Oakland Athletics: Hey Twitterverse, defend Mike Fiers, not Pete Rose?

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(Photo by Cody Glenn/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images) /

Twitter users used Astrogate to agitate for Pete Rose despite wrongdoing and attack Oakland Athletics pitcher Mike Fiers for doing the right thing.

This all started when a report in The Athletic had Oakland Athletics starter Mike Fiers detailing the blatant manner by with the Houston Astros cheated in 2017. Months later, on Monday, January 13th MLB responded by handing down it’s punishments.

The least surprising thing when the Astrogate hammer dropped was that the Twitterverse would go supernova, more or less. When it did, the least surprise was a concurrent whatabout trending around one or another figure or pet, which the suspensions and then firings of Jeff Luhnow and A.J. Hinch inspired around . . . Pete Rose.

Hinch, of course, is baseball’s third manager to be suspended or banished permanently from the game as a disciplinary matter. Rose is the only one of the three to be banished permanently. But the suspension and firing of Hinch barely had time to settle in before Twitter exploded with what seemed a volcanic eruption of demands that, essentially, the Astrogate punishments write Rose’s concurrent ticket to ride into Cooperstown.

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Typical such demands included these:

“I better see Pete Rose in the Hall of Fame tomorrow, @mlb. Get your s–t together Rob.”
“So Pete Rose is banned for life for betting while people who actually cheated in [the] World Series are gone for one year????”
“A year for cheating that directly changed the outcome of games… Meanwhile, Pete Rose is still permanently banned for betting on his team to win and was never accused of cheating in any form.”

The Rose partisans didn’t have the Twitter floor to themselves; in due course, a fair volume of Tweeters designed to remind them, without saying it quite outright, Which portion of Rule 21(d) still escapes you? Because we never seem to pass all that much time before there’s yet another inspiration to resurrect the Rose case and the Rose banishment and the Rose absence from the Hall of Fame. Especially around Hall of Fame voting times, but not exclusively so.

Those among the Twitterpated who banged on the can labeled: “Pete bet on his team to win and got thrown out for life!” forget, if they knew in the first place, that the rule mandates a lifetime banishment: “Any player, umpire, or Club or League official or employee, who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor has a duty to perform, shall be declared permanently ineligible.” It doesn’t say, “unless he shall have bet on his team to win.”

With sign-stealing things depend upon how you do it.

Old-fashioned on-the-field gamesmanship, an alert baserunner or base coach catching onto and deciphering signs to opposing pitchers, isn’t exactly legal according to baseball’s outlines, but it isn’t exactly grounds for an investigation, either. Stealing signs from off the field is, especially with mechanical, technical, or electronic devices.

But discipline for off-field, mechanical/technical/electronic sign stealing is at the commissioner’s discretion. There’s no mandatory sentence for it in the formal rule book or in the formal directives against it that date back, in fact, to the National League first directing against it in 1961. Rob Manfred was left to his own discretion in disciplining Luhnow and Hinch.

Rose didn’t have that kind of latitudinal hope. If he had only bet on baseball excluding games “in connection with which [he had] a duty to perform,” meaning playing in or managing the games (and, remember, he was the Reds’ player-manager for the final two seasons of his playing career), he’d have lost nothing but a year. And he might now be an almost three-decade-long member of the Hall of Fame.

Betting on his own team, meaning games in which he had a duty to perform as the team’s manager and thus a club official and employee—regardless of whether he bet only on his Reds to win—got him permanently banished. It also got him made permanently ineligible to stand for Hall of Fame election, when the Hall answered the likelihood of his election despite his banishment with its own regulation (which it had the absolute right to make since it’s not administered by MLB but is a separate entity, officially) barring those on baseball’s ineligible list from Hall ballots.

If you want to defend anyone in this disaster, how about defending Oakland Athletics starter Mike Fiers?

Frank Serpico. December 16, 1971. (Photo by Arty Pomerantz/New York Post Archives /(c) NYP Holdings, Inc. via Getty Images) /

Mike Fiers, Baseball’s Frank Serpico

At the same time the Twitterverse exploded with Rose partisans demanding Astrogate equal his reinstatement, it also exploded Monday with rounds of outrage against Oakland Athletics starter Mike Fiers the expressions of which would have been considered obscene even in a porn filmmaker’s parlor.

“Give back your ring you snitch!”
“A baby back B—h and a rat!”
“Should be dealt with like a rat.”
“Single-handedly destroyed an entire organization.”
“I’m fighting Mike Fiers if I ever see him.”
“We plan to hit every batter the Oakland Athletics next year until there’s a benches-clearing brawl then we all just go after Mike Fiers.” (That’s from a fan, not a player, folks.)

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Those are the more benign comments. But they’re the sort of thing once thrown at Frank Serpico when that New York police officer finally went public after a few years of beating his head against the wall trying to get his department to address rampant corruption in the late 1960s and earliest 1970s.

No, baseball isn’t anywhere near as grave as police work. But they share certain cultural similarities, including the implicit demand that you keep your trap shut and work your issues and concerns out internally, within the culture, regardless of whether anything within the culture facilitates what you know to be wrong.

Like Serpico, the Oakland Athletics starter did just that, advising teams he joined after his Houston days to beware, until last November he finally decided, for whatever reasons, that he, too, couldn’t keep it internal any longer.

When Serpico reached that point, he (with help from his better-connected fellow cop David Durk) took it to the New York Times. When Fiers reached it, he took it to The Athletic‘s Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich. “I just want the game to be cleaned up a little bit because there are guys who are losing their jobs because they’re going in there not knowing,” the pitcher told the two reporters.

Young guys getting hit around in the first couple of innings starting a game, and then they get sent down. It’s (B.S.) on that end. It’s ruining jobs for younger guys. The guys who know are more prepared. But most people don’t. That’s why I told my team. We had a lot of young guys with Detroit (in 2018) trying to make a name and establish themselves. I wanted to help them out and say, “Hey, this stuff really does go on. Just be prepared.”

The only thing missing so far is that, unlike Serpico, to whose younger self Fiers actually does have a sort of facial resemblance, Fiers hasn’t been set up to be shot in the face.

When it happened to Serpico, his well-wishes in the hospital included a greeting card whose printed “With Sincere Sympathy” was augmented by a handwritten “that you didn’t get your brains blown out, you rat bastard. Happy relapse.”

Once upon a time, Hall of Famer Christy Mathewson was the only man in baseball willing to stand up and do something about the gambling game tankers before the Black Sox scandal forced the game’s hand.

Next. Yankees: The 2017 AL MVP according to Aaron Judge. dark

Oakland Athletics starter Mike Fiers was the only man in baseball willing to stand up by name against the high-tech cheaters. You almost don’t want to know what you’d have seen if there’d been a Twitterverse in Mathewson’s time or in Serpico’s.

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