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“Baseball–So What Is Cheating?”

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Like Shakespeare wrote…’Much Ado About Nothing’.

I could not believe the 24-hour news cycle after Fernando Tatis hit a grand slam home run on a ‘3-0’ pitch while his team was up (10-3) on the lowly Texas Rangers.

The outpouring of angst after El Nino and his teammates blew thru the Rangers.

The litany of the language…’he broke the code’….there is an ‘unwritten law’….’where is your ‘respect’.

I have the MLB rulebook in my library.

I could not find any pages, paragraphs, subsections about the ‘code’ or the ‘unwritten law’.

Rookie manager Jayce Tingler compounds it all by relating he wanted Tingler to take the ‘3-0’ pitch.  Then he compounds it again by using the phrase ‘teachable moment’…as if Tatis did something wrong.

Fernando is not responsible for the crap pitching staff on the Rangers roster.

The Rangers get all pissed off about Tatis grand slam as an act of ‘piling on’.

Hey Texas, fix your sorry pitching staff.  That’s what you ought to be whining about.

Hey Tingler, don’t reign in the competitive spirit of possibly the hottest Padres rookie since the Benito Santiago days.

And the media, just off the charts having to explain, defend, apologize for what the kid-slugger did.  Seriously, that can’t be the most important topic on the table is it.

Talkshow radio hosts injured their shoulders reaching for that topic.  And the Padres broadcasters seemed to genuflect in front of the organization talking about ‘no lead is safe’ in baseball.

And the newspaper columnists had to write big exposes on all this.

You look back at all the other incidents in baseball the last year or so, and Tatis’ grand-slam shot comes off as a ‘venial sin’ if that.

But please, what a waste of energy in the midst of all this hot weather in San Diego.

Now if you want to argue about codes, unwritten rules and respect, I will argue with you on my other important topics on the table:

Sign Stealing
Beanballs after home runs.
Retaliating pitches.
Spike High Slides
Taking out the catcher
Bat flips
Dugout dancing
Failure to run out ground balls
Stares and glares.
Dugout baiting of umps
Garbage can banging
Apple watches in the dugouts
Illegal use of video rooms

You’d think this was the equivalent of the steroid era in baseball, you know the cheats in San Francisco, Texas, Yankees Stadium, Wrigley Field and St Louis.

The moral outrage was staggering.

El Nino, just do what the umpire tells you.  “Play Ball”

Per Shakespear…”Much Ado About Nothing”

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