José Caballero believes Major League Baseball is singling him out.
The Yankees utilityman was assessed a pitch clock violation during Wednesday’s 5-3 extra-inning loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates after MLB instructed umpires to crack down on his pre-pitch routine of delaying eye contact with the pitcher until the clock nears eight seconds.
The violation came in the sixth inning against Pirates reliever Carmen Mlodzinski, resulting in a called strike that ultimately led to Caballero striking out. The ruling also prompted the ejection of Yankees hitting coach James Rowson.
“I’ve seen other guys do some other things and they don’t call anything on them,” Caballero said. “They’re just picking on me.”
Caballero’s routine has been under scrutiny for weeks. During a June 14 game in Toronto, he received a warning after using the same tactic, and tensions boiled over again Monday night when Pirates reliever Dennis Santana confronted him, leading to both benches clearing.
According to plate umpire Quinn Wolcott, MLB has now made it clear the routine will no longer be tolerated.
“He’s not allowed to do an inordinate amount of time looking down, trying to get the pitcher to cause a violation,” Wolcott told a pool reporter. “There’s no other hitter that gets in the box, takes the amount of the time that Caballero does while looking down, not making eye contact with the pitcher. Obviously it’s caused a lot of problems in the past. It’s not going to be allowed anymore.”
Crew chief Adrian Johnson confirmed the directive came directly from the league.
“It’s not allowed anymore. It was the cause of a bench-clearing situation on Monday night. Major League Baseball stepped in, and they wanted enforced,” Johnson said. “We were instructed not to warn him. We were instructed to violate him.”
Yankees manager Aaron Boone said the club was never informed of the league’s change in enforcement before Wednesday’s game.
“It’s embarrassing,” Boone said.
Ironically, Boone admitted he used to dislike Caballero’s gamesmanship before the Yankees acquired him from Tampa Bay at last year’s trade deadline.
“He’s one of those guys I would yell at from the dugout,” Boone said. “He was a pest and I didn’t like it. Now I like him because he’s a good player and he’s on our side. But, yeah, we’ve had a laugh about that.”
Caballero insists he isn’t trying to trick opposing pitchers.
“He actually said that they were making new rules today and it’s on me because I was deceiving or something like that to the pitcher, which doesn’t make sense,” Caballero said. “I don’t know, maybe my English is so bad that I don’t understand, 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. You can check my last 50 at-bats and see if I do it the same or not, or check maybe 100 at-bats or 150.”
He also believes the new interpretation unfairly changes his approach at the plate.
“For everyone, it is eight seconds. For me was nine,” he said. “But now they just don’t want me to do my routine so it’s kind of like tricky for me because it’s the way that I get settled, the way that I try to approach my at-bats.”
“If I get in the box and they have 16, 17 seconds left, they can hold the ball on me all that time and I’d be tied up,” he said.
MLB implemented the pitch clock in 2023 to improve pace of play and cited its pace-of-game rules in its decision, stating that any batter attempting to deceive a pitcher into committing a pitch clock violation constitutes circumvention of the rule.
