Full Count: A pox on baseball's ridiculous unwritten rules

Welcome to Full Count, theScore's weekly baseball notebook.

During the eighth inning of a Monday night romp over the Texas Rangers, San Diego Padres phenom Fernando Tatis Jr. socked a 3-0 offering from reliever Juan Nicasio over the fence in right-center field for a grand slam, the first of his young career, to extend his club's lead to 11 runs.

Controversy ensued.

Chris Woodward, the Rangers' manager, took exception to Tatis swinging in a 3-0 count in a blowout. Apparently, Tatis violated one of baseball's unwritten rules by hacking in a 3-0 count with his team already staked to a comfortable lead late in the game.

"I think there's a lot of unwritten rules that are constantly being challenged in today's game," Woodward said following his club's 14-4 loss. "I didn't like it, personally. You're up by seven in the eighth inning; it's typically not a good time to swing 3-0. It's kind of the way we were all raised in the game."

Translation: Woodward expected Tatis to ease up in a regular-season, major-league game because his own pitchers were so ineffective.

While the demonstrable ridiculousness of this so-called rule was laid bare shortly thereafter on Twitter, where everyone from Trevor Bauer to Hall of Famer Johnny Bench defended Tatis for having the audacity to (checks notes) play the game, it's still incredibly disheartening to see that this attitude - this adherence to tired, nonsensical "traditions" at the expense of fun, excitement, and basic logic - persists within baseball itself. Even Tatis' manager couldn't help but gently admonish the 21-year-old superstar for, again, refusing to capitulate in a major-league competition.

“He's young, a free spirit and focused and all these things, and that's the last thing we'll ever take away," Jayce Tingler said. "But that's a learning opportunity, that's it, and he'll grow from it."

Tatis has to grow from this? Maybe the grown-ass men rebuking the kid for refusing to honor baseball's stodgy and arcane code of conduct, which is disproportionately invoked to keep players of color in line, ought to do some growing up. Tatis didn't even know he'd run afoul of Woodward until after the game because, well, the whole thing is so stupid.

"I've been in this game since I was a kid," Tatis said. "I know a lot of unwritten rules. I was kind of lost on this."

Hopefully this episode doesn't have any lasting effect on Tatis, who's one of the game's most electrifying young stars and a veritable godsend for a league struggling to attract younger, non-white fans. He's not the one who needs to change. And from a financial perspective, at least, baseball recognizes this; the pathetic entreaties from Woodward and Tingler to play the game the right way are in direct conflict with the league's social efforts, which naturally center around players like Tatis who go hard all the time and refuse to abide foolish rules that serve to put them in a box.

A cultural reckoning from those in charge of baseball's clubhouses remains overdue. Tatis and his no-holds-barred, pimp-your-home-runs, elan-oozing style of play are the future of baseball. It's time the old men filling out the lineup cards accepted it.

Future arrives in Motown

The Tigers have been horrendous for several years now, having embraced the tear-it-all-down approach to rebuilding that fueled sustained success in Chicago and Houston, and a promising future is starting to come into focus. In the wake of a halfway decent start to their 2020 season, the Tigers added three highly touted prospects to their major-league roster this week, calling up outfielder Isaac Paredes, left-hander Tarik Skubal, and - most exciting of all - right-hander Casey Mize, the first overall pick in the 2018 draft.

Under normal circumstances, none of them would've played a major role for the Tigers in 2020 (though all three were top-100 prospects coming into the season, only Mize had played above Double-A). But current circumstances are far from normal, and the absence of a minor-league season means that Tigers fans get an extended look at three major components of the club's future earlier than expected. Their arrival is unlikely to propel the Tigers to a playoff berth in 2020, even with the expanded postseason, but all three should at least be fun to watch, which will be a welcome development in Detroit after three straight seasons of at least 98 losses.

Dodgers still dealing with Belli ache

It hasn't affected them at all, because they're simply that good, but the Dodgers continue to get bupkis out of reigning National League MVP Cody Bellinger, who's been one of the worst hitters in the majors through the first three weeks of the season. Bellinger, who carries a .175/.245/.320 line into Wednesday's action, ranks 155th among the game's 166 qualified hitters in wRC+ (52), and his offensive woes have rendered him a below-replacement-level player (minus-0.3 WAR) so far.

What's behind this slump, you ask? Well, for one, the steady diet of breaking balls that Bellinger has seen so far appears to have handcuffed him. Bellinger is hitting just .053 with a .211 slugging percentage against breaking balls, which account for a career-high 29.7% of the pitches he's seen. Meanwhile, amid a marked decrease in the number of fastballs he's getting, Bellinger's also been chasing way more than ever before, offering at pitches outside of the strike zone a career-worst 32% of the time. He's out of whack, and he's simply not seeing the ball well or squaring it up consistently: Bellinger's barrel rate (5.1%) has dropped almost eight percentage points from 2019, and his average exit velocity (88.4 miles per hour) is down nearly three ticks. He needs to make an adjustment.

Fallen Angels

Are the Los Angeles Angels cursed or something? Seriously. They have the best player on the planet - maybe the best player of all time - in perpetuity, and they consistently field one of the league's higher payrolls, and yet they're so bad. Always. Like clockwork, despite the continued brilliance of Mike Trout and even with offseason additions Anthony Rendon and Dylan Bundy thriving, the Angels are once again a dumpster fire, mired in fourth place in the American League West at 8-16 and clinging to lower postseason odds (20.8%) than all but eight other teams, per FanGraphs.

Their pitching was thin coming into the season, and Shohei Ohtani's elbow injury only made matters worse in that regard, but they should at least be competitive with this lineup. They have three genuinely elite hitters between Trout, Rendon, and Ohtani, and three more good hitters in Tommy La Stella, Brian Goodwin, and David Fletcher. They should have a top-of-the-line offense, one capable of compensating for a mediocre pitching staff. (Even with Ohtani's injury, the Angels' staff has been middle of the pack in 2020, and far from abjectly terrible.) Yet, the Angels sit 17th in the majors in runs per game (4.71), and their struggles with runners in scoring position have resulted in an offense that's cumulatively less potent than its individual parts.

It seems that there's always something holding the Angels back, no matter who they bring in or how much money they spend, and it's such a shame: Barring a quick turnaround, Trout will have played into October just once through the first decade of his singular career.

Jonah Birenbaum is theScore's senior MLB writer. He steams a good ham. You can find him on Twitter @birenball.