Getting Ejected From the World Series Has Always Taken a Lot of Screaming

Nationals manager Dave Martinez was ejected from Game 6 of the World Series last night. According to Jayson Stark, his simmering rage was set aflame by third-base umpire Gary Cederstrom telling him to “control your dugout,” which had come alive with criticism of the events of the evening, chiefly the squabble that erupted in regards to Trea Turner being called out at first for interference in the seventh inning.

Normally, a manager getting ejected isn’t incredible news, but everything with “World Series” in front of it becomes more distinct and historic, including the screaming.

To learn how Martinez’s ejection measures up with his equally ejected World Series predecessors, we can find plenty of singular instances dotting history. The first occurred in 1907, when Tigers manager Hughie Jennings was “shooed” away by the umpire for “back talk” regarding a play at second base, according to the St. Louis Dispatch. This characterized the majority of the disputes that ended in aggressive thumb-movements by the umpires over the next two decades in the Fall Classic, except in the case of “Wild Bill” Donovan, who was ejected from a World Series game in 1909 for talking to his third base coach for too long. But to be a part of the golden age of World Series ejections, there’s no question that we have to go back to the 1930s.

Last night’s measurement of baserunning decorum at first was “two old friends catching up over coffee” compared to the kerfuffle Joe Medwick started in the 1934 World Series. In a deeply uninteresting Game 7, Medwick’s Cardinals were up on the Tigers, 8-0, when the left fielder tripled in a ninth run. As he slid into third, a brief kicking skirmish broke out between the still horizontal Medwick and the notable upright Detroit third baseman, Marv Owen. The kicks graduated into torso blows, and eventually, the two men were both up on their feet, attempting to settle the matter via baseball’s time-honored slap-fighting tradition as umpires and teammates pulled them apart.

By this point, as you can imagine, the Tigers fans in the audience had determined, through careful consideration of all party’s perspectives, that Medwick hadn’t learned his lesson, that lesson being both “don’t kick our third baseman,” as well as, “stop beating us by so many runs.” When Medwick returned to the field for the bottom of the sixth, the crowd erupted into a sudden outburst of organic materials: “oranges, banana peels, hot dog buns, apples, pop bottles, anything they could reach,” were flung from the stands in the hopes of getting their displeasure across.

The groundskeepers came out to diligently remove the fresh layer of refuse from the field, and Medwick came trotting back, only to be met by a second wall of garbage. Once again, he fled the scene, and the groundskeepers sighed, stood back up, and went about cleaning the place up.

Medwick tried to come out of the dugout for a third time, and before anybody could even ask “Where are they even getting all these bananas?” the next salvo had started. By this point, Tigers manager Mickey Cochrane came out to plead with the crowd for some kind of sanity. He failed.

It was only now — a slide, a couple of kicks, and three trash heaps later — that the umpires gathered with Medwick, Owen, and their managers to ask if there was a reason why Medwick had started spiking Owen in the torso. Medwick said there was not. After what we can only assume was a series of confused glances between the group, the umpire asked… so why did you kick him?

“Well, you know,” Medwick said, according to Edward J. Neil of the Associated Press, “a lot of things happen when you slide into third.”

Indeed! A lot of things happen when you run anywhere on a baseball diamond. The amount of moving parts in a single moment of a single play allow us to pick it apart like ravenous jackals the following day. And boy, do we!

Last night’s Game 6 of the 2019 World Series was no different, when umpires called out Turner for interfering with Astros first baseman Yuli Gurriel’s ability to catch the ball. Turner had simply run up the first base line in a running lane that was, while legal, also a lane that closes for exactly the moment he was standing in it at the end of the play.

The moment was crucial at the time; the Nationals, with a 3-2 lead in a deciding game, had runners on second and third before the umpires instead awarded them first base and an out. That and the debatable strike zone left things a mite prickly between the Nationals dugout and the umpiring crew. By the time Martinez was trying to spin-move past Washington coach Tim Bogar and get a few more finger-points in at the ump, it was pretty clear what was irking him.

Nevertheless, back in 1934, the determination of the Committee to Figure Out Just What Exactly Joe Medwick’s Problem Is was that Medwick should be ejected, both for his own safety and so that the game could be played on a ball field and not a compost pile.

Medwick’s ouster was significant in that it involved a great deal of kicking and concluded with the involvement of five policemen. But the following year’s World Series ejections made some history so profound that nothing like it would occur again for half a century, earning it the at-least-once-used nickname of “the psychopathic series.”

Game 3 of the ‘35 series saw the Tigers nip the Cubs, 6-5; a simple score, straight forward in its closeness. But housed within that box score were “strong language and bitter words” that would pop the monocle off your rich uncle grand-pop’s eye.

The first to be ejected was Tigers third base coach Del Baker, who watched as one of his players was picked off on a snap throw in the sixth inning and disagreed ever so fervidly with the call of “out” that followed.

The Cubs didn’t seem to mind so much that the Tigers had lost their third base coach. But when their 18-year-old first baseman, Phil Cavarretta, was called out trying to steal second, they encircled umpire George Moriarty and unloaded all the curse words that existed at the time at him, which is about seven, until Moriarty ejected manager Charlie Grimm from the premises. To his credit, Moriarity refused to be intimidated, spitting vitriol right back, ejecting two more players from the Cubs bench and cursing loud enough for most of the spectators to hear, which included both of the increasingly red-faced National and American League presidents.

After the game, Grimm accused Moriarty of everything: Profanity. Demoralization. Bias. And on top of all that, he had to manage the rest of the game “through a knothole” that he had “smashed through” the clubhouse door, according to the press.

There wouldn’t be multiple ejections in a World Series game again until Whitey Herzog and Joaquin Andujar were both tossed from Game 7 of the 1985 series.

Last night, as Turner headed for first base, the ball skittered past him and away from Gurriel, allowing Turner and Yan Gomes to rush into scoring position. But given home plate umpire Sam Holbrook’s decision, Gomes had to return to first base and Turner was called out. Then there was a 15-minute committee meeting to determine what the hell was going on, all while Major League Baseball’s Chief Baseball Officer stared down at his phone, trying not to hear Turner goad him into a response.

Given that Anthony Rendon stepped in moments later and clubbed a two-run shot, which was only the beginning of the Nationals breaking the game wide open, all will likely wind up being forgiven. But as is always the case with a close call in baseball, there was a simple explanation: Turner wasn’t supposed to be where he was, due to a rule that has existed since 1881, though it is somewhat subjective and always despised, which makes the call right, and you can’t change the rules during the game, except if that rule involves reviewing the play in question, which apparently wasn’t supposed to happen, but did, yet according to Joe Torre, that rule wasn’t even the rule that was applied on the play anyway.

Mmm. Perhaps we can sum it up a different way:

A lot of things happen when you run to first.