Me and Joe Maddon

Joe Maddon made big news last night when he protested the Cubs’ tilt agains the Nationals because southpaw Sean Doolittle was tapping his right toe on the ground in the middle of his delivery. Joe complained the toe-tap was like the one Carl Edwards Jr was using when he was called for an illegal pitch earlier this season. If Carl can’t do it, Joe said, then Sean can’t do it, either.  When the umps didn’t sanction Sean for toe-tapping after his first complaint, Maddon filed the protest.

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Like I said, this was big news.  I don’t mean just big baseball news.  Big news period.  I discovered this when I went looking for a photo of the toe-tap to set atop this post.  Here is a sample of the photos Google found, every one of them over the caption “Maddon protests loss vs. Nats over…” or the equivalent:

These first two are what you might expect. Doolittle maybe tapping his toe, and Maddon reasoning with the ump. We’ll skip all the photos showing Maddon in a blue sweatshirt (he was not wearing one last night) or Doolittle pitching in a day game.

Here’s one I thought was interesting:

The UEFL is the Sports & Umpire Ejection Fantasy League.  I will not share any details about that league. I don’t want anyone abandoning the EFL for the UEFL.

Watch the progression in the following images.

These are just samples.  There are thousands of them, I’d guess, ranging well beyond what I can represent here. All of them captioned with some reference to Maddon’s protest of Doolittle’s toe-tap.

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The lesson is clear:  when someone stands on principle to enforce the rules, it is worldwide news, permeating every realm of human endeavor.

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I did that yesterday.  I stood on principle to enforce the rules that players should get their defensive ratings regardless of the incompetence of the Commissioner.  I also declined to ask for a remedy going back to April because that should also be against the rules (and effectively has been) even though it hurts the W’s. (It hurts the Pears, too, but I forgot that for a bit and they are just collateral damage anyway.)

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So if we google “Wolverines protest defense omissions” I bet we’ll get a pile of images like the ones Maddon got.  Let’s see:

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Nope.  Not one. Lots of protests, but none of them captioned with anything about any EFL team’s defense or the Commissioner’s incompetence.  There are only two possible explanations for this:

1.  EFL Commissioner incompetence doesn’t count as news anymore.
2. A worldwide east coast media bias.  Next time I’ll try a search about the Outs or the Balk and see what happens.

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Either way, it makes me feel a little like Scott Servais after another 18-4 beatdown (see above).

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