It took MLB years of wrangling to institute a policy for home plate collisions after Buster Posey was sidelined by a particularly brutal one in May of 2011. The rule states:
A runner may not run out of a direct line to the plate in order to initiate contact with the catcher, or any player, covering the plate. If he does, the umpire can call him out even if the player taking the throw loses possession of the ball.
In addition, Umpires retain the right to eject a player from a game if the rule is violated blatantly and the runner would be called out.
It occurred to me as I was watching Game 2 of the Mets vs Dodgers NLDS that if Ruben Tejada had been standing at home plate Utley would have probably gotten ejected and (more importantly) he’d have been called out for his slide. The Umpires essentially took the route of deciding this was a clean “hard nosed” play … playoff baseball. But the Mets lost their shortstop to a broken leg following an extremely late slide that wasn’t really a slide at all (more of a leg tackle) … Perpetrated by a player who has done this sort of thing since the day he first broke into the league.
After the fact, Joe Torre, MLB’s Chief Baseball Officer, ruled that Utley’s slide was in violation of Official Baseball Rule 5.09 (a)(13), designed to protect fielders from precisely the kind of rolling away from the bag block that Utley hit Tejada with.
Wonderful. As soon as this came out Twitter and every major Mets outlet lit up with the collective outrage inherent in the following premise: If the play violated an MLB rule, why was Utley safe? The inning should have been over.
You’ve got to wonder what was going on with this umpiring crew. I understand the play was perhaps a throwback to a time when this was more commonplace, but here in 2015 it sure seems like there’s been a rash of old school knockdowns and bench clearing fracases this fall. You have to wonder whether MLB is sitting idly by while ratings balloon and venues fill to the rafters. It’s like Hockey fights — if the NHL really wanted to be rid of them they would have, a while ago. For a Mets team that has seen these sort of cheap shots before … from the Phillies oddly enough, it can be frustrating.
The average take-home payout for a player on this year’s World Series winner may swell to as much as $400,000 dollars. For a guy like Michael Conforto that’s almost a year’s salary. When you consider that players earn this over a period of a month, that’s an awful lot of pocket money.
Wendy Thurman at FanGraphs estimates that the 2015 players’ pool could be as high as $81.4 million dollars. The hefty payout itself inflames the already ultra-competitive dynamic of MLB’s playoffs, increasing the likelihood that players will try some dangerous and desperate crap — precisely the kind of crap that gets people hurt. It’s a problem in the NFL playoffs as well. But when Umpires fail to enforce flagrant violations that result in injuries, you’ve got to wonder what is going on.
It’s like having a traffic cop who will every so often, for no apparent reason, wave a speeding truck by into oncoming traffic because “it was a playoff truck.” If a supervisor in a factory fails to enforce violations in safety protocol he gets fired right?
You know it’s bad when Chipper Jones tweets: “That was not a slide and that is NOT how you go in hard!”
It doesn’t help sooth any Met Fan’s lingering disgust when you put the 7th inning play in the context of some head-scratching, one-sided umpiring in the first two games of this series. I mean I get the home team bias thing and I understand Chavez Ravine has a reputation for social injustice, but damn.
Still, I keep finding myself circling back to the Umpires who made it infinitely worse by not ruling against the slide. By neglecting to do so they create a dangerous precedent because, ultimately, who cares if MLB suspends Utley a couple of games? The Dodgers sure don’t. What matters is they won a game that had they lost, would have put them in a precarious 0-2 hole going into N.Y. to face Matt Harvey, a very angry Matt Harvey.
Perhaps it has more to do with money than we realize. The player pool and MLB’s slice of the proceeds get bigger as series go deep. Specifically, in the Division Series, gate proceeds from the first four games count toward the player pool — this was instituted to discourage interested parties from taking steps to lengthen a given series for monetary gain, so clearly there’s some precedent here. Sweeps are bad for business and the Mets definitely had a sweep in play until the infamous 7th inning.
In retrospect Utley would probably do precisely the same thing again if he had the chance, and that is really the issue here. In other sports you get a game misconduct for crap like that. He wasn’t anywhere near the bag, he didn’t even try to slide! So the Umpires continue to encourage, by their own wonton negligence, an act that violates MLB’s rules? I guess my next question is, why aren’t the Umpires being reprimanded?
No matter how you look at this it’s bad for MLB. Joe Torre may come out a day late (literally) and assure us he is working with the Player’s Association on rule changes but in the end you have to question whether MLB really wants to put this sort of vicious play in its past, or is it a harbinger to a more brutal time, kept around because it happens to sell tickets and it raises interest — in a Roman Coliseum sort of way — everybody loves a good brawl right? But the combination of the increasing amounts reflected in playoff shares and the failure on the part of the Umpires to enforce the rules is making for some decidedly vicious and dangerous developments on the field.
Too bad Tejada won’t get any of the added proceeds from the additional ratings Monday night’s game is sure to garner. There’s only one real way to restore justice to these playoff proceedings, by beating the Dodgers … for Ruben if you will. It appears that’s the only real way to make sure this sort of thing backfires on the Dodgers.
