Monthly Archives: April 2022

Bauer outage: suspended two years

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Trevor Bauer

Bauer’s two-year suspension won’t ease his victims’ pain or his way back to baseball—and in that order.

In considering Trevor Bauer’s unprecedented two-season suspension Friday for violating MLB’s domestic violence protocols, under which he won’t be paid and the Dodgers will be off the hook for the rest of his salary, I can’t help harking back to something pointed out last August. That’s when Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Dianna Gould-Saltman lifted a temporary restraining order against the pitcher.

During the hearings preceding that lift, the victim in the case testified for twelve hours. Bauer’s legal team may have drawn some inconsistencies from her regarding secondary items, but as Cup of Coffee writer and former NBC Sports analyst Craig Calcaterra wrote then, they never discredited “the central claim that he assaulted her in horrible ways.”

Maybe that makes it harder for the accuser to recover any money from him in a civil suit. Maybe that makes a prosecutor less likely to bring a criminal claim against Bauer for fear of the case being difficult. But the central truth of this entire affair—the stuff that Major League Baseball will look to regarding Bauer’s behavior, irrespective of whether charges are brought—points pretty clearly to Bauer doing exactly what his accuser said he did. Everything else is secondary.

After 12 hours of testimony, his accuser said, under oath, “I did not consent to bruises all over my body that sent me to the hospital and having that done to me while I was unconscious.” There was zero evidence presented which explained how those bruises appeared in a way that was benign or refuted the idea that the woman was unconscious when Bauer inflicted them. That, in my mind, is all that matters. (Emphasis added.)

This past February the 31-year-old righthander found himself off the purely legal hook, after Los Angeles County prosecutors decided not to press criminal charges against him. “Those words don’t say the evidence is false,” I wrote at the time, “as much as they say getting a criminal conviction at trial would be tougher than hitting an outside slider over the center field fence.”

The Dodgers knew Bauer was a mere misogynist when they signed him as a free agent in February 2021. “The Dodgers didn’t know Bauer would be accused of sexual assault,” writes Los Angeles Times columnist Dylan Hernández. “However, they knew he was always in some sort of trouble.

They knew how respected baseball people such as Kevin Towers and Terry Francona wanted nothing to do with him. They knew he sliced open his pitching hand repairing a drone.

They knew he threw a ball over the centerfield wall instead of handing it to the manager when he was taken out of a game. They knew of his online harassment campaign against a female college student . . . The question was never about whether Bauer would get into trouble; the question was about what kind of trouble he would get into.

But almost from the moment Bauer’s suspension was announced, defenders sprang up all around the social media universe to decry justice denied. He was cleared of all wrongdoing by a court of law! Well, not exactly. Wrongdoers aren’t always compelled to answer for their wrongdoing in the courts.

Employees from the most obscure clerk, warehouse worker, or line worker, to the highest-powered executives do get suspended and even fired from their jobs over wrongdoings that won’t get them into legal trouble at all, never mind prison time or fines. They are no less wrongdoings for lacking the weight of the law’s punishments.

Why would baseball suspend Bauer two full seasons if prosecutors decided they couldn’t get a criminal conviction against him? ESPN writers Alden Gonzalez and Jeff Passan asked and answered:

The standards in criminal and civil cases differ from those of a private business. The judge dissolving the temporary restraining order and declining to issue a permanent one does not absolve Bauer of liability within the joint policy. Neither does a prosecutor passing on pressing charges.

MLB’s imposed discipline is based on its own investigation, separate from the criminal proceedings. The league’s investigation into Bauer’s case lasted 10 months. Details about MLB’s findings have not been released, but the league’s investigators considered more than just the sexual assault allegations of the San Diego woman from last year. They looked into at least one other allegation, from an Ohio woman who sought a temporary restraining order against Bauer in June of 2020, details of which were reported by the Washington Post.

Hours after Bauer’s suspension was announced, the Post published a story about another Ohio woman who accused Bauer of choking her unconscious without consent during sex on multiple occasions over the course of a relationship that dated back to 2013. Bauer strongly denied those allegations, as he did the allegations by the other women. But the two Ohio women told the Post they cooperated with the league’s investigation, and we don’t know if others were involved as well.

What kind of sex you enjoy is irrelevant so long as it’s with a fellow human and under mutual, conscious consent. What you do while your partner is unconscious and thus unable to consent any further is very relevant when you’re being investigated formally after accusations of sexual assault, whether it’s a legal investigation or one by your employer.

There are those among Bauer’s defenders who raise the question as to why it should have been Bauer and not other known domestic violence violators to be hit with a hammer as heavy as the one with which he’s been hit. (Bauer said at once he’d appeal the suspension.) That’s not an unfair question.

Among others, Yankee relief pitcher Aroldis Chapman was suspended thirty games in 2016 for choking his girlfriend and possessing a firearm he fired into a wall. Then-Cubs infielder Addison Russell was suspended forty games in 2018—after the Cubs lost the National League wild card game—for beating his now-former wife. Braves outfielder Marcel Ozuna was suspended twenty games retroactively in November 2021 over what proved to be trying to choke his wife before throwing her against a wall and hitting her with the cast on his broken left hand.

Those were letting such crimes off the hook too easily, even allowing that those players “accepted responsibility” for their acts. But then free agent reliever Sam Dyson was suspended for the entire 2021 season after his former girlfriend accused him of rape, battery, and psychological abuse.

Some of Bauer’s defenders think commissioner Rob Manfred came down heaviest upon Bauer because Bauer’s been an outspoken critic of of Manfred’s administration in the past, before his sexual assault issues came forth. A very few of those defenders even implied Bauer’s entire domestic violence issue might have been ginned up as a way to try shutting him up.

Even Manfred isn’t that foolish. You’d have to have precisely the imaginative mind Manfred lacks to forge that kind of plot just to push a particulaly outspoken critic to one side. Even if you’re a commissioner who can be accused of abuse of power. But there is a way for Manfred to show he doesn’t care what his in-game critics say or think when it comes to certain very grave matters.

Get with the Major League Baseball Players’ Association and adjust the domestic violence protocol to allow for suspending any player found violating baseball’s domestic violence policy for one full season’s worth of games minimum from now on. I phrase it that way because they won’t all come forth before a season begins, as Dyson’s did.

The bad news is that even that won’t ease their victims’ pain. But it would send forth a more powerful affirmation that baseball suffers no domestic violence benignly and that, no, Bauer wasn’t just singled out for particular punishment, for any corresponding reason.

The Bronx Boneheads

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This is what the Yankees were afraid of being exposed? After two years, accidentally turning up during a lawsuit’s discovery phase, and a few legal contortions on behalf of blocking it from anyone else’s sight, this is what the Yankeegate letter was all about? Their own 2015-2017 replay-room reconnaissance ring, a la the 2018 Rogue Sox?

No, we’re not going to argue that electronic cheating isn’t so terrible even if it doesn’t rise quite to the Astrogate level. Agree that neither those Yankees nor those Red Sox were behaving themselves, even if the Yankees didn’t get far enough in the postseason to try it in a World Series the way the ’18 Rogue Sox probably did.

But someone, anyone. Please.

Tell me the Bronx Boneheads aren’t that deeply full of themselves that they couldn’t have withstood whatever minor slings, arrows, brickbats, and bashings would have confronted them over mere replay room reconnaissance. Tell me they’re not that ridiculous about preserving the Yankee image no matter how little their sneaky little shoplifters resemble the grand theft felons.

About the only thing the Yankee prankees seem to have done a little differently than the Rogue Sox was use their dugout phone on the road to get the stolen signs from the road replay room and then transmit it to a baserunner to send home to the batter.

Cheating is cheating? Please. This was comparable only to teen comedians ordering pizzas for deliveries to unsuspecting chumps across town. It didn’t exactly amount to seizing the pizzeria and taking hostages.

Since there were unconfirmed numbers of other teams doing likewise with their free presents from MLB, those other teams are probably laughing their fool heads off over the lengths to which the Yankees spent time and money trying to keep the Yankeegate letter from escaping into the public eye.

Yes, I said free presents from MLB. It was MLB itself that laid the replay rooms on both clubhouses in all ballparks starting in 2014. They did it with the best intentions. Perhaps naively, they forgot that boys will be boys, and presents such as those were probably bound to inspire a little extracurricular chicanery.

Since Astrogate and Soxgate’s exposure in 2019-20, the rules now involve security personnel posted at all replay rooms. Before the December-March owners’ lockout, both sides were close enough to agreeing, too, on more stringent measures such as no one but a team’s designated operator plus an MLB security worker allowed in the rooms, and even blacking out catcher’s pitch signs on the replay room monitors.

But while you have your laughs-and-halves over the Yankees resembling the siblings scrambling to Watergate coverup lengths to keep Mom and Dad from learning one of them accidentally smashed the crystal pilsner glass, causing it to shatter into a trillion shards, try to remember that this does not and will not get the 2017-18 Astros off the hook.

The Yankees, the Rogue Sox, and other teams who merely turned the replay rooms into their versions of Spy vs. Spy didn’t go to even half the lengths those Astros did for intelligence gathering and transmitting.

Their general managers, so far as anyone knows, didn’t sanction sign-stealing algorithms developed by low-level interns and ignore the warnings that using them in-game was illegal. Now-former Astros GM Jeff Luhnow thought of that with the Codebreaker algorithm.

Their bench coaches and designated hitters didn’t dream up either an independent high-speed real-time camera or alter an existing delayed camera into illegal real-time transmission to deliver opposing signs to clubhouse monitors next to which a transmission person could signal Astro batters by banging the trash can, slowly or otherwise. Then-Astros bench coach Alex Cora and DH Carlos Beltran did. (Smile—you’re on Candid Camera!)

“These are different things. Very, very different things,” tweeted ESPN’s Jeff Passan after the Yankeegate letter was obtained by SNY.

Players have been trying to steal and relay signs from second base forever. That doesn’t excuse the Yankees and Red Sox, but context matters. Relaying pitches with such specificity as the Astros did was entirely new.

Now, if MLB comes down harder on the Yankees or Red Sox in 2017, does that change things? Perhaps. Maybe the Astros are scared straight. But let’s remember: Manfred warned the Red Sox in 2017 after using the Apple Watch. And they won the World Series in 2018 while cheating . . .

Using technology to steal signs was rampant in baseball. The Yankees, Red Sox and Astros — and others whose indiscretions have not been proven publicly — did it. It’s simply facile to treat them as the same. It’s factual to say that there are different levels of cheating.

The one true revelation in the Yankeegate letter is that commissioner Rob Manfred actually fined the Yankees $100,000 after they were caught using their dugout phone in September 2017. Seriously?

They spent two years and who knows how much money in legal costs to try to suppress . . . that their mere replay room reconnaissance ring of 2017-18 wasn’t even half the Astro Intelligence Agency and cost them in the end slightly less than half what they pay pitcher Gerrit Cole per day?

The Yankees feared “significant and reputational harm” if the letter was made public. That fear may have been well founded. But not for the reasons the Bronx Boneheads thought.

A little hustle in the muscle

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Dominic Smith

Dom Smith diving across first after Cardinals reliever Giovanny Gallegos (65) was late covering on Smith’s smash up the line and well behind the base in the top of the ninth Monday. Gallegos then tried but couldn’t nail trail runner Jeff McNeil at the plate, kicking the Mets’ overthrow win into overdrive.

It looked simple enough. Mets outfielder Mark Canha down to his and the Mets’ final strike Monday night with third baseman Eduardo Escobar aboard on a one-out base hit. Cardinals reliever Giovanny Gallegos 0-2 on Canha and ready to land the last punch(out).

The good news for the Mets is that they ended up landing the final punch with a two-run homer finishing a 5-2 overthrow into which they hustled themselves after they’d been down to their final strike. Aided and abetted unexpectedly by Gallegos a moment late and two bucks short covering first base on what could have been a game-ending dazzler.

Thus did the first showdown between the leaders of the National League East and Central grind, sprint, and launch its way to the finish in the Mets’ favour. You could almost feel the Cardinals bawling themselves out that it didn’t have to go that way the moment Mets reliever Edwin Diaz struck Cardinals outfielder Harrison Bader out after a two-out walk.

It came to this because the Mets wasted a delicious pitching duel between Max Scherzer and the Cardinals’ Miles Mikolas, trading shutouts for seven innings, after Mets reliever Tyler May couldn’t put Mendoza Line-hitting Tyler O’Neill away and surrendered a two-run single for his trouble with the bases loaded and one out in the bottom of the eighth.

But now Canha wasnt quite so ready, fighting back to a full count, before he hit a bouncer up the third base line to Nolen Arenado, the Cardinals’ third baseman to whom a play like this, even on the short run, was something he could do upside down if necessary.

Arenado on the not-so-hard run whipped a throw across the infield to first base. The ball soared right past first baseman Paul Goldschmidt and Escobar soared home to put the Mets on the board at last, with Canha taking second on the play and Jeff McNeil checking in at the plate.

Canha came out for pinch runner Travis Jankowski. McNeil sent an RBI double deep to right. And Mets manager Buck Showalter sent Dom Smith up to pinch hit for smart catching/modest-hitting Tomas Nido. Smith shot one up the first base line that Goldschmidt stopped one way or the other, diving across the line as he speared it fair.

But when Goldschmidt hustled a throw to the pad he had no target. Gallegos bounced off the mound a moment too late for the out as Smith dove onto the pad and Jankowski and McNeil cross the plate safely, McNeil himself diving home a split second before Cardinals catching insertion Andrew Kinzner could get a tag on him off Gallegos’s throw home.

“The second he hit it, I thought it was a foul ball,” said Gallegos post game. “Then I saw the ball bounce back to first, and that’s when I broke.”

“That’s a mental mistake,” said Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol. “Can’t excuse it. He knows it; we know it: He’s got to cover first.”

“Dom probably ran the fastest 90 (feet) of his life there,” said McNeil. “I knew it would be close at first base. I ended up scoring. It was a lot of fun.”

Smith wouldn’t exactly disagree. “You try to hustle as hard as you can to beat him,” he said. “I saw the closer didn’t get over right away. I just ran as hard as I could. I knew I had a step on him. I felt slow but I tried to run hard.” Don’t fight the feeling next time, either. It could be worth another pair of runs in another eleventh-hour effort.

It put the Mets up 3-2, brought lefthander T.J. McFarland in to relieve Gallegos for the Cardinals, and brought lefthanded-hitting Brandon Nimmo to the plate for the Mets. McFarland threw Nimmo a sinker that didn’t quite sink below the inner middle of the zone, and Nimmo sunk it on a high line inside the right field foul pole.

“It was worth the wait,” said Mets manager Buck Showalter after they banked the game. “It really was. It was fun to watch.”

“We’re a resilient team,” Smith said, “and I feel like we’re in it till the last pitch every night. Even the games that we don’t come up with a win, I feel like we make it tough on our opponents when they do beat us. I think it showed our DNA and what we’re about.”

And it almost (underline that) erased the pitching duel that kept Busch Stadium in thrall most of the night. Scherzer may have struck ten out in his seven innings but he appreciated his mound opponent just as much. Appropriately.

“Tip your hat off to Miles tonight,” he said of Mikolas, whose own seven-inning effort was five punchouts and four scattered hits. “That’s baseball. It was a great game. Sometimes you run into a buzz saw and he did his job tonight. I’m pitching on pins and needles there. I have to make every pitch. I was thinking even a solo shot might lose it.”

He didn’t have to worry as much as he thought. Monday night left Max the Knife number five on the career survey with his 106th double-digit-strikeout game, not to mention 33 punchouts and a measly eight walks in 25 innings pitched this season thus far.

If only he could pitch in Busch Stadium more often than he does. In his previous five gigs there, he’s gone seven innings or more each without a single run being pried out of him. He also has an ongoing 21-straight shutout inning streak against the Cardinals, and now that he has seven starts of ten strikeouts or more against them he’s behind only Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax in that department.

This is the pitcher the Cardinals have never tried to sign when he was on the open market despite his roots being in Missouri. Now they can look forward to this plus two more seasons of potential continuing torture at his right hand. Even if he might still need Met bats in the ninth to keep the bullpen from trashing his best efforts after he departs for the day or night.

“Everybody had a hand in that rally and that’s the cool thing,” he said of the Mets’ ninth-inning grind-out. “When you see your offense go off like that and just find a way to scratch across extra runs.” Catching one of the other guys asleep just enough when there’s first base to cover critically doesn’t exactly hurt, either.

Coming at last, the Yankeegate letter

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Aaron Boone, Brian Cashman

Manager Aaron Boone and general manager Brian Cashman may have a lot of explaining to do when the Yankeegate sign-stealing letter comes forth to the public.

It didn’t happen when I thought it would happen, but the now-infamous Yankeegate letter will be made public. The Yankees couldn’t quite convince the 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals to reconsider their original denial last month.

They couldn’t convince the court that releasing the letter would calcify your spine, cut your circulation off, amputate both your arms, or destroy the world’s coffee bean crops.

Writing for the three-member panel, Judge Joseph Bianco said it’s very much in the public interest whether commissioner Rob Manfred wrote to Yankee general manager Brian Cashman that he knew the Yankees were up to a little bit more in 2017 than just a little subterfuge involving their dugout telephone.

“As the judge explained it,” writes Sportico‘s Michael McCann, “the letter is a judicial document, which means it is presumptively accessible to the public.” Not to mention Manfred and baseball’s government compromising any privacy arguments by letting a takeaway or two escape to the public purview in the first place.

Major League Baseball swore to anyone who’d listen that the Yankees weren’t using cameras belonging to their YES broadcasting network for any extracurricular in-game field intelligence, while fining them over the dugout phone. MLB also fined the Red Sox after an assistant trainer was caught using his AppleWatch for such intelligence gathering.

It took Astrogate and its fallout to help Manfred to zap the Red Sox, at least, over their 2018 replay room reconnaissance ring, which wasn’t quite as grave as the Astros’ off-field-based, illegal electronic sign-stealing intelligence agency. Both the Astros’ 2017 World Series title and the Rogue Sox’s 2018 World Series title have since been suspect.

The Yankees haven’t won a World Series since 2009. But if the Manfred letter to Cashman reveals anything deeper than a dugout phone at play in any such Yankee intelligence operation, it won’t take the 2017-18 Astros off the hook but it will put the 2017 Yankees on the hook squarely enough.

Suspecting numerous teams used their replay rooms for subterfuge is one thing. Answering it to the extremes the Astros went and the Yankees might have gone is something else entirely. We won’t know until the letter’s release how far the Yankees actually went. But when the Yankees say in court documents that the letter will inflict “significant and reputational harm” if released, look out.

“The letter could also mention coaches, staff and players who were alleged to have played roles in possible shenanigans . . . MLB attorneys have similarly warned the letter could ’cause potential embarrassment,’ while insisting the letter’s release is motivated by ‘perceived shock value’,” McCann writes.

That could prove a significant embarrassment, especially remembering how Yankee outfielder Aaron Judge insisted that Astros second baseman Jose Altuve’s 2017 American League Most Valuable Player award was now tainted in light of Astrogate. Altuve has since been shown not only to have objected to the Astros’ trash-can banging of stolen signs while he was at the plate, but he wasn’t actually wearing any kind of buzzer under his uniform at any time.

The Yankeegate letter saga began when the DraftKings fantasy sports group sued the Astros, the Red Sox, and MLB itself over those teams’ 2017-18 cheatings, and pre-trial discovery included filing the letter under seal. DraftKings lost their $5 million lawsuit, and releasing the letter won’t reinstate the suit. Nor will it take the Astro Intelligence Agency or the Rogue Sox Reconnaissance Ring off the hook.

But one of the five DraftKings plaintiffs, Kristopher Olson, has told McCann that the courts must “recognize the distinction between diffuse, random acts of rules breaking, like the use of corked bats by individual players, and a concentrated, coordinated campaign like the one in which the Astros engaged and [that] MLB took steps to downplay and conceal.”

It took pitcher Mike Fiers blowing the whistle at last to Athletic writers Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich to un-conceal Astrogate in November 2019. Manfred himself was compelled to leave almost every Astro player unpunished in return for getting them to spill about the AIA. Drellich’s in-depth Astrogate examination, Winning Fixes Everything: The Rise and Fall of the Houston Astros, twice delayed since last August, is now due to be published in September.

Manfred crunched the Astros with stripped draft picks and owner Jim Crane with a $5 million fine, not to mention imposing yearlong suspensions of then-manager A.J. Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow, whom Crane fired posthaste. The players’ union and MLB agreed since that any players involved in any degree of Astrosoxyankeegate-like espionage can be suspended without pay and with a concurrent loss of MLB service time.

Hinch eventually admitted in a wrenching interview that, except for a couple of clubhouse-monitor smashings, he could have but didn’t do more to thwart the AIA. Then, after serving his year’s suspension, he found new life as the Tigers’ manager.

We learned soon enough, too, that Luhnow approved a staffer-created algorithm designed to steal signs from off the field before then-bench coach Alex Cora and then-designated hitter Carlos Beltran masterminded an operation involving either an extra camera or illegally-altered-to-real-time existing one for the AIA. The Astros’ mealymouthed presser as spring training 2020 opened left them an even worse look. The pan-damn-ically cut-off spring training and delayed regular 2020 season shielded them partially from fan retribution.

The Rogue Sox didn’t take quite the beating over the 2018 cheaters as the Astros did, but then the Sox so far were proven only to have been one team who did figure out that their replay room—bestowed by MLB upon home and road teams in all ballparks—had its extracurricular uses. Manfred purged their video room operator J.T. Watkins but, again, let players off the hook in return for details.

Rogue Sox manager Cora, hired for 2018, also resigned before he could be fired in 2020. He, too, gave a self-lacerating interview while sitting out a year-long suspension; it may have helped his re-hiring for last year. Beltran was hired after the 2019 season to manage the Mets, but he was forced out before he got to manage even a single spring training game for them. He works now as a Yankee broadcast analyst.

The Yankeegate letter’s full disclosure may inspire Astrogate-like wrath toward the Yankees. The outrage might be enough to force Manfred to drop at least an Astrogate-like hammer upon the Yankee front office and even manager Aaron Boone. (MLB says releasing the letter would be “embarrassing” to it, too.) “May” and “might” are the operative words there.

If so, there’ll be plenty of fan bases, including the one for those National League East-leaders playing across town in Queens, who’ll think it couldn’t happen to a nicer team.

3,000 hits, and one for the game’s integrity

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Miguel Cabrera

Miggy Stardust standing alone at first base after becoming baseball’s only 3,000-hit/500-home run/Triple Crown winning player Saturday afternoon.

Well, it proved too much to ask that Miguel Cabrera should get number 3,000 by launching one over the fences in Comerica Park Saturday afternoon. Sometimes the Elysian Fields insist that drama takes an inning off. But he didn’t wait long for the big knock, either. A sharply-cued single is equal to a home run in the hit total.

With Robbie Grossman aboard with a leadoff single in the bottom of the first, Cabrera shot a 1-1 fastball from Rockies pitcher Antonio Senzatela through the right side of the infield as if he’d lined up a money shot in a pool tournament. The bedlam began before he had a chance to hold up at first.

The Comerica audience chanted and cheered down upon him from just about the moment he left the batter’s box. He raised his fist at first as the ballpark scoreboard gave him the fireworks equivalent of a 21-gun salute. Former teammate José Iglesias, now a Rockie, ambled over to give him a bear hug—and the ball he’d just hit into history.

The Tigers poured out of their dugout to congratulate their man. His wife, his son, his daughter, and his mother gave and received hugs with him behind the plate while time was still in effect. Who says it wasn’t worth the extra day’s wait?

Cabrera barely had time to settle back in at first base when Jeimer Candelario struck out but Jonathan Schoop pushed him to second and Austin Meadows (safe on a fielder’s choice) home with an infield hit, and Spencer Torkelson—who’s taken first base over while Cabrera settles in strictly as a designated hitter—hit Senzatela’s first pitch to him into the right field seats.

Just like that, the Tigers showed they knew how to celebrate Miggy Stardust’s big knock the right ways. Then, after Grossman singled home a fifth run in the fourth, the big puddy tats ramped up the party with two outs in the sixth, and the guest of honour struck again, his two-run single being sandwiched between a pair of RBI singles, including Candelario pushing Meadows home on another infield hit.

Tigers manager A.J. Hinch gave Cabrera the rest of the game off, and his mates treated him to another two-out four-run inning in the seventh, this time Meadows singling home a pair, Candelario drawing a bases-loaded walk, and Schoop singling Meadows home. The Tiger bullpen took care of the rest, even if Angel De Jesus had to claw his way out of a self-inflicted bases-loaded jam to seal the 13-0 win.

That was the opener of a doubleheader in which the Rockies threatened to shut the Tigers out in the nightcap until Meadows hit a two-out, two-run triple off Rockies reliever Alex Colome. But Colome struck pinch hitter Harold Castro out swinging on three straight cutters to nail the 3-2 Rockies win.

Cabrera picked up another base hit in the nightcap’s bottom of the first to set first and third up for Candelario, who struck out swinging before Meadows forced the guest of honour at second for the side. But nothing could spoil Cabrera’s party, not even a doubleheader split. Nothing could spoil him becoming the first man ever to nail 3,000+ hits, 500+ home runs, and win a Triple Crown.

Not even the Comerica crowd booing wrongly when the Yankees ordered him walked in the bottom of the eighth Thursday, so their lefthanded reliever Lucas Luetge could have a more favourable matchup with the lefthanded-hitting Meadows.

That debate poured into the following two days, even as the Tigers and the Rockies were rained out of playing Friday night. It was a foolish debate, in which the booing Tiger fans proved nothing more than that they’re not averse to a little tanking—when it might involve one of their own getting the ideal matchup to get the big knock after he’d gone 0-for-3 thus far on that day.

Down 1-0, Yankee manager Aaron Boone could have been accused of a little tanking himself if he’d let Luetge pitch to the righthanded Cabrera, whose splits show he manhandles pitching from both sides but is that much better against the portsiders, and handed Cabrera the immediate advantage going in.

Boone had even a slight a chance to hold those Tigers and keep his Yankees within simple reach of overcoming and winning. History be damned, he took it. And even if the lefthanded-swinging Meadows did wreck the maneuver promptly with a two-run double, it happened just as honestly as the free pass to Cabrera occurred.

“What a shame and not a good call by the opposing team,” sniffed one social media denizen about the Yankees, a sentiment expressed by only a few too many thousand from the moment Cabrera took his base that day. “Just let him have his victory at home for the fans. What a shame.”

Just “let” him have his victory?

No—the shame would have been if the Yankees let Cabrera have one more chance to  help beat them even with an historic hit providing a little extra Tiger insurance. The game’s integrity includes especially that everyone present and playing makes an honest effort to compete and win. That’s what the Yankees did in that moment.

Cabrera may be aging, but he’s still a formidable bat. A Hall of Famer whose age is only too pronounced but whose spirit and love of the game hasn’t been eroded out of its career-long presence is too smart not to know the Yankees weren’t about to let him bury them alive if they could help it.

So he waited an extra day or two to swing into the history books. The only thing wrong Saturday was probably that it couldn’t have been a home run. It’s happened before when baseball competition required precedence over baseball history. It can happen again with the next significant milestone approached by the next significant player. For integrity’s sake, we should hope that the participants play the game right then, too, even if it means history waiting an extra day or two.

The Comerica Park racket after Cabrera pulled up at first in the first should tell you one historic swing wasn’t just worth the wait, it was good for baseball, the Tigers, and Miggy Stardust. And in that order.