Back when the Kansas City Star first decided they could live without my contributions, for my own amusement I started a blog on a different platform and wrote a piece about visiting a major league clubhouse and I’m pretty sure the seven people who saw it, enjoyed reading it, so I decide to rewrite it and post it here. (And if you were one of those seven people, just keep reading because I’ve added new jokes.)
The Unwritten Rules
Baseball has approximately eleventy-billion Unwritten Rules and they’re called “unwritten” because they’re not in a book and no one will tell you what they are.
Until you break one.
And then they’re more than happy to inform you that you just fucked up and make you feel like a jerk (it’s a baseball tradition) so if you ever get to visit a Big League Clubhouse I’m going to save you a lot of embarrassment by telling you some of the Unwritten Rules which apply to that situation.
And we’ll start with…
Do not sit down
The first time I broke this rule was when I visited the Kansas City Royals clubhouse during spring training and I knew Dan Quisenberry so I sat down in a chair next to his locker to have a conversation and another player (whose name I can’t remember, along with the current location of my garage door opener) walked up and said I was sitting in his chair.
I jumped up and apologized, looked around and said:
“There’s not a chair in here for me, is there?”
Which made Quiz and the other player laugh because I’d figured it out: every chair in the clubhouse is meant for somebody else and even if there’s a couch, that’s not meant for visitors and a player shouldn’t have to ask you to get up so he can sit down in his clubhouse.
Quiz was my buddy and after he retired we’d go out to lunch on a regular basis, but he still didn’t tell me not to sit down because he wanted to see what would happen when I screwed up. When it comes to the Unwritten Rules, ballplayers enjoy watching you wander through a cultural minefield, just waiting for you to step on something interesting.
Although…a visitor sitting in the wrong chair can be pretty damn funny and I’ve got a story about that.
When a team makes it to the playoffs, the media crowd starts growing because reporters are no longer covering teams that got eliminated and the crowd of reporters just keeps getting bigger and bigger as the team advances which means a lot of out-of-town reporters aren’t all that familiar with the players they’re now covering.
So after a playoff game, some short Black dude related to Jarrod Dyson was in the clubhouse and made the mistake of sitting in Jarrod’s chair in front of Jarrod’s locker to wait for Jarrod and the out-of-town media gathered around him and turned on the cameras and stuck microphones in his face and started asking questions about the game because apparently all Black people do look the same to us overly-White people, which cracked up Lorenzo Cain, who then said:
“Go ahead and interview him; he had just as many hits as Dyce did.”
A self-serving complaint about the national media
So some reporter from New York or Los Angeles or Krakow (assuming the Russians haven’t taken over that city just yet) shows up in Kansas City or Milwaukee or Bum Fuck, Idaho to cover a team and provide fans with their insights, but in reality they don’t know jack shit about the team or its players.
That being the case, some of them look at the work of local reporters and use that information, which would be just fine if they gave the local reporters credit, like, “According to Joe Blow of the Podunk Times-Dispatch…” but the national media tends not to do this; instead, they act like they came up with that information all by themselves and to make it worse, they think you’re going to be flattered that they stole your stuff.
During the Royals World Series runs I had two ESPN reporters tell me they used my stuff all the time like, “Isn’t that thrilling for you?” and I wanted to ask if they could also come by my house and eat the food out of my refrigerator, but I didn’t, so it’s my fault for not calling them on their bullshit.
But now every time I hear some national reporter regurgitate some “inside” information I kinda wonder who they stole it from.
(But as you can tell, at least I’m not bitter about it.)
Do not watch the TVs
There are TVs everywhere in a Big League Clubhouse and sometimes they’re showing video of the opposing team and sometimes they’re showing whatever sports event the players might be interested in, but even if they’re showing Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rosario Dawson and the Queen of England having a three-way, do not watch TV for too long because just like those clubhouse chairs, those TVs aren’t meant for you.
You can glance at the TV and say, “Geez, Arnold really needs to get back in the gym” or “Who knew the Queen had a butterfly tattoo on her left butt cheek?” but don’t stare too long because if you do, somebody is probably going to ask you if you have a TV at home and when you say yes, they’ll suggest you go there and watch it.
Do not wear the opposing team’s colors
Before you leave the house, look at the schedule, see who the opposing team is that day and don’t wear their colors or you’re going to spend all day getting, “Nice shirt” comments and they usually don’t say, “Nice shirt, asshole” unless they know you pretty well, but trust me – the “asshole” is implied.
I once made the mistake of wearing a navy pullover with orange trim on a day the Royals played the Detroit Tigers and since they knew me well enough to insult me to my face, players and coaches refused to talk to me until I took the pullover off.
Wearing the opposing team colors is bad enough, but you really don’t want to wear some other team’s hat, which a very famous actor did (if you see me in a bar and buy me a beer and a shot, I’ll reveal the actor and the team) because if some team is nice enough to let you in their clubhouse and dugout, they don’t like it when you use the occasion to promote one of their rivals.
And just in case you think that’s a stupid rule and it would never actually happen, here’s what happened when Elaine wore an Orioles cap to a Yankees game and as we all know, Seinfeld reflects real life more accurately than anything on Fox News or CNN:
Do not stare at the stuff in a player’s locker
Baseball players feel like they have very little privacy when they’re at the ballpark and their locker is one of the few places that’s all theirs, so they put up pictures and keep souvenirs and anything else that makes the locker a little more personal and for them, you staring into that locker feels like some random stranger coming into your house (more on that before we’re through) and checking out what you keep in your closet.
Also…
Mark McGwire got in trouble when a reporter looked into his locker and saw a bottle labeled “androstenedione” and wondered what it was. Players feel like nothing good can come from somebody poking around in their personal stuff and if you came to work one morning and somebody was going through your desk, you’d feel exactly the same way.
You’re not welcome in the weight room, training room or dining room
Every day they open up the clubhouse to the media and the players who don’t want to talk to us (and that’s a lot of players) scatter and head for off-limits areas like the weight room, trainer’s room or dining room and one day I was talking to a coach when the clubhouse officially closed and one of the media wranglers told me it was time to leave, but the coach said fuck that, he’s talking to me and the clubhouse is closed when I say it’s closed, which was awesome and I asked that coach if he could do that for me every day. (Although now that I think about it, that coach and I no longer work there, so maybe there’s a lesson to be learned, which past experience has taught me I’ll ignore.)
Anyway…
About five seconds after the clubhouse was theoretically closed to the media, the players who were hiding out in off-limits areas came flooding back in the clubhouse, the music went up to 11, profanities and racial insults filled the air (baseball players are some of the least politically correct people on Earth…thank God) and in general, the players acted like French citizens right after the Nazis were run out of Paris.
A lot of players consider the media intrusive and in that playoff scenario with a bunch of out-of-town reporters showing up to cover a team they don’t know, the players really try to avoid reporters because who needs that distraction when you’re playing the most important games of the year?
Which is why I can not believe MLB is allowing players to get wired with microphones and talk to ESPN announcers during games.
During games players are supposed to be paying attention to small stuff like a batter changing his stance or choking up on the bat or when a pitcher is about to throw a slider and it’s only a matter of time until some player gets a bad jump on a catchable ball because he was busy telling Karl Ravech what kind of conditioner he uses on his hair.
Bottom line: most players would prefer nobody came into their clubhouse ever and here’s why.
Why players feel the way they do
Teams might schedule Early Work at 2:30 for a 7:15 game, so a lot of players start wandering in right after lunch. After a game ends, they need to shower and maybe eat dinner and talk to the media if they did something notable (good or bad), so do the math and during a baseball season, players spend way more time in the clubhouse than they do in their houses or apartments.
Keep that in mind.
Now let’s say you’re selling your house and your real estate agent says they want to bring a buyer by to take a look and then that complete stranger sits down in your favorite chair without an invitation, starts watching TV or examining the pictures on your mantle or the notes stuck on your refrigerator and then wanders off to poke through that storage closet where you hid the gallon of cheap whiskey you don’t want anyone else to know about and then asks personal questions like how things went at work that day.
I don’t think it would take very long before you wanted this jerk out of your home.
And that’s exactly how players look at the clubhouse; it’s their home.
So if you ever get to visit a Big League clubhouse just act like you would if you were in somebody else’s home, because that’s exactly where you are.
P.S. There are way more Unwritten Rules I didn’t get to and if enough of you like this, I’ll eventually tell you the Unwritten Rules for a field visit, but right now I’ve got to go find that goddamn garage door opener.
As always, great stuff.
Great topic!