If José Caballero is going down — and it seems as if he is, now forced to begrudgingly adjust a routine he had perfected — he is going down swinging at Major League Baseball.
The Yankees shortstop, whose pre-pitch habit designed to take advantage of every allowable second of the pitch clock became subject of an MLB crackdown — without any warning — on Wednesday, still was upset a day later and said the league knows it is “wrong.”
“It’s very easy to simply invent rules and change the world’s most beautiful sport and then not be responsible for those mistakes,” Caballero said in Spanish in an Instagram post, according to a translation provided to The Post. “They know they’re wrong but it’s very difficult to accept that a regular player, who only wants to play the sport he has always loved, can adapt and use it in his game.”
All season — and even earlier than that, toying with the timer since its inception in 2023 — Caballero has mastered a technique that appeared to be within the rules and yet led to frequent arguments with opposing pitchers and home plate umpires.
To prevent quick-pitches or pitchers throwing toward not-ready batters, hitters must make eye contact with the pitcher with at least eight seconds on the clock. And thus Caballero would refuse to look at the pitcher — perhaps playing with his bat or staring into the dugout or crowd — until there were 8 or 9 seconds left. Doing so 1) put pressure on the pitcher, who had to be engaged at that moment to ensure an automatic ball would not be called, 2) provided the pitcher the least allowable amount of time to then release the pitch and 3) often annoyed the pitcher, which a pest like Caballero considered an advantage.
That changed Wednesday, when MLB instructed the Yankees-Pirates umpiring crew to police the routine by enforcing an on-the-books rule that restricts hitters from attempting “to deceive a pitcher into beginning their windup or coming to the set position.” The league’s focus on the routine followed an incident Monday in which Pirates pitcher Dennis Santana became irked at Caballero, which led to words being exchanged and the dugouts emptying.
On Wednesday, Caballero was then issued a pitch-clock violation in the sixth inning of the opening game, prompting arguments, hitting coach James Rowson getting tossed and, ultimately, a strikeout in a Yankees loss.
“Maybe my English is so bad that I don’t understand,” the Panamanian, who has a good command of the language, said after the game, “but ‘deceiving’ kind of means that you’re trying to trick someone. And I’m not trying to trick someone because I do the same thing over and over.”
After the game, manager Aaron Boone called the league’s lack of warning to Caballero and the Yankees “embarrassing.”
“Bottom line,” Caballero wrote in his post, as interpreted by Carolina Sánchez Calabrese, “they are in charge and will do and undo whenever and however they want and everyone else has to be silent and obey.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
