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Another crappy slide, another pissed-off middle infielder, another dustup on a big league diamond. This is almost becoming routine.
On Saturday, Rangers second baseman Roughned Odor tried to take out Angels shortstop Andrelton Simmons on the final play of of LA’s 6-0 shutout. On one hand, it’s up to Odor to do whatever he can to break up the double play and extend the inning. On the other, there’s this pesky document put out by Major League Baseball called “Official Baseball Rules,” by which Odor’s tactics should be judged a bit more harshly.
Odor swung well to the outside of second base in an effort to disrupt the play, but not wide enough. To reach Simmons, who’d cleared the base by some four feet, Odor had to jut out his right leg in the exact opposite direction of the bag. In so doing, his cleats tore into Simmons’ shin.
The effort was not enough to disrupt the throw, but it did manage to empty the dugouts. No punches were thrown.
Odor was clueless after the game. “He pushed me,” he told reporters about Simmons’ response. “I was surprised because I made a good slide. It was not a dirty slide. I tried to break up the double play with a good slide. That’s why I was surprised he pushed me like that. He was angry, but I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ I made a good slide. It was not dirty.”
Rangers Jeff Bannister stood up for his player, because that’s what managers do, calling the slide “appropriate.”
“I didn’t see anything I thought should warrant the reaction we got,” he said in an MLB.com report. “Situation where we are going to continue to play hard baseball. Situation where Rougned made contact with the bag. Not sure why the anxiety.”
Why the anxiety might be because, for Odor, this kind of slide is old hat.
Following Anthony Rizzo’s disputed slide in Pittsburgh a week ago today, and the Pirates’ revenge slide two days later, the Rangers should be up on what constitutes “not dirty.” In the modern, safety-first era, what Odor did—even if, as seems likely, he did not intend to spike Simmons—was unequivocally dirty.
The rule he broke, 6.01—which we’ve referenced an awful lot over the previous seven days—specifically mandates that a runner can’t change his pathway for the purpose of initiating contact with a fielder. The rule’s current iteration was devised following Chase Utley’s slide in the 2015 National League Division Series that broke Ruben Tejada’s leg. (Utley also did something similar to Tejada, with less-disastrous results, in 2010.)
The rule is there for a reason. Simmons ended up with a gash on his leg, but did not miss any time. Also, he didn’t want to talk about it. “Nothing,” he told reporters in response to a question about what he said to Odor following the slide. “I was trying to tell him, ‘You forgot to say hello to your family for me.’ He’s like, ‘No, I didn’t forget, I told them.’ I was like, ‘No, they told me you didn’t tell them.’ He wasn’t very happy about it, so it’s OK. … I’m gonna eat my gelato and sleep well at night.”
Simmons was eating gelato at the time.
On Sunday, Angels pitchers opted against retaliation, but Simmons had a chance to seize his own pound of flesh with a wide slide into Odor to break up a double play in the fourth. He did it—Odor’s relay to first baseman Ronald Guzman was not in time to catch Shohei Ohtani—but umpires ruled that Simmons had deviated from his path, and called Ohtani out.
(To be fair, regarding the commentary in the above tweet, Simmons completed his double play on Saturday, so there was no need to review the slide.)
Questionable slides have led to all sorts of confrontations over recent seasons. Recently, of course, they’re supposed to be regulated out of existence, something that has yet to happen. Given Odor’s track record with this kind of thing, unless the league office intervenes, expect it to continue.