Baseball's Unwritten Code Is In Their Heads
It's about time we wrote down all those unwritten baseball rules. The misinterpretations are causing all kinds of problems.
Justin Verlander won a dandy pitching duel with Jered Weaver on Sunday, 3-2, but both pitchers struggled with the unwritten sections of the baseball rulebook.
Weaver had the first read -- and he might have misread.
Magglio Ordonez belted an offspeed pitch down the left-field line in the third and stood at home plate to watch the ball curve on the fair side of the pole for a two-run homer. Weaver had words with Miguel Cabrera after he popped out to first, then exchanged words with Ordonez after he flew out in the sixth.
"I don't hit many homers anymore, so I wanted to make sure that one was going to stay fair," Ordonez said. "I'm not going to try to show up anyone in this league. That's not me.
"He was yelling at me to run faster, so I told him that I'm old -- that's as fast as I can run."
Then in the seventh, Carlos Guillen launched a 3-2 pitch into the seats in right for a solo home run.
Guillen, reacting to Weaver's words to Ordonez, flipped his bat at home plate before taking a couple of sideways hop-steps and getting into his home run trot.
"I was upset because he was yelling at Magglio when Magglio hit the home run," Guillen said. "Nobody in the ballpark knows if it's going fair or foul, so he has to stand maybe at home plate. (Weaver) was yelling, 'Run, run, you have to run the (expletive) bases.' Magglio has 13, 14 years in the big leagues. You don't have to yell at him."
After both teams were warned about further antics, Weaver threw his first (and last) pitch to Alex Avila high and inside over the Detroit catcher's head.
Weaver didn't even wait to get ejected before leaving the mound, yelling and pointing at the Detroit dugout on his way to his dugout.
"After what Guillen did, I think that just kind of crossed the line a little bit," Weaver said. "I'm not just going to go out there and take that. I'm a competitor, and ... I'm not going out there trying to show anybody up. Never have.
"If that's the way they want to play the game, then that's what it is. But I just didn't appreciate it too much."
Meantime, Verlander was no-hitting the Angels through seven. But then Erick Aybar bunted leading off the eighth, and Detroit's ace threw the ball away for a two-base error.
Angels manager Mike Scioscia called it "a great play." Detroit manager Jim Leyland said it was "beautiful."
Verlander, who turned and stared at Aybar on second, called it "bush league."
The Angels squeezed two runs out of the inning (one when Verlander dropped the ball while Aybar was in a rundown between home and third) and scored on their first hit of the game.
"Very surprised," Verlander said of the bunt attempt. "It's a three-run game. It's a close game. There's arguments both ways, but obviously from a pitching standpoint, we like to call it bush league. But there's arguments on both sides of it.
"I was charging it -- probably thinking some bad thoughts about him the whole time -- and maybe tried to throw it a little bit too hard, which is probably exactly what he wanted. He probably wanted to get me a little fired up."
"Beautiful play," Leyland said. "I'll be in the minority with the people that didn't like that. I disagree with that totally. They've got a good team with a lot of speed. They're trying to win a pennant, just like we are. I don't have any problem with that play whatsoever."
"That's a great play with Erick's bunt," said Scioscia, who thought it should be a single and error. "That should have been a hit. We're trying to get back into the game, and we snuck back into it."
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