Players Support Yermin Mercedes, Even if His Manager Won’t

Throughout his 13-year major-league career, Carlos Gomez played with a certain style and exuberance that, on several occasions, rubbed his opponents the wrong way. He admired his home runs (and triples) — even those that didn’t win games — by dropping his bat or throwing his arms into the air. He remembered exactly which pitchers had hit him with a pitch. He slid hard into second base, before it was banned, even when leading by seven runs.

It’s not like Gomez, now 35, played with a reckless abandon, though. He knew baseball’s etiquette. As a rookie with the Mets in 2007, he watched and learned from stars like Carlos Delgado, Moises Alou, Carlos Beltran and Julio Franco. And, according to Gomez, he saw them swing at a pitches on a 3-0 count in close games but never in lopsided ones.

“Winning by 10 or 12 runs, based on the way I learned the game, you shouldn’t do that,” Gomez said in a phone interview in Spanish from his native Dominican Republic. “It feels like you’re humiliating the opponent. But it’s modern times.”

Even in 2021, after so much hand wringing in the past, baseball somehow cannot escape a controversy about its unwritten rules. It’s a subject that Chicago White Sox Manager Tony La Russa, who recently admitted he didn’t know the written rules for extra innings, knows about well.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/sports/baseball/yermin-mercedes-tony-la-russa.html