Yankees' Domingo German washes up, gets under Twins' skin with clean innings
New York Yankees starting pitcher Domingo German reacts at the end of the top of the fourth inning against the Minnesota Twins in an MLB baseball game at Yankee Stadium on Saturday, April 15, 2023. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
“You have to wash your hands” is very good advice, as we’ve learned during the last few years.
It is not advice, however, that you expect an umpire to give a pitcher during a baseball game.
But that’s exactly what crew chief James Hoye told Yankees starter Domingo German on Saturday before the top of the fourth inning of the Yankees’ 6-1 victory over the Twins.
Just like that, with all the recent focus on the pitch clock and the sped-up games in 2023, attention shifted back to sticky stuff at Yankee Stadium.
It was a turn-back-the-clock moment to the summer of 2021, when baseball’s crackdown on pitchers using sticky stuff to get a better grip on the ball led to constant checks by umpires — and coincidentally, or suspiciously, led to some pitchers seeing a temporary drop in their spin rates and effectiveness (cough, cough, no one is looking at you, Gerrit Cole).
Did German have any outlawed sticky stuff on his hands or his glove or anywhere else when he pitched one of the best games of his career (perfect for 5 1/3 innings, career-high 11 strikeouts)?
No, the issue was that German had too much rosin on his fingers when umpires checked him thoroughly after the top of the third inning and again before the top of the fourth.
Yankees manager Aaron Boone said the men in blue got suspicious because German had not been spotted touching the rosin bag much while he was on the mound.
Pitchers use rosin — legally — to dry their hands. German explained that he likes to rosin up before he takes the mound by using the bag that is in the dugout. That is legal.
That second check, when German went out for the fourth, is when Hoye was spotted on TV telling him he had to wash his hands. But because there is no sink on the mound, German was allowed to continue without getting ejected, and with only Hoye’s hygienic advice as a consequence.
Hoye had told German to hit the soap and water between the third and fourth innings, and Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said German should have been ejected for coming back out for the fourth with rosin.
Hoye told a pool reporter that German still had rosin on his pinkie when he came out for the fourth. That's why the umpire emphasized the need for thorough hand-washing, apparently.
Maybe the Yankees need to install a sign in the dugout: "Employees, especially pitchers, must wash hands before returning to work."
Baldelli, who said he did not ask the umpires to check German, was himself ejected — sent to an early shower, as it were.
Baldelli wanted to wash his hands of the whole subject after the game, but he calmly answered questions about it for more than eight minutes.
“All I know is the pitcher didn’t comply with what he was asked to do,” Baldelli said. “That upset me and I think upset everyone in our dugout . . . They [the umpires] thought there was an issue. And then they thought there was an issue again. And then he kept pitching."
Perhaps the larger problem for Baldelli was that German was carving up his batters as if he had a mixture of Superglue, spider tack and Bubble Yum on his fingers.
German retired the first 16 Twins before allowing Christian Vazquez’s single to center and struck out 10 of the first 14 batters. He left with one out in the seventh after giving up a double to Trevor Larnach with the Yankees leading 4-0. That run scored when Michael King gave up a double to Jose Miranda. King pitched 2 2/3 innings to finish out German’s first win.
Sticky stuff has become mostly an afterthought since the 2021 crackdown, especially with the pitch clock getting so much attention this season for shaving 20 to 30 minutes off the average game (Saturday's was 2:27 — yay!).
But umpires are still checking. Most of the time it seems perfunctory — just a quick swipe of the fingers as the pitcher passes by after a half-inning.
Yankees utilityman Isiah Kiner-Falefa earned more than a chuckle on Thursday after pitching a shutout inning in a blowout Twins win. As he walked off, Kiner-Falefa held out his palms and asked why umpires didn’t want to paw him to see if he had any illegal help with his effective arsenal, which included (no joke) a 38-mph eephus pitch.
Baldelli might have found that funny on Thursday. Not so much on Saturday.
Anthony Rieber covers baseball, as well as the NFL, NBA and NHL. He has worked at Newsday since Aug. 31, 1998, and has been in his current position since July 5, 2004.
