My Unwritten Rule: People Who Seriously Quote Baseball's "Unwritten Rules" Are Childish Dolts

Unwritten Rules Update: With his team up by six runs in the fourth inning, Fernando Tatis Jr. stole third base with two outs on pitcher Ian Gibaut, the clown who threw behind Machado last night after Tatis grand-slammed a 3-0 pitch. Tatis stole the base before Gibaut delivered the pitch! He's torching the unwritten rulebook. Hahahahaa.

It's hard to believe that in 2020 there are still professional baseball people who publicly whine about alleged infractions of the so-called "unwritten rules" of baseball.

(But then I remember that a frighteningly large percentage of the population still worship and support, and are apparently willing to die for, and/or sacrifice the lives of their children for, a man whose bottomless incompetence, selfish disinterest, and undiagnosed mental illnesses have led directly to the deaths of more than 200,000 Americans (and there is no end of deaths in sight).)

Wasn't MLB's 2018-19 advertising campaign ("Let the kids play!") supposed to finally end this decades-old nonsense?

Last night, Fernando Tatis Jr. of the Padres swung at a 3-0 pitch from Texas reliever Juan Nicasio and hit a grand slam. San Diego had a 10-3 lead in the eighth inning at the time. It turns out Tatis had missed a "take" sign. It happens. Well, the Texas team was not very pleased at this turn of events and so Ian Gibaut, who replaced Nicasio on the mound, promptly fired his first pitch (a 93 mph fastball) behind Manny Machado's head.

Texas also should have been not very pleased with Nicasio falling behind 3-0 count on four consecutive hitters (Tatis included) and walking two of them before the slam. Nicasio was not ejected for his headhunting and the umpires issued no warnings. Solid work, blue.

Also last night, Washington's Juan Soto belted a 445-foot ninth-inning home run off Atlanta's Will Smith, giving the Nationals a 6-3 lead (Atlanta rallied and won the game in the bottom of the ninth). Soto briefly admired the flight of his home run, but it was long enough for Smith to curse at him, which (naturally) prompted Soto to trot around the bases even slower than he had originally planned.

Nationals manager Dave Martinez had the correct response after the game:

Will Smith said something to Soto that I didn't really appreciate. So I just want to let him know, hey, it wasn't Juan who threw the ball. His job is to hit so just be quiet and get on the mound. You threw the pitch, make a better pitch.

These "Unwritten Rules" are created solely by individual bias. Someone thinks you shouldn't bunt in the last three innings of a no-hitter or steal a base if your team leads by four or more runs after the fifth inning or some other random idiocy, then a few other players agree, and it's suddenly a "rule".

You know why these rules are "unwritten"? BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT ACTUAL RULES. No one has to follow them. No one should follow them. They don't exist, outside of the minds of people who want to control players' actions to conform to their own stunted ideas of how players should behave.

In Texas, Tatis adopted a somewhat conciliatory tone:

I've been in this game since I was a kid, and I know a lot of unwritten rules. And this time, I was kind of lost on this one. From those experiences, you have to learn. Probably next time, I'll take a pitch. I love this game and I respect this game a lot. ... This game is hard for everyone, so why not just celebrate and have fun the way you wanna have fun?

Two current pitchers and two former hitters weighed in on Twitter:

Reds pitcher Trevor Bauer:

Hey @tatis_jr listen up. 1) Keep swinging 3-0 if you want to, no matter what the game situation is, 2) Keep hitting homers, no matter what the situation is, 3) Keep bringing energy and flash to baseball and making it fun, 4) The only thing you did wrong was apologize. Stop that.

Red Sox pitcher Colin McHugh:

Swinging in a 3-0 count should not be against any rules, no matter the score. Before a game I would always look to see what % a guy swings 3-0. If it's over 20%, it means I can't just groove one. The guys who will never "give you a pitch" at the plate are the toughest AB's. In this data driven baseball age, there's nowhere to hide. If you have a tendency, it's gonna be exploited. Swinging 3-0, to me, is the same as swinging first pitch of an AB. If you do it enough times, a pitcher can't game plan as well against you.

Reggie Jackson:

Fernando Tatis keep playing hard and playing great, it's a pleasure to watch you play ... It ain't easy to hit Hrs. Keep bringing energy you have to the game, we need players like you.

Johnny Bench:

So you take a pitch…now you're 3-1. Then the pitcher comes back with a great setup pitch…3-2. Now you're ready to groundout into a double play. Everyone should hit 3-0. Grand Slams are a huge stat.

As ESPN's David Schoenfield noted, "Just because you're down seven runs doesn't give you the right to throw a 3-0 fastball down the middle and expect an easy strike."

In 2019, batters swung at a 3-0 pitch 11.1% of the time. Even when their team was ahead by 5+ runs, players swung at a 3-0 pitch 5.2% of the time. Those rates are nearly double from what they were ten years earlier (5.3% and 2.2%, respectively). So the game changes and pitchers would be wise to change with it.

Schoenfield:

It is all kind of silly. If Tatis had crushed a first-pitch fastball or even a 2-0 fastball, nobody would raise an eyebrow. But because it was 3-0 he has somehow, what, destroyed the integrity of the game? Hurt Juan Nicasio's feelings? This isn't Little League. He's trying to compete, to drive in runs, to hit home runs. Sure, a seven-run lead with two innings to go is pretty safe, but you never know. The Giants just blew a five-run lead in the ninth inning the other night.

Padres manager Jayce Tingler let Tatis know right away that he missed a sign.

It's a learning opportunity, and that's it. He'll grow from it. ... Just so you know, a lot of our guys have green light 3-0. But in this game in particular, we had a little bit of a comfortable lead. We're not trying to run up the score or anything like that.

Note to Tingler (who will probably learn this simple fact after his team blows a six-run lead in the last two innings of a game sometime down the road): ALWAYS run up the score. ALWAYS. ALWAYS. ALWAYS.

Everyone always says: "You can never have enough pitching". Well, you also can never score enough runs. The trailing team is not going to stop trying to score runs and come back, so you keep scoring to make sure they don't.

Manny Acta tweeted:

While coaching 3b in Montreal, I held up a runner at 3rd base out of "respect" for the other club. Frank Robinson almost grabbed me by the ear and said to me: "Listen son, you only have enough runs when you're showering after a win" #unwrittenrules

After the game in Atlanta, Texas manager Chris Woodward (who at 44 is already a grumpy old man feeling lost in the modern world) told everyone to get off his lawn:

There's a lot of unwritten rules that are constantly being challenged in today's game. I didn't like it, personally. You're up by seven in the eighth inning; it's typically not a good time to swing 3-0. It's kind of the way we were all raised in the game. But, like I said, the norms are being challenged on a daily basis. ... I don't think we liked it as a group.

Boo hoo, Chris. It's time to accept that the world does not run exactly on your terms.