Find out what it means to Tony LaRussa

              I don’t know why so many people have trouble with the concept of Unwritten Rules.  What are called "Manners" in the rest of the world are, in baseball, called Unwritten Rules, and are grouped under the heading "Respect for the Game" or "Playing the Game the Right Way".   There are literally many millions of things that you can do in the rest of the world which would be considered bad manners, but the general heading that groups almost all of them together is "showing a lack of respect."  Probably that gets them all, although in some cases, over time, the original purpose of the UWR (Unwritten Rule) gets lost.  Many times this lack of respect is codified in some way that you don’t intuitively understand.  In Korea, at least when I was there, it was considered highly offensive to light a cigarette in the presence of a person older than yourself, a person of the previous generation.   It was/is an unwritten rule; if the senior person smoked, you could smoke, and if the senior person gestured or said that it was OK for you to smoke, then it was OK for you to smoke, but you didn’t just light up on your own.   It was considered to show a lack of respect for your elders. 

              In the great movie "Gran Torino", Clint Eastwood pats a young child on the head, only to learn that this is considered highly offensive in the Hmong culture.  It’s an unwritten rule. 

              We are, of course, in the middle of a controversy involving the unwritten rules.  Yermin Mercedes, who is no relation to his cousin, Vermin Gran Torino . .  Anyway, a non-pitcher was on the mound, lobbing meatballs at the Chicago White Sox.  The score at the time was 107-to-nothing.  The count on Mercedes got to be 3-0, and the pitcher lobbed one over the plate, and the Vermin Yermin hit it out of the park.   Well, maybe it wasn’t out of the park, I don’t know; for all I know it was in a domed stadium.  He hit a home run.  You’re not supposed to do that; it’s a violation of an unwritten rule. 

              There are unwritten rules everywhere.  No business could survive without them, no family could stay intact without them, no personal relationship could work without them.   Whenever we stumble into one of these controversies, people say two things that really don’t make ANY sense:

1)      That we should get rid of all of the unwritten rules, or

2)      That we should AT LEAST write them down somewhere.

You couldn’t BEGIN to write them all down.  They would make the Baseball Encyclopedia look like a pamphlet.  (Credit:  Mark Twain said that if you took all of the "Begats" out of the Bible, the rest would be a pamphlet.  If you’re going to steal a joke, steal from the best; it’s an unwritten rule.)

Anyway, the thing that has just happened, between Yermin the Vermin and Tony LaRedneck, has very close parallels in my life, your life, and everybody else’s life. A couple of years ago, in a Kansas University Basketball game, KU was beating the hell out of somebody and, at the closing gun, a kid who only got to play when the game was out of control fired up a completely unguarded three-point shot, which went in.   His coach apologized immediately, and the kid himself apologized the next day.   The same thing happened the other way ten years ago; KU, who normally loses about 5 to 7 games a year, was getting beaten badly by somebody and, as time ran out, our player, unguarded, slammed down a dunk.  Bill Self apologized immediately, and our player apologized the next day. 

Nothing is on the line here, nothing matters.  The contest is, in reality, already over; we are just trying to formally conclude the event without unnecessarily embarrassing anybody.  We are showing respect for our opponents by not attempting to embarrass them.  The young player used that "gift" in a way that was never intended.   Do you remember the scene in Bull Durham when Crash Davis, upset with his young pitcher, calls for a fastball and tells the batter a fastball is coming?  The batter hits a home run, but he stands there admiring his shot.   Crash immediately starts yelling at him. . .I don’t remember the exact words, except for "I gave you a gift", but he yells something like "RUN.  What are you standing there for?  I gave you a gift. Don’t stand there acting like you did something great." 

33 years ago, I was accidentally drawn into an incident very much like this.  I was in the process of buying a new car, and I went by the dealership two or three times, working with an older man who was trying to sell me the car.  But when I had decided to make the purchase and went into the dealership, the salesman was just running out of the office to go to a doctor’s appointment, so he told a younger salesman, "Hey, Jack, I’ve got to run; can you close this out for me?"   Exactly the same thing as the on-field incident; we’re just formally closing out a done deal, combined with "I’ll give you a gift."

But, I later learned, this led to ill will between the two car salesman.  The younger car salesman, rather than being grateful for the gift, was crowing to a third salesman about how he had closed the deal.  

What should he have done?  I’ve never been a car salesman, but what I would have done is, I would have said to the older salesman, "Hey, thanks for the gift there, I’ll split the commission with you."  He probably would have said "No, that’s not necessary", in which case I would have said, "Well, let me take you and your wife to dinner, then." 

If a player plastered a 3-0 pitch at the end of a blowout in a High School game, his coach would have told him not to do that.  Mercedes, of course. . . and I mean no disrespect by joking about his name. . .but Mercedes did not play high school baseball in the states.  He comes from a different tradition, a different place, and there has to be space in your value system to accommodate that.  When I was in Korea, a friend of mine was meeting with his girlfriends’ father and extended family, preparing to ask her father’s permission to marry her.  Having somehow missed the memo, he pulled out a cigarette and lit up.  The room gasped, and the girlfriend gestured hurriedly for him to put it out. 

But he still got permission to marry the daughter.   He got the OK because his prospective father-in-law understood that he had not INTENDED to show disrespect; he just didn’t know about the rule. 

But what happened next, in our present example, is that Mr. Mercedes insisted that he had done no wrong, and he was going to do it again the next time he had a chance.   Suppose that my friend in Korea, being informed that he had violated the unwritten rule, had responded "I don’t give a shit about your unwritten rule; I’m going to light a cigarette whenever I God Damned well want to light a cigarette."   That’s a different thing. 

None of this is intended in any way to justify throwing at the batter, or to justify giving his players permission or instruction to throw at the batter, if that is in fact what LaRussa did.  That’s wrong; that should not happen.  As Brandon McCarthy points out, players get paid based on their performance numbers.  It’s one thing when it happens in a high school game; it’s a different thing when people are getting paid.

Well, yes, but Yermin Mercedes is going to wind up the year with 21 or 22 homers, probably.  The difference between the two is not necessarily very much, and I would argue that trying to take advantage of a situation like that for a petty prospective gain in salary is. . . .perhaps not recommended.   I remember one time this guy I worked with and I were flipping a coin over something, and, after we finished, he put the coin in his pocket and walked away.  He was a guy who did stuff like that.  It’s petty, of course; I don’t care about the quarter.   But what he was saying is, "I care more about this quarter than I do about your respect."  Was that a smart decision, on his part, because he came out ahead a quarter?   Most of us would choose the respect of the community over the quarter.  The question is, will Yermin choose the respect of the community over a hit here and there? 

If he wants to have a long career, he will be better off if he does.   But it wasn’t ONLY Yermin who misunderstood the unwritten rule; it was also LaRussa.  The unwritten rules change over time, just as manners by all the other names change over time.  Every generation challenges the rules and changes the rules.  In 1985, the unwritten rule was that if a player showed you up, you threw at him, or at least threw close to him.  That’s not the rule anymore.   LaRussa, it may be, I don’t know, but LaRussa may have been insisting on enforcing a rule that hasn’t been on the books for the last 15 years. 

That’s happened before.  Anybody remember this one? 15 to 30 years ago, Don Baylor had a pitcher throwing a no-hitter, which used to be a really big deal before pitchers started throwing them every week.   With two out in the 9^th, a young player, I think a rookie, bunted to break up the no-hitter.   Baylor was livid, and insisted that there was an unwritten rule that you didn’t do that.  

But Baylor was just wrong; there was never any unwritten rule that you’re not supposed to bunt to try to break up a no-hitter.  Baylor THOUGHT there was some such rule, because he personally would not do it, but that was just his choice, and since then a lot of writers have WRITTEN that there was some such rule, because they suppose that Baylor must have known what he was talking about. 

These controversies erupt because different people have different understandings of what the rules are right now.  I am certain that they all have a better understanding of the UWR than I do.   But in every field, the unwritten rules—that is, the manners—the unwritten rules are WAY more important than what is written down or what can be written down.  Whether you are a baseball player, a car salesman, a lawyer, an academic, a butcher, a baker or a burglar, you are living in a jungle of unwritten rules, and if you want to be successful, you had damned well better respect those rules.  If you are working with the Mafia, you had better know every jot and tittle of the Unwritten Rules of the Mob.   In the front office, it’s an unwritten rule that, when you win the World Championship, you have to pay the players who won it for you.  You have to show respect to the players who put that ring on your finger.  You can think whatever you want to think about that rule, but if you don’t follow it, it is GOING to cost you.