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August 22, 2012

Sobsequy

The Hidden Complexities of Baseball's Unwritten Rules

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On August 11 in Toledo, the Durham Bulls’ Will Rhymes hit a second-inning, two-run home run off of Toledo Mud Hens starter Drew Smyly. (If you watch the video above, you’ll see a replay of Rhymes’ homer partway through.)

The next batter was Nevin Ashley, and Symly drilled Ashley near the thigh with his next pitch. Message delivered, but not quite the right way: Smyly and Toledo’s manager, Phil Nevin, were ejected, and both benches were warned.

That should have ended the thing. But in the game’s final inning, Rhymes came to bat against hard-throwing Mud Hens’ reliever Bruce Rondon. As Ben Lindbergh detailed last week, Rondon is a very young (21 years old), highly regarded Tigers farmhand. His fastball can top 100 mph and was called by one evaluator, Baseball Prospect Nation’s Mark Anderson, an “absolutely elite pitch… that can be unhittable when thrown for strikes.”

Rondon was making just his third appearance at the Triple-A level, called up from Double-A when Mud Hens closer (and 2011 Durham Bull) Chris Bootcheck went down with a season-ending injury.

In addition to the “elite” fastball, Anderson called Rondon “still very wild,” and he wasn’t describing only Rondon’s pitches. Anderson also reported on Rondon’s “poor makeup. Lacks drive and desire. Frequently characterized as lazy. Lacks effort on the field and carries off-putting emotion on his sleeve.” Anderson isn’t the only observer to make assessments like these about Rondon.

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20 comments have been left for this article.

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Johnson Magic

Hey - easy with the "lowly" description of Lehigh. I went there, and as any Engineer can tell you 15 > 2.

Otherwise a great article. ;-)

Aug 22, 2012 07:16 AM

rating: 0

Adam Sobsey

BP staff

Ha! Good one. And Lehigh had the best player on the floor that night, C. J. McCollum.

Aug 22, 2012 07:53 AM

edwinblume

casual reference to my favorite movie = great article

Aug 22, 2012 07:46 AM

rating: 0

Adam Sobsey

BP staff

Regarding athletes on Twitter, I neglected to add that Rhymes is one of the few who does have an interesting presence there, and not only because of his accidental provocation in last year's postseason. In the wee hours of the morning before the game discussed in this article, he tweeted this line from a Bright Eyes song: "The sorrowful midwest... I did my best to keep my head." After the game, again in the small hours--almost exactly 24 hours after the first Bright Eyes tweet--Rhymes tweeted the line again. It was almost as if the agitating events of the game--played in the midwest, of course--had Rhymes revisiting the line with a sort of prescient-in-hindsight reflectiveness.

Aug 22, 2012 10:16 AM

Dubey89

Very much enjoyed this article. Thanks

Aug 22, 2012 12:40 PM

rating: 0

Richard Bergstrom

Rhymes should get a guest spot here. Seems like a thoughtful guy.

Aug 22, 2012 15:16 PM

rating: 0

R.A.Wagman

Love your work, Adam - you are a real writer's writer. And you are absolutely spot on about the milb website. Way too many clicks needed to do anything, inconsistent linkages. Just weak.

Aug 22, 2012 19:57 PM

rating: 0

Adam Sobsey

BP staff

Thank you very much! I don't know what the problem is at milb.com. Some of this year's tweaks have actually made the site *less* user-friendly.

Aug 24, 2012 08:09 AM

drawbb

Other readers have rated this comment below the viewing threshold. Click here to view anyway.

Once again: I'd like to ask the editorial staff to reconsider and provide a warning in the links of all articles discussing Twitter in a significant way as this one did. Thank you!

Aug 23, 2012 13:00 PM

rating: -4

Ben Lindbergh

BP staff

You're welcome to try to persuade me why this is necessary, but I still don't see any reason to do it. This article is 2000 words long. Only 200 of them have anything to do with Twitter. The tweet Adam embedded, and his discussion of it, is relevant to the rest of the story, since it supports the idea that Rhymes might hold some grudge against the Tigers that caused him to flip his bat after hitting the home run against Toledo.

This story also contains an embedded video of an on-field incident from MiLB.com. It includes quotes from players. It includes statistics. It includes links to other articles. All of those things are used to make arguments and enrich the article, just as the tweet was. Should we provide warnings about all of those things, too?

In a comment on Adam's last article, you called Twitter the "scourge of the world," so evidently you find any reference to it offensive and would prefer to have skipped this article entirely rather than read an embedded tweet. That's certainly not the view of our authors, almost all of whom are active on Twitter, and I doubt that many (if any) of our readers feel the same way. I'm willing to attach a warning to something that I think might alienate or offend a significant percentage of our readers, but I don't see how mentioning Twitter falls into that category.

Aug 24, 2012 02:05 AM

drawbb

That's just it---I have the option to skip embedded video, I have the option to skip articles by a writer I don't like...I'm simply asking to have the same option on this subject.

If I'm correct that you're like some websites and evaluate by the number of clicks on each article, then that's the very reason I want a warning: I don't want to inadvertently contribute to ancillary support of a topic I'd love to see die. On the other hand, if you don't evaluate by the number of clicks then it's not such a big deal.

Aug 24, 2012 05:51 AM

rating: -2

Ben Lindbergh

BP staff

But the topic of this article wasn't "Twitter." It was baseball's unwritten rules, and how we, and even the other people on the field, might not always understand what motivates a player. The tweet came toward the end and could have been skipped over just as easily as the video (though I don't know why presenting a quote from Twitter is any more distasteful than presenting a quote from a paper or an in-person interview--regardless of the source, it's something Rhymes said).

Twitter is no more than a medium where people communicate with one another. If an article includes a tweet that I think some people might find offensive, I might include a warning about that, but I don't follow why the mere presence of a tweet, regardless of its content, merits a warning. If a reader asked me to put a "Warning: contains text about Barry Zito" notice on every article that mentions Barry Zito, just because they don't want to see any more articles that mention Barry Zito, I wouldn't be inclined to do that either.

Aug 24, 2012 06:07 AM

drawbb

But then the author goes on to talk about Twitter, and should athletes even be on there, and his first comment is more about Twitter...

If you think it's harmless, that's your business. I, on the other hand, see guys having to waste valuable time answering questions about Twitter instead of preparing for games. I won't even go into the lives and careers it's ruined, so let's leave it there.

These are the reasons I don't want to do anything remotely supportive of that garbage. For example, I had to pull the plug entirely on ever listening to any more ESPN Radio because they started talking about Twitter more than the games themselves.

There is a ton of content on this site, much of which I love and only a couple things I despise or find useless. The key is that the headlines and bylines should help me find and avoid the latter categories--however they may vary for each individual person. In your satirical Barry Zito example, you actually ARE doing that to a large degree even if that is someone's real-life pet peeve. Most articles' headlines typically let us know they focus on one player or one team when that's pertinent, so most of the time the Zito-phobe can avoid that content.

I don't know anything about maintaining the graphic headlines for a website, but is it difficult to simply have a "T" or a "GIF" appended to the heading of each article?

Aug 24, 2012 07:50 AM

rating: 0

Richard Bergstrom

Hey, I hate Fox News and think a good chunk of its television channel should be sandblasted into CandyLand.. but if someone says something on Fox News, it's still a public record of a statement made, and thus, it's evidence that can be used to substantiate/validate an article. Same thing with Twitter. Many celebrities communicate with their fans via Twitter, so, a record of what they say on Twitter can help give insight as to what is going on in the Twitterer's mind.

That being said, yeah, Twitter is a waste of time and personally, I think a few too many tweets are on This Week in Quotes. But, on the other hand, I like the idea that BP isn't ignoring a widely used system of information.

Aug 24, 2012 09:48 AM

rating: 0

Ben Lindbergh

BP staff

I don't know--I see what you're saying, but I wouldn't blame Twitter for the ill-advised things that people say on Twitter. Plenty of people have had to waste valuable time answering questions about, or had their careers ruined by, things they've said to another person directly, or in the papers, or on the radio, or on TV. People say stupid things. Twitter makes it more easy for those stupid things to be publicized, I suppose, but the people still have to say them. Fortunately, there are a lot of people on Twitter saying smart, funny, insightful things that I wouldn't want to miss.

I agree that an article that focuses on Barry Zito would probably say something about Zito in the headline or the summary, but an article that merely mentions Zito while focusing on something else probably wouldn't. Off the top of my head, I can only think of one recent BP article in which Twitter could have been said to be the subject of the article (something Michael Bates wrote about C.J. Wilson). Otherwise, it's just an aside, as it was in this article, or just something that's cited like any other source. I don't want to make your BP browsing experience more unpleasant, but given that Twitter is almost never the focus of one of our articles, and since I haven't heard this request from any other subscriber, I don't think adding a "T" (which would probably confuse people) to mark any article that mentions Twitter makes sense.

Aug 24, 2012 09:56 AM

Richard Bergstrom

He could select the article in IE/FireFox/Chrome, copy all, paste to notepad (which removes the Twitter gifs), then do a find/replace for any paragraphs that mention Twitter and replace it with the word "email". Basically that's what Twitter is, mini-mass emails.

Aug 24, 2012 09:59 AM

rating: 0

drawbb

Thanks for responding again. Just a few points and I'll relinquish this subject hereafter.

First, I DO blame Twitter for dramatically accelerating America down a path we were already headed...in which anything said becomes fact merely by having been said at all...in which whatever final few shreds of journalistic integrity still remained were strewn to the dustbin of history once and for all...in which the pressure to keep up with this dangerous trend has quite likely been the cause of a fairly significant number of its disastrous consequences. The new problem Twitter brought to the table was that this instrumentality proliferated so rapidly and so thoroughly that we've now passed the point of no return.

The other is that its very existence totally ruined any chance sports journalism had of ever reclaiming its dignity. Newspapers were already a dying industry, and we all get why that happened. Transitioning to the next phase isn't such a big deal on its own, but when that next thing involves the writers literally being pressured to amass X number of Twitter followers in order to retain a job...well, it doesn't take long to figure out the fastest way to do that. Does anybody think the gossipy TMZ-ization of sports that engulfed ESPN is a good thing? Twitter is highly culpable in that. Seriously, when did highlight shows start taking time away from showing highlights and use it instead to show tweets and talk about tweets? Believe me, the last thing sports writers needed was something which they both must use and which makes their relationship with athletes worse.

On another level, the whole thing itself is so juvenile: "Look how many followers I have!"...begging to be re-tweeted...people actually saying "hashtag (subject)" aloud in conversation. If you think all these are just my personal concerns, they aren't. I know of at least two people way over my station who share my identical viewpoints on Twitter, but who feel pressured to keep up with the fact that it's currently dominating the industry and are on there even though they desperately don't want to be. The game needs an environment in which the manager can tell a player in person that he's being optioned before a guy hears it on Twitter first or in which you can talk about baseball in clubhouse meetings and not Twitter.

Thanks for the consideration again, Ben. I'll move on now. Just don't be surprised by anything that arises in the future where this is concerned.

Aug 24, 2012 10:58 AM

rating: -1

Ben Lindbergh

BP staff

I can certainly see why Twitter would be an inconvenience to a team--it's just another way for players to get themselves in trouble and cause distractions, or to read about rumors without any substance, or to read about real news before hearing it their manager or GM. And I can certainly see why someone whose job depended on racking up followers would resent that. I'm rarely on Twitter when I'm writing, because I do find it distracting.

That said, I think teams and writers can also treat it as an opportunity to build an audience and interact with fans. And more importantly, for the purposes of this discussion, most of our readers don't care if Twitter makes life more difficult for baseball operations execs, team support staff, or certain members of the media. That's not their problem. For them, it's a way to keep up with news, learn from people whose work they enjoy, come across work they've been missing, and enhance their enjoyment of watching games and following a team. I think those are positive things.

Aug 24, 2012 11:29 AM

Richard Bergstrom

Just as a further note, I do think Twitter helps provide witnesses and cuts back a bit on the "unnamed" sources. Sure, someone might be tweeting about an anonymous source but at least it's easier to backtrack to who reported it. The example of a manager optioning a player to AAA being kept private really hasn't happened in the last twenty years and Twitter hasn't been around that line.

Aug 24, 2012 15:49 PM

rating: 0

drawbb

You are mistaken about that last sentence. I'd never seen it happen once in two decades until that existed.

Aug 24, 2012 19:10 PM

rating: 0

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<< Previous Article
Punk Hits: The Other S... (08/22)

<< Previous Column

Sobsequy: What Your Te... (08/15)

Next Column >>

Sobsequy: Compensation... (08/29)

Next Article >>
Manufactured Runs: Is ... (08/22)

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