Yermín Mercedes Homers, Annoys Own Manager

Heading into the ninth inning of a blowout loss Monday, Twins manager Rocco Baldelli waved the white flag and summoned Willians Astudillo from… wherever he was sitting at the time. La Tortuga already had a scoreless inning under his belt this year, titillating Twins fans and the Baseball Twitterverse with an eephus that limped over the plate at 49 mph. Astudillo’s slow-pitch softball routine was received warmly that first appearance, and in a year where very little has gone right for Minnesota, the locals seemed pleased to see him out there again.

Naturally, we couldn’t get through the outing without an unwritten rules controversy.

With two outs, Astudillo fell behind Yermín Mercedes 3-0. The catcher-turned-hurler boldly stuck with the pitch that he’d ridden to get the first two outs and lobbed another one, this time over the outer half of the plate.

Mercedes hit the tar out of it:

It’s a shot worthy of celebration. This may not have been the toughest pitch to crank out of the park, but it still takes an incredible amount of strength to muscle a ball 420 feet, all the more so given that Mercedes had to generate all of the power.

Because this is baseball though, people took exception to the situation. Not with the Twins, who once again resorted to using a position player to wind things down. Not with Astudillo, whose pitches are, let’s face it, a bit farcical. No, people are mad at Mercedes.

“I don’t like it at 15-4,” Twins TV color analyst Roy Smalley said as Mercedes circled the bases. “I don’t like it. You’re going to get the same pitch after this… I’m not crazy swinging 3-0 [when you’re up] 15-4.”

Smalley is referring to the longstanding ethic that players on the winning team shouldn’t swing while up in the count 3-0 late in lopsided ballgames. I feel a little silly just typing all that out, but as a code of conduct, it’s been nearly uniformly observed in recent years; just two other such swings have been registered since 2008 (hat tip to Mike Petriello for pointing out that Mercedes was not alone in his 3-0 swing proclivity in such circumstances). So while Smalley’s comments were not well received in most corners of the internet, they weren’t out of nowhere. This is a Thing, and it’s not a huge surprise that the old-school broadcaster from the visiting team took exception. It also isn’t shocking that Mercedes’ dinger upset his manager, Tony La Russa. La Russa, after all, is also an old-school guy trying to navigate a new-school game. Turganev had a book for all this.

But if La Russa’s annoyance wasn’t a surprise, his decision to take that frustration public was. It was a “big mistake,” La Russa said to the media on Tuesday afternoon. “The fact that he’s a rookie, and excited, helps explain why he just was clueless. But now he’s got a clue.”

Those are rough words for a rookie whose only crime was “homering when some people think he wasn’t supposed to.” La Russa’s remarks sparked a controversy and the incident raised fresh questions about his suitability for a job managing a swashbuckling team that plays with a delightful exuberance.

In La Russa’s very mild defense, he had tried to give Mercedes the take sign. Now, I’m not sure how Mercedes was supposed to see it. Nobody is looking for a sign in an 11-run game and Astudillo was doing his best to get on Rob Manfred’s good side by taking all of two seconds between pitches. Still, a missed sign is a missed sign, and La Russa wasn’t out of line to bring it up with Mercedes. That conversation should stay behind closed doors, though, particularly since it wasn’t just one isolated remark. La Russa wasn’t done when he called his rookie slugger “clueless,” adding: “There will be a consequence he has to endure here within our family,” the manager said. “It’s a learning experience.”

Let’s pause to consider the inanity here. It’s weird enough that players are supposed to stop trying just because they’re ahead by a certain number of runs (the exact number, of course, remains ambiguous) or treat these at-bats like they don’t count; it’s not like the arbiter is going to toss out stats accumulated against position players come contract negotiation time. It’s just as puzzling that it’s entirely acceptable for a team to dispatch the backup catcher to lob lollipops but uncouth for a hitter to swing after working a 3-0 count.

There’s an added wrinkle at play that I think gets overlooked in these situations. Minnesota was only throwing Astudillo to save the bullpen, which means that they were effectively surrendering early so as to be more competitive in the next game, a matchup against these very same White Sox. The burden placed on the hitter in this situation is just odd. The defensive team is transparently putting as little effort as possible into fulfilling their obligations, for the express purpose of saving their fire for the next game, and yet it’s the hitter’s job to help steer the inning to a close. I don’t have any problems with Minnesota employing such gamesmanship, but it seems that the least Chicago — or any other team in that situation — can do is swing for the fences.

But I digress. The unwritten rules were breathed into the sport long ago and the specter of this unrecorded legislation will loom over the game for decades, generating controversy here, policing the conduct of Black and Latin American players there. In any case, the practical consequences of this particular situation played out as you’d expect. If the Twins weren’t already upset about Mercedes’s blast, La Russa’s comments all but painted a target on his player’s broad backside. Sure enough, Tyler Duffey went after him, narrowly missing with a fastball that sailed behind its target:

Chicago’s decision to hire La Russa raised plenty of eyebrows at the time. While he’s in the Hall of Fame and was an innovator in his prime, he’s also 76 years old and is managing for the first time since 2011. And while nothing prevents someone his age from applying a keen eye to the game, much has changed in the years since he last paced the dugout, and it’s not clear that he’s up to speed: He didn’t know the rules about which runner takes second base at the start of extra innings, and his workload management is out of date as well.

But the bigger concern was more about personality. La Russa’s well-documented views on how the game should be played were clearly misaligned with the way Tim Anderson and co. go about their business. From the outset, it’s been fair to wonder how a successful but intransigent manager, one with three rings in the safe and a plaque in Cooperstown, would mesh with a team full of young players with a decidedly less stodgy approach to baseball.

I’m not a Chicago White Sock, so I can’t say definitively. But from a distance, it seems a clumsy fit so far, and the situation is only growing tenser. In an Instagram post from NBC Sports Chicago that highlighted Mercedes’ and La Russa’s comments, Anderson weighed in, writing “The game wasn’t over! Keep doing you big daddy,” which triggered a positive response from Mercedes. After last night’s game, Lance Lynn also defended his teammate, saying “If a position player is on the mound, there are no rules. Let’s get the damn game over with. And if you have a problem with whatever happened, then put a pitcher out there.” It’s not quite insubordination, but the episode makes one wonder about the relationship between La Russa and his players.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Plenty of good teams have won with an out-to-lunch manager, or galvanized themselves around a collective dislike of the boss. Still, all things being equal, I’m sure most players would like to play for someone who has their back.

La Russa had another shot to stick up for his guy following last night’s 5-4 loss, and it’s a chance he didn’t take. When asked for his thoughts on Duffey’s pitch — which, again, went behind Mercedes — La Russa said: “I wasn’t that suspicious. I’m suspicious when someone throws at someone’s head. I didn’t have a problem with how the Twins handled that. What did they do? He tried to get a sinker in. You don’t read minds. I’m not going to read their mind…”

I’m dreadfully underqualified to be a major league manager, and I generally have very little to say about how they execute their duties. But this? This can’t possibly be the right way to play manage the game.