St. Louis Cardinals’ manager, commissioner’s office sort out gray area in new MLB rules
Representatives from the Major League Baseball Commissioner’s office were in St. Louis Cardinals camp on Friday morning as part of an annual series of meetings designed to identify concerns of those in the game and clarify rule changes set to be implemented for the coming season.
Cardinals manager Mike Shildt said he met with the representatives for about 90 minutes with a conversation that spanned from the inevitable drill down regarding the abuse of technology in baseball, the implementation of the new three-batter minimum for relief pitchers, and a discussion about the ways in which foreign substances are introduced to baseballs during game action.
“The game has gotten more gray area and that’s what got the game in trouble a little bit,” Shildt said. “I’ve said this and I’ll say it again: there’s no winner in the whole sign stealing deal. Everybody’s lost.”
One crucial point which was clarified for Shildt on Friday morning is that a pickoff of a runner would not count as one of the three batters a reliever could face before his removal from a game. A batter who is intentionally walked would qualify as one of the requisite hitters, even though the automatic apportionment of intentional bases on balls now no longer requires a pitcher to physically deliver a pitch.
Shildt also said he expects that MLB will deploy additional personnel to ballparks in order to more closely monitor the use of the video technology that is at the heart of Houston’s sign stealing scandal.
“Law enforcement’s always reactionary to criminals,” Shildt said. “It just is. It just happens. If law enforcement could be ahead of criminals, there’d be zero crime. So, similar here.”
Appropriate for the relatively blustery morning in Florida was the discussion about doctoring baseballs.
Cincinnati starter Trevor Bauer has accused the Astros of applying a combination of substances to baseballs as a matter of practice in order to artificially and unfairly increase the spin rate of those balls. Such a practice would, in theory, add velocity to a fastball or sharper break to a breaking ball, giving a pitcher an unfair advantage.
Though doctoring baseballs has long been a violation of the letter of the law, it has been broadly accepted as a matter of practice. In both the 2006 and 2013 World Series, Cardinal fans could see opposing pitchers (Kenny Rogers of the Detroit Tigers and Jon Lester of the Boston Red Sox) with apparent stains which suggested some doctoring of the ball.
In those frigid and sometimes wet circumstances, the Cardinals under managers Tony LaRussa and Mike Matheny opted not to push the issue. Shildt, like his predecessors, sees the dilemma.
“By rule, you can’t doctor the baseball, and that’s fine,” Shildt said. “And there’s always been a little bit of an understanding, so this is this gray area.
“There’s been this understood, mostly acceptable hitter-pitcher relationship, where guys are throwing four miles an hour faster than they were five or six years ago. As a hitter, you pretty much want that guy to know where it’s going.”
The player safety consideration is not insignificant. This season’s opening day is set at the earliest possible date under the current scheduling rules, meaning more games are likely to be played in difficult conditions.
Pitchers shift from warm environments in Florida and Arizona to pitching mounds in Minneapolis and Detroit may also find themselves in the crosshairs of an MLB edict designed to cut down on retaliatory hit batsmen, which is a result of the league-wide outrage over the behavior of the Astros.
“We don’t want people being thrown at and we don’t want hitters getting hit or anything around their head,” Shildt said. “Well, the fact of the matter, sometimes, guys make it look real easy but a ball can get away, and it slips, and it gets away. Well now all of the sudden ... a guy doesn’t have some basic feel for the ball and he can’t grab something that gives him a feel because the balls are slick.
“So now what happens? A ball gets away and it’s deemed to be intentional. Well, now guess what happens? Ejection, manager ejection, possible suspension. So there’s where the gray is and that’s what’s being sorted out.”
Shildt believes the answer is in the development of baseballs with a tacky feel, though he conceded that such a development may be several years away.
He’s also eager for baseball to move past a winter of discontent and in an era of appreciation for the game’s history and get back to “romanticizing” the national pastime.
“There’s a lot of people that care about the integrity of this game in the clubhouse, in the commissioner’s office, in front offices,” Shildt emphasized. “I am convinced of that. There’s a high, high percentage of people that are sincere about continuing to move this game forward and be good stewards.
“We all are in this together for the game. There’s a lot of people that care. You want our end users, our fans to know that this is still a sport that has a lot of integrity and character and it’s a wonderful game that people are trying to do the best they can to take care of it.”
This story was originally published February 28, 2020 at 4:00 PM.
