Does Dallas Braden have a ‘roid rage problem? Or was his macho, posturing, alpha male, totally incongruous and utterly bizarre reaction to A-rod crossing the mound on his way to first is just more anti-A-rod, anti-Yankee class resentment boiling to the surface? Or perhaps Braden’s just a dope?
The latter seems quite likely given his post game quotes:
“If my grandmother ran across the mound, she would have heard the same thing he heard — period,” Braden said. “That’s the way I handle the game and the way I handle myself on my workday.”
Nice, berate your old grandmother for breaking a rule that exists only in your mind. Does Oakland keep a team mental health professional on staff?
In the aftermath of the much discussed dust up–in which Braden berated a surprised Rodriquez for jogging across the mound in the middle of an inning on his way back to the first base after running out a foul ball–I went hunting for any work by any of the baseball beat reporters, professional columnists or bloggers who could address whether or not jogging across the mound was, in fact, a breach of baseball etiquette or just a weird fixation of Braden’s. I’d never seen a player cross the mound, but neither had I ever heard of a prohibition against it.
Most writers were content to just offer blow by blow of the Braden/Rodriguez post game comments, while others were content to parrot that crossing the mound was prohibited by one of baseballs “unwritten rules.” The more careful writers couched the “unwritten rule” comment with a qualifier: “according to Braden.” But is crossing the mound a breach of baseball etiquette. I’ve been watching baseball for nearly 40 years and I’ve never heard that one and, based on the reaction of most fans and reporters, no one else has either. In the days when I was a reporter, had I been covering the game, my first reaction to the dust-up would have been to find out whether or not this was a breach of widely held etiquette by asking players and former players. Between players, coaches, managers, scouts and broadcasters present at a a baseball stadium on game day, reporters have access to baseball men with years of experience at every level of the game. Why not ask them?
But I was surprised to find such questions in almost no reporters’ piece today (though I haven’t made an exhaustive search). Was A-rod out of line or is Braden nuts? I still wouldn’t know except for the work of Ben Shpigel of the New York Times who at least asked one former player, Keith Hernandez:
There are so many unwritten rules in baseball that it’s hard to keep track of them all. Don’t barrel over catchers in spring training. Don’t steal bases with a 10-run lead. Don’t peek at a catcher’s signs. Retaliate when a teammate is hit by a pitch. Those are all well-known.This incident seems a little more nuanced. It makes sense, I suppose, that a pitcher would get upset about an opposing player touching his mound during the middle of an inning. Players zip across the field all the time, but they usually bypass the mound, jogging along the grass behind it.
But to be honest, I had never heard of — or considered, really — that actually happening. Braden said it was more common than you would think, but David Waldstein spoke with Keith Hernandez at Citi Field, and Hernandez said that he couldn’t recall it being an issue when he played.
“I don’t know if there is an unwritten rule,” Hernandez said. “But I would never do that.”
Here, then, is the question: can a rule be broken if it may not have existed in the first place?
Related articles by Zemanta
- Braden To A-Rod: Stay Off My Mound! (slidingintohome.blogspot.com)
- Rodriguez: “I’ve never quite heard that” (ballhype.com)
- Open Thread: A-Rod > Braden (i-yankees.com)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=8f6883bd-4c1d-4196-86f1-b43488d70320)
