Felony or Misdemeanor of Baseball Etiquette? Or Stay off my MOUND!!!!

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April 23, 2010
Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez pushed Oakland Athletics pitcher Dallas Braden over the edge Thursday when he walked over the pitcher's mound. Melissa Block talks about A-Rod's foul play with Paul Dickson, author of The Unwritten Rules of Baseball: The Etiquette, Conventional Wisdom, and Axiomatic Codes of Our National Pastime.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126225395

So what do you think? Was ARod wrong in crossing and trespassing on the pitcher's mound? Was it an intentional or unintentional slight against the pitcher? Or do you think the pitcher overreacted?

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Type: Discussion • Score: 7 • Views: 4,569 • Replies: 34

full tackle baseball baby, that's what i'm talking about (golf too, should allow two blind tackles per round)

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@tsarstepan,

Over-reaction. There is no rule of any sort about this and the opportunity for it to happen (runner at third needing to go back to first) is so rare that it's not accurate to say there is even a custom about it.

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@tsarstepan,

Alex and his obscene paycheck should be banned from baseball...

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@engineer,

That's my thinking. The media should lay off ARod and this is from a die hard Red Sox fan/Yankee's hater.

Now he knows this unwritten rule, he now knows better. If he continues this allegedly disruptive and disrespectful behavior then perhaps the media can make a minor deal about it.

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@Rockhead,

That's another issue then this one. Wink

The entire Yankees team should be imprisoned in a 10 by 10 cement cell room at the bottom of the ocean (no windows or hatches or air hoses or tanks)

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@tsarstepan,

Roberta would have a problem with that scenario...

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@Rockhead,

Tickets to Yankees stadium will be affordable after that plan is enacted. Of course Yankees games won't be played there when the team is on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

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@tsarstepan,

tsarstepan wrote:

Now he knows this unwritten rule, he now knows better.

don't most 8 year old ball players know this?

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@ehBeth,

this is the same clown that yipped as he went by on a pop-up.

very sand-lot.

always has been...

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@tsarstepan,

tsarstepan wrote:

That's another issue then this one.

The entire Yankees team should be imprisoned in a 10 by 10 cement cell room at the bottom of the ocean (no windows or hatches or air hoses or tanks)

I've been interested in sports and teams for as long as I can remember. I started going to baseball games in the early sixties (at Yankee Stadium) and basketball games at Madison Square Garden. I never did get to see the Giants play at the Stadium or in the Meadowlands.

I didn't understand when I was younger and don't understand now why a fan of one team will hate another team. I just don't get it. You get together the best team you can. You do the best you can. Either you win or lose. If my team doesn't win, I'm disappointed. If my team wins, I'm happy.

The kind of vitriole exhibited here is just a bit over the top. One player on one team violated an unwritten rule. You're pissed off at the player, fine. You want to kill the whole team. A bit much.

I rejected everything else I was gonna say. The essence is above.

Throwing in a sigh. Sigh.

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@Roberta,

I wouldn't allow anyone to imprison the Yankee's dear Roberta. I respect Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, and even A Rod, along with many of the other players too much.

All my antiYankee diatribes are just hot air blasts I must emit in order to keep my citizenship in the Red Sox Nation. After all, I am an expatriate of the Red Sox Nation living in enemy territory doncha know. Wink

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I've played a lot of baseball in my time, and if I were the pitcher I would be throwing at the head of that stuffed up prick the next time he was in the batter's box. It is unconscionable for a major league ball player having spent a decade and a half in pro baseball at the major league level not to know even the unwritten rules.

Don't forget that this player is a completely dishonest sack of **** who cheated by injecting himself with steroids to improve his performance.

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@tsarstepan,

Quote:

Was ARod wrong in crossing and trespassing on the pitcher's mound?

yes.

Quote:

Was it an intentional or unintentional slight against the pitcher?

intentional.

Quote:

Or do you think the pitcher overreacted?

yes.

A-Roid puts himself into these situations all the time.
this is not the first unwritten rule he's broken, nor will it be the last.
he simply does not respect the game or its players...

1 Reply

@Region Philbis,

It'd be interesting to see what rule or what player ARod will go after next. He does keep things interesting ...

in a very jerkish way however. Confused

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@ehBeth,

ehBeth wrote:

don't most 8 year old ball players know this?

No.

Quote:

But to be honest, I also have never heard that "don't cross the mound" rule. I wasn't a great baseball player by any stretch, but I played a lot of it -- and I never heard the rule. I don't claim to be the most insightful baseball analyst going by any stretch, but I've covered a lot of baseball and talked to a lot of baseball people -- and I never heard the rule. And I am quite sure that through the years, I have seen numerous players walk either right by the mound or right over it ... some to pass along a little message or joke to the pitcher, some (A.J. Pierzynski comes to mind) to be irritating, and some simply because it's a direct route. I don't know if I have seen any of them actually step on the rubber like Braden claims A-Rod did. And I would not doubt for one minute that A-Rod did the run-across to be annoying or intimidating. I don't know why he did it -- but it's certainly possible that he was sending one of those goofy and childish coded A-Rod messages, like the time he yelled "Ha!" when running by someone trying to catch a fly ball.
Still, it seems to me the key factory here is: It's A-Rod. And all that entails. I mean, let's face it ... if that was Albert Pujols running across the mound, and that was a pitcher who has accomplished as much as Dallas Braden griping about it -- say Anibal Sanchez or someone -- it seems to be there would be a whole lot of "Shut your fat face, kid," talk going on across the country.
But it's not Pujols. It's A-Rod. And because it's A-Rod, there are suddenly a lot of people saying: "Yeah, you can't just run across the mound -- everybody knows that!"

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/writers/joe_posnanski/04/25/alex.rodriguez/1.html

1 Reply

@Robert Gentel,

Robert Gentel wrote:

ehBeth wrote:
don't most 8 year old ball players know this?

No.

Geez, when I was a terrible little league ballplayer even I knew that rule -- not that I ever was in any danger of violating that rule, of course, given how seldom I ever made it to third base. It's like a goalie's crease in hockey. That's the guy's office, and you don't just walk into a guy's office and start messing with his stuff.

I also knew that you don't steal with a big lead and that, as a batter, you never look back to see how the catcher is positioning himself. That one can earn you a fastball right in your ear.

Joe Posnanski, from Sports Illustrated, wrote:

And because it's A-Rod, there are suddenly a lot of people saying: "Yeah, you can't just run across the mound -- everybody knows that!"

Yeah, that's bullcrap. When will people in NYC learn that the rest of us aren't as enamored of NYC celebrities as NYC folks think we should be. A-Rod, Schma-Rod, who cares. Stay off the mound, you chucklehead!

1 Reply

Hey, at least the A's got a double play off of the next pitch.

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@joefromchicago,

joefromchicago wrote:

Geez, when I was a terrible little league ballplayer even I knew that rule...

Of course you did. But there's no evidence for this because it was "unwritten" right?

Can anyone cite any record of this purported rule prior to 2010?

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@Robert Gentel,

Robert Gentel wrote:

Of course you did. But there's no evidence for this because it was "unwritten" right?

Much of the details of my early life remain unwritten. I haven't gotten to that chapter of my autobiography yet.

Robert Gentel wrote:

Can anyone cite any record of this purported rule prior to 2010?

Probably. Baseball is quite possibly the most obsessively written-about sport in the world, so there's got to be someone out there who will find evidence of this practice back in baseball's shadowy past. Maybe "Orator" Jim O'Rourke stepped on the mound and "Old Hoss" Radbourn yelled a few choice epithets in his direction, calling him a "rapscallion" or even a "dunderhead," and then emphasized his point by throwing O'Rourke a "duster" the next time he came to the plate.

But then we don't really have to go to that trouble. The mere fact that nobody has made a big deal about this sort of thing until now may be because nobody has done it in a big league game until now. It's not like runners are taking a shortcut over the mound in every game and it's just A-Rod that gets into trouble for it. The lack of any discussion about this before now may be evidence that the rule doesn't exist, but it can also be evidence that the rule does exist and everybody is obeying it.

My guess is that the pitcher was certainly aware of the rule -- I doubt that he made it up on the spot. So there's at least one person on the diamond who thinks that the rule exists and that it is applicable to all players. Whether that rule is generally accepted is worth researching, I suppose, but I'm not going to be the one to do it.

2 Replies

Felony or Misdemeanor of Baseball Etiquette? Or Stay off my MOUND!!!!

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