The Arizona Diamondbacks are angry at Quintin Berry, third base coach for the Chicago Cubs. Several Diamondbacks, including manager Torey Lovullo, suspected Monday night that Berry was picking up the changeup grip of Diamondbacks starting pitcher Merrill Kelly and then using not-subtle-enough hand gestures to ping information to Cubs hitters, relayed through a runner on second base. This matter came to a head in the fifth inning, with Michael Busch facing a full count at the plate and Seiya Suzuki on second base following a double off the wall in left. Berry did something with his left hand and Kelly stepped off the rubber and glared at him. Diamondbacks bench coach Jeff Banister, who has a terrific old worn-out baseball face, first lit into Berry, and then pitching coach Brian Kaplan shouted across the diamond to Cubs bench coach Ryan Flaherty, and then the two dugouts woofed back and forth and exchanged theatrical finger wags.
Pitch-tipping is regarded as largely the problem of a sloppy pitcher, and exploiting it is well within the bounds of acceptable gamesmanship. The Diamondbacks do not disagree. What they apparently object to, as Kelly explained after the game, is when a coach gets involved in the action. The way Kelly sees it, he is a player competing against other players, and if those players pick up on his grips and kick his ass, that's just how it goes. But he is less cool with the involvement of some middle-aged bozo from over on the other side of the base line. Kelly makes a reasonable case.
"Stealing signs is as old as baseball, I think it’s a little bullshit when it comes from the coach," Kelly explained after the game, a 7–0 Cubs win, per Arizona Sports. "I think if it’s a guy on second base and they see the grip in your glove, or if the hitters can see something that you’re doing with your glove, I think that’s fair game. I think it’s a little bush league when it comes from outside that." Kelly accepted blame for not doing enough to hide his grips, and offered that if they're detectible for Berry, it's inevitable that someone else will suss out his pitch selections. But he wants all of those advantages to be gained and lost within the lines. "Like I said, everyone in this game is just trying to get an edge wherever they can. It’s definitely not the first time a coach has relayed signs. But I think in that situation, I think it should stay between the players."
Kelly has had enough trouble this season, without the added aggravation of having to protect his grips from the prying eyes of glorified spectators. Monday's performance, in which he allowed three runs and pitched into the sixth inning, was a whole lot better than Kelly's two most recent starts, in which he allowed 12 earned runs across nine total innings, and surrendered almost as many dingers (three) as he recorded strikeouts (four). Statcast says his pitching run value is in the first percentile across baseball, and that he has just about the worst fastball in the sport: The expected slugging percentage on Kelly's four-seamer, which he throws more than 27 percent of the time and which is vital to setting up his changeup, is .748, which is real bad. The changeup is Kelly's other most-used pitch, and since the fastball is presently a huge fat turd, he cannot survive for long if opponents are able to spot and anticipate the cambio. Hell, even if he isn't tipping it, the changeup is already not much better than another turd: Per Statcast, his run value on off-speed pitches is an ugly minus-4, good for baseball's eighth percentile. It's been a rough season.
Lovullo, who largely stayed out of the fifth-inning exchange but did march out onto the field and have a chat with umpire Lance Barrett, stopped well short of accusing the Cubs of anything particularly dastardly, but noted that everyone is a little bit edgier down the stretch of a long season. "We were barking at their third base coach, and he was barking back. And what's funny in April is not funny in August," said Lovullo, who chalked the whole exchange up to gamesmanship and declined to get into specifics. "Everybody's edgy. And they're protecting their side, we're protecting our side."
In an earlier era, someone from the Cubs would've eaten a fastball for this transgression, and then sometime this evening, in Game 2 of the series, someone from the Diamondbacks would've had to wear one in retaliation, and there might even have been some brief and painless bench-clearing. Unfortunately, thanks to the Woke mind virus, all we'll get from this is one pitcher's look of exasperation and a lot of coaches pulling faces at one another from 30 yards apart. Look at how they have massacred our national pastime.
