Russell Martin claimed<\/a> after his team\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s game against the Los Angeles Angels on Wednesday that Diaz refused to let him throw new baseballs out to his pitcher as punishment for daring to argue balls and strikes with the home plate umpire.<\/p>\nDiaz and Major League Baseball hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t publicly addressed the issue at time of writing, so currently we only have Martin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s version of events, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s clear that Martin wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t throwing baseballs back to his pitcher after fouls as catchers normally do.<\/p>\n
It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s well established in baseball that arguing balls and strikes will land you in trouble and the umpire has every right to receive the full respect of players even if they disagree with his decisions. However, I suspect Major League Baseball will take a dim view to Diaz taking matters into his own hands and acting in such a petulant manner.<\/p>\n
Martin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s decision to disclose the tale to reporters and to bluntly state \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Laz Diaz is a dick. Write it hard\u00e2\u20ac\u009d isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t likely to go down well with the authorities either. The Yankees\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 catcher climbed upon the moral high-ground and then loudly tumbled his way back down again with that interjection.<\/p>\n
We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seen cases in the past in football where referees allegedly have been kept from officiating in games against managers (primarily Sir Fergie of Manchester) they have had high profile run-ins with, something the Referees’ Association is normally keen to deny.<\/p>\n
It will be interesting to see if Diaz happens to be steered clear of Yankees games in the near future and even more interesting if he isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t.<\/p>\n
If Diaz did publicly exact retribution for Martin arguing balls and strikes, who knows what payback he might have in store for someone who called him a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153dick\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to a bunch of beatwriters.<\/p>\n
My advice to Martin for the next time he bats with Diaz behind the plate \u00e2\u20ac\u201c no doubt with the opposing catcher politely reminding the umpire of what the man digging in had called him – would be to swing at anything within a foot of the strikezone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Catchers beware: upset Major League umpire Laz Diaz at your peril<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[553,98],"class_list":["post-13665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mlb-2","tag-mlb-2","tag-new-york-yankees"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13665"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13665\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13670,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13665\/revisions\/13670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}