Baseball has been doing a bang-up job lately validating my baseball ethics posts. My conviction is that the game is and has always been a cultural ethics microcosm, revealing and clarifying ethical dilemmas and conflicts with applications far removed from the game itself. Yesterday there was another example.

Behold…

During the sixth inning of the St. Louis Cardinals’ 7-6 victory over the Colorado Rockies last night, Cardinals rookie reliever Hancel Rincon, making his first appearance in a big league came, wore his cap rakishly askew. Rincon was pitching to Rockies batter Cole Carrigg when home-plate umpire Doug Eddings decided to react to the query of the previous Rockies batter, who had asked Eddings, “Hey, can he wear his hat like that?”

Batters since the dawn of baseball time have tried to find ways to wage psychological warfare against pitchers; EA had an earlier example this season, here. This one worked: the comment inspired Eddings to join the fashion police. Eddings halted the game, motioned to Cardinals catcher Leo Bernal, and told Rincon to fix his cap, punctuating the request with “Grow the fuck up!” Rincon complied. Three pitchers later, Carrigg hit an inside-the-park home run and Rincon exited the game shortly thereafter.

Later in the inning, Cardinals manager Oli Marmol was ejected from the game by Eddings. Marmol explained: “We have a kid making his debut, and in between an at-bat, he tells him that he needs to fix his hat and, ‘The kid’s not going to wear his hat like that on my field.’ Last I checked, this is Coors Field, so I took issue with it.” Not only did Eddings eject Marmol, but he also called a pitch-clock violation that gave Rockies designated hitter Troy Johnston a 1-0 count to start his at-bat against the new Cardinal pitcher. That was not a valid use of the rule, but umpires think they are God sometimes. It’s tradition!

“And then the pitch violation while I’m out there having a discussion, that’s also stupid, in my opinion,” Marmol said later. “So there’s a lot of moving parts to that one. At the end of the day, I thought they handled it poorly, and I’d like an explanation at some point.”