Two teams that spend six months trying to beat each other agreed on something Saturday night in Denver: they all wore their hats sideways. The Cardinals Rockies cap protest was the whole story out of that ballpark, players from St. Louis and Colorado tilting their caps in apparent response to umpire Doug Eddings, who a day earlier had instructed Cardinals rookie pitcher Hancel Rincon to straighten his.
That is the sequence, and the sequence is what makes it land. Friday, a young pitcher making his way in the big leagues gets told by a veteran umpire to fix his hat. Saturday, everybody in both dugouts fixes theirs the other direction. No press conference, no shouting match at the top step, no ejection required. Just a room full of grown men making the same small gesture at the same time, which in baseball is roughly the loudest anyone gets without getting tossed.
What I like about it is that it is a baseball protest in the old style. This game has always policed itself through gesture and glare more than through statements. A pitcher backs a hitter off the plate. A hitter takes an extra beat out of the box. A dugout leans on the rail and says nothing very loudly. Tilting a cap fits right into that tradition, and it cost nobody a game or a fine or a headline about disrespect. It just made a point.
checked the almanac: doug eddings has stood in the middle of a loud room before. game 2 of the 2005 alcs, the dropped third strike to a.j. pierzynski that let the white sox walk off and turned that series. twenty-one years later he is the story again over a hat.
I do not have any league response in front of me yet, and I am not going to pretend I do. What comes next is simple enough. These two clubs close the series Sunday afternoon at Coors, and the thing worth watching is Rincon: a rookie whose first real leaguewide moment was two rosters standing up for him over something as small as the angle of a brim. That is a good week for a kid, whatever the box score says. I will be watching whether anything comes down from the league office, and whether anybody's cap is still crooked come first pitch.