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Baseball's unwritten rules need to be changed
There was an incident in a Detroit Tigers game several weeks ago that reminded me again that while baseball may indeed be the national pastime, it’s also among the goofiest of activities known to man.
Justin Verlander, the Tigers’ ace, was seven innings into a no-hitter against the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim when a speedy swat hitter named Erick Aybar stepped to the plate to start the eighth.
Verlander delivered, and Aybar squared around and bunted the ball between the pitcher’s mound and third base. Verlander jumped on it, but then threw wildly over the first baseman’s head. It was ruled an error, so the no-hitter was still intact. But Verlander was still steamed. He turned and glared at Aybar. And shortly thereafter – related or not - Verlander gave up his one and only hit of the game, and the no-hitter was history.
The Tigers ultimately won the game, but Verlander remained livid. He called Aybar’s action “bush league,” which in baseball parlance means amateurish, because according to baseball’s list of unwritten commandments “thou shalt not bunt or otherwise pitty-pat the ball while the opposing pitcher is throwing a no-hitter.”
The funny thing about this rule – other than it exists at all – is that it’s not well-defined. It doesn’t, for instance, tell a batter how early in the game he should cease and desist from bunting. So a guy who bunts in the fourth inning of a no-hitter might not be frowned upon, but a guy in the sixth inning who does it will probably.
In no other sport will you find such silliness. An NFL wide receiver on his way to the end zone doesn’t intentionally run out of bounds so as not to ruin the other team’s shutout. A basketball player doesn’t pass up a chance to block the shot of an opponent who’s about to set a scoring record. Only in baseball does the unwritten rule say that you shouldn’t do everything possible to win the game.
It’s nuts. But then that’s baseball. This is a sport, after all, in which you’re also not supposed to steal a base when your team has a large lead, and yet, oddly enough, there’s no such rule for hitters. When teams are way ahead, hitters still try to get on base. But when they do, they’re not supposed to steal. Go figure. Why, you might ask, doesn’t the unwritten rule just go all the way and require that baserunners walk or jog between bases?
In baseball, you’re also not supposed to admire your work when you hit a home run, which again makes no sense. If you hit a ball traveling 95 mph with a teeny-tiny stick over a fence 360 feet away, you deserve to stand and admire it or perhaps let fly with a “Yeeha!”
But when hitters do that, baseball tradition dictates that the pitcher throw his next pitch at the next batter, often at his head, which again is nuts. What’d that guy do? He’s not the one who oohed and aahed over the home run he just hit. Why doesn’t the pitcher wait until the guy who hit the home run comes up again and plunk him?
Well, because that’s not what the unwritten rule book says, that’s why.
It gets nuttier, though. When the batter who was just drilled does the sensible thing and charges the mound to pummel the pitcher, who gets thrown out of the game? The batter, and not the guy who tried to injure or kill him.
Now where’s the sense in that?
The curious thing about that particular unwritten rule is that while batters aren’t supposed to celebrate their hitting prowess, the same doesn’t hold for pitchers. Pitchers routinely pump their fists and roar like lions when they strike a batter out.
The Tigers’ Jose Valverde, for one, does it all the time. And yet never once do you see the next batter “accidentally” helicopter his bat toward Valverde to let him know he didn’t appreciate him showing up his buddy.
That makes me suspicious. You know what I think?
I think pitchers wrote the unwritten rules.
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http://blog.mlive.com/flintjournal/a...ules_need.html
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Originally Posted by Kaabee
