TORONTO – John Schneider is savvy enough to understand the weight his words would carry within the steaming kettle of emotion Aaron Judge’s sketchy sideway looks have created around this Toronto Blue Jays–New York Yankees series. So when he was asked about baseball’s murky grey zone around subterfuge and where he placed the line between fair and foul, the answer was telling of where he feels the partition lies, and how he feels his divisional rivals crossed it.
“The integrity of the game is so important,” Schneider told an overflowing media gathering in his office. “People are always trying to look for competitive advantages. If you’re doing things in plain sight, you have to be able to correct them and you have to be willing to have the consequences be what they are. If it’s done fairly, that’s part of the game. Everyone’s looking to help their teammates. Everyone’s looking to pick up on tendencies. Anything that’s happening on the field in the right way, totally fair game.”
The unsaid implication, of course, is that the Yankees were doing things in plain sight in need of correction, a message reinforced hours later when words were exchanged between the Blue Jays dugout and third base coach Luis Rojas, who positioned himself outside the coach’s box, and when New York starter Domingo German was ejected in the fourth inning after a foreign-substance check.
In that way, the Yankees not only again crossed the line the day after both Judge and Jake Bauers were caught by Sportsnet broadcast cameras glancing in the direction of the base coach opposite them during eighth-inning at-bats, they totally stomped it. Aaron Boone’s turn playing the innocently accused pre-game Tuesday – “I think most of the people in the know, know that there’s nothing there,” he said of the sideway looks – rang all the more hollow after.
No matter, baseball games aren’t won or lost on the moral high ground, which made Judge’s go-ahead, two-run homer in the eighth inning of a 6-3 win all the more painful. After German spun three perfect innings, the Blue Jays had fought back from a 3-0 deficit to tie the game in a three-run fifth, only to end up dropping a second straight before a crowd of 35,112.
Worse, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., appeared to tweak something fielding a bunt in the eighth and didn’t take the field in the ninth. After the game, the Blue Jays said Guerrero Jr. has right knee discomfort and will get an MRI.
The wild game capped an even wilder day which included conversations about Monday’s affair with Major League Baseball for both clubs, with the positioning of base coaches ending up a focal point.
What the Blue Jays seemed to believe is that Yankees base coaches Travis Chapman at first and Rojas at third were positioning themselves well outside the coaches’ boxes in order to peer in at reliever Jay Jackson during the eighth inning. Jackson may have been a bit sloppy with his glove, leaving it wide open with no one on base, and the coaches could perhaps have picked up his grip and relayed it to the batter, which would explain all the sideways peeps.
Relaying grips under those circumstances is generally considered fair game – it’s on the pitching team to protect its pitches – but not if, as Schneider put it, “things are being picked up from people that aren’t in places they should be.”
Asked if Yankees coaches were a focal point, Schneider said: “I think every team has their guard up on that. It’s easy to look at a runner at second when you’re hitting, tough to look into the dugout. Probably a little bit easier to look at a coach. There are boxes on the field for a reason. When it’s a glaring 30 feet where you’re not in that spot, you kind of put two and two together a little bit.”
Hence, Blue Jays pitching coach Pete Walker getting fired up when Rojas strayed from his spot Tuesday, leading to a discussion with umpires.
