A-Rod vs. Braden: Who’s Right?

His feet touched the rubber, and Braden took offense, telling Rodriguez to “get off my mound.” Rodriguez said his piece after the game, dismissing Braden’s allegations as “pretty funny, honestly” because they had no idea what they did wrong.

If you haven’t heard or seen by now, this is the abridged version: Rodriguez, on his way back to first base after a foul ball in the sixth inning, wandered by the pitching mound.

“I still don’t know,” Rodriguez said.

The fact that a 26-year-old with 50 career starts was blasting him did not sit well with Rodriguez, either. When it was relayed to him that Braden expressed his frustration to Oakland reporters, Rodriguez responded with, “Who said that?” Told that it was Braden, Rodriguez said: “Exactly. Exactly.”

“If my grandmother ran across the mound, they would have heard the same thing they heard — period,” Braden said. “That’s the way I handle the game and the way I handle myself on my workday. That’s the way it is. I would never disrespect somebody like that.”

Braden came a small stronger, calling it a breach of baseball etiquette for an opposing player to meander near the mound while the pitcher is still there.

This incident seems more nuanced. It makes sense, I suppose, that a pitcher would be upset about an opposing player’s touching his mound in the midst of an inning. Players zip across the field all the time, but they usually bypass the mound, walking along the grass behind it.

There's so plenty of unwritten rules in baseball that it’s hard to keep track of them all. Don’t barrel over catchers in spring training. Don’t steal bases with a 10-run lead. Don’t peek at a catcher’s signs. Retaliate when a teammate is hit by a pitch. Those are all widely known.

But to be honest, I had never heard of — or thought about, — that actually happening. Braden said it was more common than you would think, but David Waldstein spoke with Keith Hernandez at Citi Field, and Hernandez said they could not recall it being an issue when they played.

“I don’t know if there is an unwritten rule,” Hernandez said. “But I would never do that.”

Here, then, is the query: can a rule be broken if it may not have existed in the first place?