[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he tricky thing about unwritten rules is that when edicts aren’t spelled out in black and white, it leaves an awful lot of room for gray area.
Perhaps no sport in the world has more unwritten rules than baseball. Coming in at 284 pages long, the official Major League Baseball rulebook is certainly comprehensive, with copious guidelines concerning base running, balks and batter interference. But for well over 100 years, baseball—from the major leagues down to the game’s lowest levels—seems to exist in the margins, where the jurisdiction of the league’s officials ends and the philosophy of ballplayers, and fans, determine the lay of the land.
This weekend, while I was taking photographs for the men’s baseball league I play in, I got the chance to watch a truly special pitcher take the mound. Brayan Trinidad, a 22-year-old lefthander with a low 90s fastball and a devastating slider, put together his second-straight 16 strikeout game, dominating hitters throughout a nine-inning, one-hit performance that left the other team wringing their hands in despair.
What made his performance even more remarkable is the fact that just two weeks prior, Trinidad was a weak-hitting middle infielder who threw right-handed.
As it turned out, this pitcher was not, in fact, Trinidad, but a Dominican-born professional nicknamed “La Piedra de Nagua,” who was released by the Texas Rangers’ organization a few weeks earlier.
Obviously, our league has pretty clearly defined rules on roster eligibility. The use of non-rostered players in league games is supposed to result in an automatic forfeit, and continued disregard of the rules can lead to a team’s season being terminated outright.
But, again, this is baseball, so there’s always a question of how the rules get interpreted.
Bringing in outside players is nothing new; heck, even my team has done it in the past. But the unspoken agreement between teams is that it’s one thing to suit up someone’s 17-year-old cousin to ensure a shorthanded ballclub can field enough to play; it’s an entirely different matter to bring in a flame-throwing minor leaguer under an assumed identity for the playoff push.
The losing manager, whose team needed that win to remain in the playoff hunt, lobbied league officials for some sort of judgment on the illegal player, and I don’t envy their decision at all. Sure, the move was against the rules, but if everyone’s willing to look the other way during other instances of rule-breaking, is it right to penalize this team just because their ringer could play?
Depending on how you look at it, this is either part of the beauty of baseball, or a major problem with the sport. Why are steroid users considered cheaters, not worthy of a plaque in the Hall of Fame, while pitchers who used foreign substances on balls—think of Gaylord Perry—considered to be nothing more than wily geniuses? How long is Jose Bautista allowed to stand at the plate after swatting a dinger before it means the next batter is going to get a fastball in the ribs? Why are superstars like Bryce Harper allowed to initiate brawls in the dugout with his teammates, while struggling catcher Miguel Montero was outright released after criticizing his pitchers for their inability to shut down the running game?
I understand that baseball’s unwritten rules might be confusing to some, but for me, that’s part of the charm of the game. Watching these conventions shift with time, seeing the way the game continually evolves through generations, gives the sport an appearance of a living, breathing entity, and I, for one, embrace it.
That is, unless we have to face “The Rock of Nagua” in the playoffs. If that happens, you’d better believe that I will be lobbying for a much stricter interpretation of the rules we actually happened to write down.
