and he hasn’t played with the shortstop this year because it was his first game in the major leagues in three years. And it’s against the rules.
He’ll probably get one in his ear the next time the Yankees and Blue Jays play.
I was saying that that’s unsporting, not against the rules.
I will bow to **RickJay’s ** expertise on last night. Okay, A-Rod is a punk. I said it.
Jim
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with what A-Rod did. You take every inch you can in baseball. I don’t view the rules as sacred in baseball, I view them as something to always be pushed. If you’re going to be out anyway it’s not always a bad call to risk the interference.
No one bitches and moans all that much about O-linemen who get away with uncalled holds, or corners and safeties who skirt very close to the line on pass interference but don’t get called on it.
Baseball is a dirty, tough game. For that matter so is football. I only played up through High School, and I can tell you all kinds of nastiness goes on inside pileups and at the line of scrimmage where the refs can’t see what’s going on.
Several of the greatest players in baseball history are famed for spiking players; ever seen any pictures of Ty Cobb stealing home? The guy is 3-4’ off the ground with his spikes coming in at the catcher’s stomach–link, and link, many famous pitchers would bean people intentionally, or throw spit balls whenever they could get away with it.
I’m not sure where this idea came about that baseball is a “gentleman’s” game, it isn’t.
It’s also a myth that baseball and football are about sportsmanship on the professional level. They aren’t and never have been, they’re about winning, plain and simple. Successful professional athletes are about winning first and foremost. One ballplayer said in an interview that you pretty much have to use greenies to play baseball (this was before they were banned) because the rest of the team wouldn’t think you were doing all you could to win if you didn’t try for the little extra boosts like that.
If you want sportsmanship watch NCAA wrestling or something.
I’m sorry, but you’re objectively wrong.
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What he did was wrong in the sense that it was against the rules. I have provided the relevant cite.
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It was well outside the commonly understood boundaries of sportsmanlike play. That’s what sportsmanship is, after all, and the OP was asking about sportsmanship. If it’s your position that sportsmanship should not be expected in the major leagues then go ahead and make that argument, but you’re agreeing with the OP that Rodriguez acted in an unsportsmanlike fashion.
The FACT is, however, that most professional sports do have a basic level and understanding of sportsmanship based on long standing precedents of behaviour. This isn’t some rule people are just now making up, like that time Bob Brenly went apeshit because a guy bunted to break up Curt Schilling’s no-hitter when his team was only losing by one run and Brenly blathered about how is was an “unwritten rule,” only nobody could find an example of anyone calling it bad before Bob Brenly did. Even in the hyper-competitive major leagues, players haven’t doing what Alex Rodriguez did in longer than you’ve been alive. JAckie Robinson didn’t do it, that I’m aware of, and he had more competitiveness in his fingernails than A-Rod will ever have. Pete Rose didn’t do it and he was a psycho. Rodriguez’s own teammate was surprised it was permitted.
- It is of course obviously not the case that major league ballplayers push every inch they can and break every rule they can in the hopes they might not get caught. Otherwise, runners would pull this sort of shit every time there was an infield play with two outs, and they don’t do that.
Of course, the reason most player don’t do what you’re suggesting is that if they do do it, retaliation in kind is inevitable; if A-Rod makes it a habit of doing this they’ll start doing all sorts of stupid shit when he’s trying to make a play, and then everyone will be doing it and every popup or grounder with two outs will be a travesty of runners shrieking and bouncing and waving their arms at fielders. Then they’ll have to strengthen 7.08 and start suspending people. So, frankly, your “take every inch” theory’s bullshit. Take every inch you can and soon, by necessity, the league will have to take back a yard.
Different sport. Irrelevant.
But since you brought it up, no one bitches and moans in baseball when a catcher frames a pitch that was a few inches offside, or when a runner slides into a second baseman breaking up a double play. Whether you like it or not, the established precedent of play is a valid measure of sportsmanship.
Nobody’s saying this rises to the level of Rodriguez hitting someone over the melon with a bat, or blindsiding Clark on his way to the bag, or doing something really odious like fucking around on his wife (oh, wait) and even I’m saying - as a guy who thinks the play WAS unsportsmanlike, against the rules, and against my team to boot - that it doesn’t prove Rodriguez is an asshole. After all, the guy has played 1,832 major league games, and if the worst thing anyone can point at is a cheap interference every 916 games, well, you could do worse. But it’s not sportsmanlike and it’s against the rules, and that’s that.
Colliding with a catcher who is blocking home plate is legal, and spiking players was already common practice in professional baseball before Ty Cobb was born. That said, Cobb was an unsportsmanlike bastard. If you’re comparing A-Rod to Ty Cobb you’ve effectively proven A-Rod is unsportsmanlike, because Cobb was unsportsmanlike; he was, even by the more violent standards of his era, a cheating, unsportsmanlike peice of shit.
While this particular play may be legal, I find it telling that I can’t recall ever seeing any player ever doing it. other than him. FRom the dugout, thats not the same- the dugout is closer to the fans then the play, and of course the fans are yelling after each pop up.
As fiddlesticks said above, this is a safety issue, unlike faking a realy to second base. No one cant get hurt there. Miscommunciation on fly balls can and quite often does result in injuries.
I have no opinion on this subject, but my wife’s great aunt, who would be about 105 is she were alive today, was a big baseball fan. I asked her about some of the players she had seen and she mentioned Ty Cobb: “he was such a nice fellow”. Of course she said the same thing about Bill Lambier :).
It’s not really a safety issue. The number of incidents where players run into each other fielding a ball that results in injury is incredibly low. There’s a lot more risk in sliding to break up a double play, and that’s totally legit and happens all the time.
Plus, if A-Rod was yelling “I got it” and one of the fielders misinterpreted that, they would think the other fielder had it, thus they would stop moving to field the ball–no risk of collision.
It’s pretty well known that A-rod’s former teammates at Seattle and Texas despised him and mocked him behind his back. As someone who has a few friendly connections to the Mariners’ organization, I have a few unflattering anecdotes. He didn’t exactly leave many friends behind when he left, and he made sure to burn every possible bridge. And little things like slapping the ball out of the first-baseman’s glove because he can’t control his emotions after making an out don’t exactly endear him to baseball fans, although I’m sure it makes many Yankees fans proud.
Well you are sure wrong. Not one Yankee fan in this thread defended that pathetic slap, and BTW, it was the Pitcher, Bronson Arroyo.
Arroyo, right. But of course I wasn’t directing my comments narrowly at Yankees fans in this thread, as, I’m going to assume, you already know. And given the way Yankees fans—including the city’s mayor—celebrated a child interfering with the outcome of a playoff game in 1996, it’s not a stretch to infer that there are probably plenty who celebrated A-Rod’s despicable behavior in Game 6 of the 2004 ALCS as well. But again, none of them are taking part in this thread.
The Blue Jay fielder said he heard “mine” not “hah”, and both words are similar anyway. Teammate Johnny Damon thought it was illegal, and Joe Torre didn’t know what to make of it.
No, you cited the rules on interference. I’m not aware of an incident like this ever being called interference in the history of baseball. If you’d like to provide a cite where an umpire actually called it that way, I’d be more than happy to stipulate it was against the rules.
And? Where did I ever say A-Rod did or did not act in a sportsmanlike manner. I specifically said that people are full of it if they think baseball is about sportsmanship, it isn’t. It’s a game, that around 700-800 people play at an extremely high level, and they play to win. These are very competitive people, most professional athletes are. They aren’t playing to learn some vague moral lesson about playing hard and building team working skills, this isn’t little league, or High School ball. The fans want to see wins and exciting baseball, the players want to win and do well. Players that skirt the rules of polite behavior and even the rules of the game have been incredibly popular in the past and some still are today.
I said there’s nothing wrong with it, and there isn’t. Is it “mean” or “unsportsmanlike?” Maybe, who cares. I watch because I like baseball, not because I think there’s some greater lesson to be learned about sportsmanship. Nice, stand-up ballplayers are great, but I liked Gaylord Perry and Reggie Jackson and they were anything but.
You may remember the 1978 World Series where Reggie Jackson used his butt (literally) to interfere with a thrown ball, if he hadn’t pulled that move, his team would have lost the game–it was also clearly interference and he wasn’t called for it. He took a risk and it paid off, and he definitely broke the rules in doing it. Tough for the other team he didn’t get caught, Tommy Lasorda was all over the umps trying to get them to call interference the second it happened, but he was out of luck.
Are you really asserting that you know how Jackie Robinson and Pete Rose played on a day-to-day basis? Both of those men combined played thousands of Major League Baseball games, you’re unfortunately naive if you believe neither of them ever got their hands dirty.
The thing about what A-Rod is, isn’t that it crossed some “gentleman’s boundary” that ball players just don’t cross. At worst, it was immature and not often done in the major leagues because almost no major leaguer would fall for that stuff. Just like no major leaguer who is used to playing in front of 50,000+ fans is going to be distracted by someone yelling “swing, batter batter” if that stuff still distracted players at the major league level, players would still do it at the major league level. A-Rod took advantage of the fact one of the fielders had just came up from the minor leagues.
What I actually said was:
So I never actually said major leaguers in general do that, that “I view them (the rules) as something to always be pushed.” Obviously not every player buys in to that. Bringing up Pete Rose is pretty humorous because he always seemed very willing to do whatever it takes to win. Charlie Hustle wasn’t exactly a class act, he seriously injured a catcher in an All-Star Game when he drilled him going home.
I think many players certainly do, and I think that’s what you want out of a player. That doesn’t mean constantly trying to break the rules, but it does mean skirting with them to get every little inch you can, constantly breaking the rules would get you in trouble, but operating in vague areas doesn’t.
No, it’s because most major leaguers wouldn’t be distracted by this any more than a batter would be by someone yelling “swing batter batter batter” at them. The reason a move like this might be considered “Bush League” is because it is very typical of the kind of shit you see in Little League; it’s not done at the professional level because it’s just not effective except in the rare case when you have a rookie playing the field who might be thrown because he’s not as adjusted to the show yet.
Not irrelevant to my point, which is that athletes in general are competitive and interested in winning; and will constantly do almost anything to win.
And, so? Like I said, no one but little kids and parents really cares about sportsmanship, that’s a very childish and naive way to look at the game. It’s competitive sports.
Again, on the sportsmanlike stuff, so? I’m not familiar with any umpire calling this as being against the rules. Umpires have a great deal of discretion, so maybe they have or could, I’m just not aware of it happening.
Cobb was also incredibly popular and generally considered one of the best players in the history of the game. Until Nolan Ryan he was elected to the Hall of Fame with the highest percentage of voters (even higher than Babe Ruth.) When he retired he had set over 90 major league records.
When Cobb was suspended, his entire team refused to play and for that game the Tigers had to field a time made up of random people from a college baseball team and even people off the street, they ended up losing something like 24-0. But for all the criticism Cobb received, his team loved him enough that when he was faced with a short suspension they refused to play without him.
Your right. We should all hang our heads in shame because of an incorrect umpire’s call in our favor. How wrong of us to be happy for winning the game. Once we saw the replay, the Yankees should have gone back out and conceded the game, the series, and even their playoff checks. At the very least, the Yankees should have thrown the series, knowing that any further victories would be forever tainted by a bad call that they had absolutely no say in.
I’m sure there are plenty of sports radio talk shows where one can phone in and make moronic statements about baseball, individual teams, and the fans of those teams. Let’s not bring the SDMB down to that level.
As for slapping Arroyo’s glove, unlike DJ’s false HR, the umpires got the call right and the Yankees lost the game. There’s nothing there to cheer. That’s strike three (misidentifying Arroyo was the first). Back to the dugout for you.
Is there anything you do think is ‘wrong’ in sports? Intentionally injuring a player on the other team? How about intentionally injuring them when they’re not in the game (say, poisoning their food, or just shooting them on the way to the ballpark)? Bribing officials?