David Lennon: Yankees and Jose Caballero in battle with MLB over pitch clock issue
Yankees' Jose Caballero argues with home plate umpire Quinn Wolcott during his at-bat against the Pirates in the sixth inning during Game 1 of a split doubleheader at Yankee Stadium on Wednesday. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
As far as Major League Baseball is concerned, the clock has officially expired on Jose Caballero’s pitch-timer gamesmanship.
But if the rationale was to avoid any more on-field disruptions, or bench-clearing melees like earlier in this series, picking the sixth inning of Wednesday’s eventual 5-3 loss to the Pirates was a strange spot to deliver the heads-up.
Imagine Caballero’s surprise when he dug into the batter’s box, did his usual head-down routine, then glanced upward to engage with Pirates reliever Carmen Mlodzinski as the required eight seconds displayed on the timer — only to have plate umpire Quinn Wolcott suddenly ring him up for an automatic strike.
“You’re picking on me!” Caballero screamed at Wolcott.
And he’s absolutely right. We normally don’t buy into the Yankees as victim narrative, the poor little $360 million Bronx franchise being unfairly persecuted by the bullies in the commissioner’s office down on Sixth Avenue.
But Caballero, and dare we say manager Aaron Boone — who likes to push the boundaries with league officials — have a legitimate gripe. Without the Yankees getting any advance notice, Wednesday’s umpiring crew was told to deploy tighter enforcement of the pitch-timer rule going forward, and specifically when it comes to Caballero.
How do we know that? The umpires laid out the details to a pool reporter after Wednesday’s game, confirming that Caballero was indeed targeted — and really ambushed, given that he previously hadn’t been penalized for it.
“He’s been warned all season,” crew chief Adrian Johnson said. “We were instructed not to warn him. We were instructed to violate him. That’s what it is. It’s a violation.”
Caballero’s routine, by the rule’s interpretation, is vulnerable to an umpire’s judgement. What he does could be considered “deception” — again, a subjective term — that unfairly messes with a pitcher’s windup or coming to a set position. Although Caballero is not defying the letter of the law by engaging with the minimum eight seconds left, an umpire can decide the behavior “circumvents” the stated rule. Or at least the umpires will now, as Johnson and Wolcott insisted between games of Wednesday’s split doubleheader.
Wolcott could be heard on the YES broadcast telling an angry Caballero “You don’t get to do the three-to-four seconds in the box thing anymore.” But that’s not specifically spelled out in the rule, as written, and Wednesday was the first many of us heard it — the Yankees included, apparently.
“He’s not allowed an inordinate amount of time looking down, trying to get the pitcher to cause a violation,” Wolcott said postgame. “There’s no other hitter that gets in the box and takes the amount of time that Caballero does while looking down and not making eye contact with the pitchers. Obviously, it’s caused a lot of problems in the past.”
Now we’re onto something. Two days earlier, when Caballero’s routine was still considered legal, it evidently annoyed Pirates reliever Dennis Santana to the point where he sparked a shouting incident that emptied the dugouts and bullpens. All Caballero did was ground into a double play, then spun around to see Santana yelling at him before the mob arrived.
Afterward, Santana said he was “a little bit” aware of Caballero’s tactics, although the reliever seemed particularly upset by the circumstances.
“That’s not my problem,” Santana said Monday night. “He can do whatever he wants. (But) we’re already losing. It’s the eighth inning. You got a couple hits. Get ready.”
Sounds more like a Santana issue, but now Caballero is the one getting punished for it, and whatever edge he once gained is now gone. MLB already was scrutinizing Caballero’s pitch-timer methods, and Monday night’s altercation was the trigger to finally legislating his routine out of the game.
So what now? Caballero wasn’t exactly sure as he discussed the development between games.
“He actually said they were making new rules today,” Caballero said of his sixth-inning chat with Wolcott. “And it’s on me, because I was deceiving, or something like that, to the pitcher, which doesn’t make sense. Maybe my English is so bad that I don’t understand, but deceiving kind of means that you’re trying to trick someone — and I’m not trying to trick someone because I do the same thing over and over. If you’re going to make a change in the rule, at least notify us before the game.”
Boone, as you might expect, heated up microwave-quick when the subject was broached postgame. Somehow, the manager kept his cool enough to avoid ejection in the sixth — hitting coach James Rowson got the boot instead — but his temper spiked at the podium later when asked about MLB’s handling of the situation.
“It’s embarrassing,” Boone said.
The Yankees realize that Caballero is an instigator and concede to hating him when he was doing the same things to them while wearing a Rays uniform. Understanding that, Boone said they’ve made sure to keep Caballero within the rules, only to discover that the rules abruptly flipped Wednesday in the sixth inning.
It’s not the reason the Yankees lost Game 1. But they did have a runner on base down 2-0 in the sixth when Caballero was penalized a second strike that left him with an 0-2 count. He then struck out looking on the next pitch.
Caballero probably was rattled by the penalty, and now he’ll have to adjust going forward with a bulls-eye on his back. No doubt he’ll find another way to antagonize opposing teams, and probably MLB as well.
“I’ve been playing baseball without clocks my whole life,” Caballero said. “They’re the ones who invented this clock thing. So now they don’t know what to do with their rules.”
That’s not entirely true, because MLB flexed them Wednesday to defuse Caballero’s combustible impact. For the time being, anyway.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.
