Speaking of dress codes:
During the second inning of Wednesday night’s 4-3 loss to the New York Yankees, Francona was called out of the dugout so an MLB security official could make sure he was wearing his uniform top under his usual Boston pullover jacket.
“When Derek Jeter is on second base and I got somebody coming from the league making me go down the runway, I was a little perturbed,” Francona said Thursday.
“That was about as embarrassed as I’ve been in a long time, for baseball.”
The rule requiring managers to wear a uniform is rather silly to begin with, since baseball is the only sport to do so. But it’s traditional and most seem to like it. As a fan, I’m perfectly with managers wearing whatever they want. If a manager today wants to wear a suit like Connie Mack used to do, let him. Simply prohibit anyone (other than the trainer) from the field if he isn’t dressed in a uniform. The manager can then decide how important those mound visits are to him.
But I’ll concede for the rest of this entry that managers should wear uniforms. Does it make sense to pull a manager out of the dugout during an inning? During the game is bad enough, they couldn’t wait until the game was between half-innings? That’s a farce.
“I’m not talking about that, and I’m disappointed that they talked about it. And there will be something said about that,” [MLB vice president Bob] Watson said. “That’s in house.”
When a policy is built on secrecy, someone in management should question the validity of that policy. But Bud Selig is running the show, so I’m not surprised. He must be out of local governments to shake down for a new stadium, so this is how his idle mind fills the time while it’s completely uninterested in the integrity of the game.
Update: Baseball states that “timing was an issue“. No kidding.