Now at SI.com: Bobby Valentine Sometimes Says Stupid Things
My latest is up over at Sports Illustrated.com, involving Bobby Valentine‘s recent comments about Kevin Youkilis. You can click over there to see a full-color photo of Bobby V during game action, or...
View ArticleHow to Make Friends and Influence People (or Not): Umpire Edition
Things got testy for Denard Span Tuesday. We know already that there are different ways to deal with umpires—some effective, some not so much. We know already that superstars have more leeway in this...
View ArticleGreat Scott! Red Sox, Rays Continue Decades-Long Dustup
Jeez. You go away for a long Memorial Day weekend, and all heck breaks loose. The nice thing about looking at situations like this in retrospect is the clarity afforded by the long view, in which the...
View ArticleThe Professor is In: Youkilis Offers Impromptu Code Lecture at Home Plate for...
When it comes to the unwritten rules, the primary takeaway from Sunday’s game between the Red Sox and Toronto was not Boston starter Daniel Bard hitting two members of the Blue Jays within the span of...
View ArticleBringing New Meaning to ‘Beantown’: Padilla’s Drilling of Beltre Nothing New
Click for GIF This is what happens when one earns a reputation. By almost every account, Vicente Padilla’s beaning of Adrian Beltre yesterday was an accident. (Watch it here.) It came in the eighth...
View ArticlePerfecto Broken Up by Bunt … and for Once That’s Okay
Boston, a day after getting gut-punched 20-2 by the Oakland A’s, had mustered not so much as a baserunner with two outs in the fifth inning Saturday against right-hander A.J. Griffin. Frustration was...
View ArticleBitter Bobby: Valentine Slaps BoSox, Fans on his Way Out the Door
For anyone who might have, against all reason, been maintaining even a modicum of hope for the tenure of Bobby Valentine in Boston, the soon-to-be ex-manager effectively flipped the bird to the entire...
View ArticleEt Tu, Pedro? Well, Yeah, of Course Et Tu.
First, Lance Armstrong admitting to doping, and now this. Remember all those guys Pedro Martinez intimidated with inside fastballs over the years? (He hit 141 hit batters over 18 seasons, finishing in...
View ArticleArm Butter Accusation Storm Builds in Toronto
Sportsnet’s Buchholz graphic It started last week when Dirk Hayhurst—ex-pitcher, sometimes author and current broadcast analyst for the Toronto Blue Jays—unleashed some damning suspicions on Twitter...
View ArticleBad Blood Between the Rays and Red Sox? Say it Ain’t So
As soon as John Lackey drilled Matt Joyce in the back with a 90-mph fastball in the sixth inning of Monday night’s game, people were already speculating how far back the antagonism ran. Did it date...
View ArticleRays, Red Sox Bring Battle Online
In June, the Red Sox and Rays got into it when John Lackey drilled Matt Joyce. Last year they got into it when Franklin Morales drilled Luke Scott (among multiple confrontations during a long Memorial...
View ArticleWhy Does Dempster Hate A-Rod So? Let Us Count the Ways
The reason the unwritten rules dominate baseball like in no other sport is the space within the game for messaging. The idea that if somebody wants to communicate an idea through action, there is...
View Article1972: Pudge’s Boston Blast Buys Bad Blood
Research for my next book, about the OaklandA’s dynasty of the 1970s, to be published by Houghton Mifflin in 2015, has turned up boundless examples of unwritten rules from that bygone era. The latest...
View ArticleSubstance Abuse, NY Style: Yankees Pitcher Puts the ‘Pine’ in ‘Pineda’
Michael Pineda stymied the Red Sox tonight, but what's that goo on his hand? nyp.st/1efc1vK http://t.co/6kgbMRZRPc— New York Post Sports (@nypostsports) April 11, 2014 So Michael Pineda loaded up his...
View ArticleTropocolipse 2014: Red Sox Anoint Themselves Baseball’s New Code Police
Every day we see new evidence of the degradation of baseball’s unwritten rules, how past forms of moral governance have been swept away in favor of the far simpler ideal of simply letting boys be...
View ArticleRed Sox vs. Rays, Because of Course Red Sox vs. Rays
Would David Price have had such a long memory had it been anybody but the Red Sox? We’ll never know unless he tells us, of course, but the answer is, of course not. In last year’s ALCS, Ortiz hit two...
View Article‘What an Idiot!’ Say, Mike Napoli, What do you Really Think?
Mike Napoli had come through with the heroics, but he didn’t seem to believe it. One out away from a complete-game shutout, Yankees pitcher Masahiro Tanaka fed the Red Sox first baseman a 1-2 fastball...
View ArticleInside Intimidation Doesn’t Always Work Out the Way One Plans
One pitch. The next pitch. There is something to the idea of keeping hitters uncomfortable, but as Yoenis Cespedes shows, a batter’s comfort level is entirely internal.
View ArticleThe Fine Art of Negotiation, Baseball Edition: How to Keep Your Hitters From...
Baseball retaliation is generally considered to be a you-hit-my-guy-so-I’ll-hit-your-guy proposition, designed either to curtail unwanted activity from the other team or to make some sort of macho...
View ArticleDown and Dirty: The Different Responses to a Takeout Slide
You hit my guy so I’ll hit your guy. Retaliation is the oldest story in baseball. Friday saw two similar events—middle infielders being taken out by aggressive slides—handled in different ways. In...
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