Oakland Athletics: Hey Twitterverse, how about defending Fiers, not Rose?

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.)

More from Call to the Pen

• Philadelphia Phillies, ready for a stretch run, bomb St. Louis Cardinals
• Philadelphia Phillies: The 4 players on the franchise’s Mount Rushmore
• Boston Red Sox fans should be upset over Mookie Betts’ comment
• Analyzing the Boston Red Sox trade for Dave Henderson and Spike Owen
• 2023 MLB postseason likely to have a strange look without Yankees, Red Sox, Cardinals

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.

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.