Another sickeningly beautiful day in Sarasota.
Not only is the weather straight out of a stock photography web site, but the sweet taste of hope is in the air. No one knows what could possibly happen in 2011, but based on the Orioles’ play under Buck Showalter and the people they acquired this winter that you’ve actually heard of, there’s the chance these Orioles could be more than an afterthought on Baseball Tonight.
Jake Fox, 27-year-old catcher and guy just trying to impress people, steps to the plate with Orioles holding a it’d-be-more-comfortable-if-we-weren’t-the-Orioles 13-3 lead in the underside of the 8th. In the other dugout, Tigers manager Jim Leyland chews angrily on a piece of wood, as is his custom, and the rookie on the mound for Detroit quickly clogs up the count to 3-0. A guaranteed plate-hugger is on the way, and like every other time this situation has presented itself in a baseball game in history, every body knows it.
But Jake Fox wants to prove he knows it more than anyone and takes a mighty hack at the pitch; and as he leads all of baseball in home runs for spring training (10), the move is a legitimate threat to invite this young hurler to the earned run party that every other Tigers pitcher was attending that day.
Almost simultaneously, Showalter and Leyland have rage-strokes. Buck rips his hat off and screams at no one in particular. Leyland throws himself up the dugout steps and shouts something toward the mound. Whatever Fox did, he’s pissed both of off the highest tenured men on the field.
Well, what he did is what he did. Traditionally, you take that pitch–but you certainly take it when you’ve got a 10-run lead in the 8th and you’re up against a moon-faced rookie. Leyland was mad at the ignorance of etiquette, and Showalter was mad because he’s apparently had a shout or two with Fox on the very topic this year and Fox, well, certainly didn’t learn the lesson Buck has been trying to impose upon him. Perhaps he learned it this time, when his manager met him on the step after the at-bat and screamed a hole in his head.
Plenty of these types of rules are followed in baseball.
- Don’t steal second when you have a mammoth lead
- Don’t run into the catcher if there’s no play at the plate
- Don’t try to sneak the bat down to first base with you and hurl it at the pitcher when nobody’s looking
But was Jake Fox’s decision really enough to warrant the disdain of both managers? Yes, probably.
To be fair, Jim Leyland is as old as the solar system. It wouldn’t be a huge stretch to assume he was yelling at some kids behind the Orioles dugout for laughing during the last pitch before being ushered back down the dugout steps by one of the trainers.
And this is just further explanations of those unwritten rules of baseball we got a crash course in last season. Can we fault Buck Showalter and Jim Leyland any more than we faulted Dallas Braden for causing a scene when A-Rod ran across the pitcher’s mound? No, we cannot. Because unlike Braden, Showalter and Leyland have a combined 31 years in professional baseball, are good at their jobs, and the rule they are talking about actually exists.
But think about it from Jake’s point of view. He’s a kid hitting home runs at a robotic pace, and when the season starts, he’s going to be hidden behind the hopeful ghost of Matt Wieters. Any chance he gets, he wants to put another reminder of how useful he can be over the right field wall after a weak showing in 2009.
This is the kid who recognizes the value of a chance. As a minor leaguer playing for the Lansing Lugnuts in the Cubs organization, Jake was told he’d be catching one night for Mark Prior, who was down from the big club on a rehab assignment. His mind blown, Jake cleaned his brains off the wall, placed them back in his head, and proceeded to invite his loved ones to the stadium to watch their husband/daddy/son we always knew would make us proud get a small, innocuous taste of the Show.
When he showed up for the game, he saw Paul Bako’s name in the catcher’s spot; which is like finding out you’ve been replaced by a Big Mac wrapper from the side of the highway. The manager, Julio Garcia, told him he just wasn’t experienced enough to catch for a professional pitcher, and Paul Bako, having spent his career wasting a roster spot on six different teams (so far), totally was.
“Just kidd–” Garcia shouted, but it was too late. Jake Fox grabbed a bat out of the equipment manager’s hands and committed more war crimes than any baseball locker room has ever seen in this country.
Actually, Garcia revealed the switch was a practical joke before any rampage could have gone down. But how that story doesn’t end with “…and then he killed them as he laughed,” is beyond me.
Besides, with Paul Bako standing right there, he could see exactly what can happen to a catcher if he fails to meet the extremely low expectations set for him by his team.
But even so, once something has been explained to you by Buck Showalter, even if you disagree with it, chances are he will not enjoy telling a man something a second time. Beefing up his numbers or not, Fox has got to understand that he can’t really go against his manager’s orders, especially when that manager is Buck Showalter, and especially when he’s not yet considered an essential piece of the puzzle (though he’s made a pretty strong case thus far).
The bigger question here is, when will baseball finally institute a 10-run rule? It made a lot more of my disastrous little league outings all the more bearable just by taking the bats out of the other teams’ hands.