The St. Louis Cardinals decided they were done being polite. After umpire Doug Eddings turned the previous night’s game into a story about a crooked hat instead of actual baseball, the Cardinals responded the next day with a small piece of trolling that had the entire baseball internet applauding.
During pregame introductions, the Cardinals video board played a compilation of famously crooked hats in baseball history. Ken Griffey Jr. backwards. Ichiro cocked to the side. Bo Jackson tipped just so. It was five seconds long, it was petty, and it was perfect.
Eddings was not scheduled to work that game, but he did not need to be. The message was received across the sport. Do not turn a baseball game into a lecture about how a player wears his hat, especially when the player was not breaking any actual rule.
Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol played dumb when asked about the video, saying it was a marketing department decision and he had nothing to do with it. Sure, Oli. Nobody buys that, and nobody is supposed to.
MLB’s problem right now is that its umpires are dominating headlines for the wrong reasons. Angel Hernandez retired, and the sport rejoiced. Then the next generation of umps decided they wanted their own moments in the spotlight, which is the opposite of what an umpire should ever want.
The larger reform push is real. The league has been experimenting with the automated ball-strike system in Triple-A for years, and the results have been strong enough that full implementation at the big league level is a matter of when, not if. Moments like this Eddings incident do not slow that train down. They speed it up.
Players are also getting more vocal. Ten years ago, a public spat between an umpire and a manager would end with a fine and a boilerplate statement. Now players call out umpires by name on social media and their union backs them up.
The Cardinals just added a new weapon to that arsenal. If your umpire crew is making your team look bad, the scoreboard operator can go to work the next night. Expect other teams to remember that.
Doug Eddings will be back working games this weekend. Every Cardinals fan in the stadium will notice. If Eddings ever ends up back in St. Louis, he should probably straighten his own hat before he walks out of the tunnel.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
