The Chris Moeller Archives

Chase Utley, pay for our sins

Major League Baseball now has its Roger Goodell and the man is Joe Torre. The Hall of Fame manager currently serves the commissioner as “discipline czar,” and he apparently learned nothing from the Tom Brady court verdict.

Torre, last night, issued a two-game suspension-- to be served during the NLDS-- to Los Angeles’ Chase Utley. The Dodgers’ second baseman slid hard and late to break up a double play Saturday night in a game against the Mets. The contact led to a broken leg for the Mets' shortstop Ruben Tejada. The umpires not only-- correctly-- ruled it a legal slide, but the replay challenge revealed that Tejada never touched the bag at second, and Utley was ruled safe as well. The play kept the inning alive for the Dodgers, who trailed 2-1 at the time, and led to a four-run 7th inning, a 5-2 victory, and a leveling at one game apiece of the best-of-five series.

Torre’s verdict is wrong on so many levels. One is that Torre should have no place in that post as it is. The czar is going to be ultra-sensitive to charges of favoritism having been in five different uniforms over the years. He managed both the Mets and the Dodgers during his career, but while L.A. fans would be primarily ambivalent about him, Mets fans certainly already view him, first, as the long-time skipper of the cross-town Yankees. His tenure in the Bronx was marked by a famous rhubarb between the two teams, a bat throwing incident involving future Hall-of-Famers Roger Clemens and Mike Piazza. Former commissioner Bud Selig named Torre to the post because he believed that MLB fans view him as an unimpeachable personality, a false assumption to be made. More than a dozen of Torre’s former Yankees players saw their names on the Mitchell Report regarding the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. Why does Tony LaRussa always get sullied by the media for supposedly “allowing” steroids in his clubhouse, but Torre doesn’t? Jose Canseco was added to the Oakland roster when nobody knew he used steroids. He was added to the Yankees roster when half of baseball knew he was.

Most importantly, Utley’s slide was completely legal. The umpires ruled it so on the field. He went directly towards the bag, however late, and, as Doug Glanville pointed out on ESPN Saturday night, Tejada was pirouetting to still go to first base for a relay throw so the slide was not only clean, but justified. Disgruntled Mets fans cannot argue that the umpires should have ruled the play a double play if there had been no movement towards first. The commissioner's office wanted instant replay and now it needs to deal with the consequences when infielders are forced to stay on a play longer where once a phantom tag of the base was common.

While this whole mess gets sorted out, what are competitors in the four divisional series to do on the base paths? They’ve been trained for their entire baseball lives to go in hard (the best ones always do), and now Torre has created a climate in which he, unilaterally, decides which clean plays are too rough and which clean plays are not. He even acknowledged in his babbling comments Sunday in Houston to Ken Rosenthal that the umpires did not err on the ruling (huh?), and that historical precedent for this type of play doesn't matter. Is there anybody in the world that thinks Utley would be getting suspended if Tejada had not gotten hurt on the play? There was an identical play Friday in the Rangers/Blue Jays LDS, but nobody came up limp. In the middle of September, the Cubs’ Chris Coghlan ended the season for the Pirates’ Jung-Ho Kang in a play in which the runner slid even further away from the bag, and there was no punishment. Because Tejada was injured, the Mets are allowed to replace him on the LDS roster, but if Utley loses his appeal, the Dodgers will be forced to play with 24 men.

What was really crippled on the play was the Mets’ chances of winning Game 2, and that's what has the New York-dominated sport media whipped up? (Did you know that Utley so tormented the Mets when he was with Philadelphia that a part of Citi Field is referred to as "Utley's corner"?) The break-up slide was perfectly executed—and timed. It actually led directly to the Dodgers winning. If the next Dodger hitter had popped out, I again believe that Utley would be getting the leniency typical of the first century and a half of baseball. It’s similar to the infamous Steve Bartman play in 2003 in that it didn’t take on everlasting meaning until two or six other things went wrong.

Is Major League Baseball worried that they’re going to be targeted by litigators in regards to player safety the way the National Football League has been? Because I have yet to see a medical study demonstrating that repeated dust-ups at second base leads to Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy.

Torre is acting the Goodell part in that he seems to forget there’s a Collective Bargaining Agreement, and that’s a shame because Torre, as a player in the 1970's, was an early union rep under Marvin Miller's direction of the MLB Players Association. Sadly, United States history is littered with these types of instances of union advocates later going to work for management. Does Torre, acting in this particular post for the sole purpose of keeping commissioner Rob Manfred out of the fray, not get that these overreaching decisions on player punishment get blown out of the water in court every time when there’s no precedent in place (which Torre, again, admits) and when there’s no clearly defined rule? For his appeal, Utley's agent is reportedly preparing a video of similar baseball plays in which no punishment was handed down (let alone during the postseason), and I'm sure Torre's office can stay busy until tonight' first pitch watching it. It's up to Utley to take the case, like Brady, to the next level if the appeal goes against him.

If  Manfred and his underlings want to change the rules, change the rules, but you don’t start issuing penalties before the rules have been put on paper. There is a rule in place, and since Utley went directly into the bag, he acted consistent with it. As usual, MLB is stepping into the game where it shouldn't. If the umpires let the teams police themselves, you would have far fewer of these incidents. You frequently see umpires now issue warnings to both teams when one team plunks a batter. Those warnings are pointless, and sometimes even detrimental. It keeps the two sides from establishing the equilibrium of the game for themselves, and by the way, the umpire has the authority to throw a pitcher out of a game for intentionally throwing at a batter even if a warning has not yet been issued, so what’s the point of the warning?

Same thing in this case. Pending the appeal, Utley has to step to the plate again multiple times in this series against the Mets. Already, Mets manager Terry Collins is grumbling that the umpires won’t allow the teams to pitch inside during tonight's Game 3 while, out of the other side of his mouth, implying that the Mets will seek retribution. Might this result in one pitcher or two being sent to an early shower by the home plate umpire during a pivotal game. Joe Torre and Major League Baseball have created that potential mess, not Chase Utley.

posted by CM @ 2:04 PM