Accountability 101

BY KEVIN KERNAN

Here is a simple question for MLB 2025.

Where is the accountability?

One of the great staples of the game for generations was that if you messed up a play mentally, there was a price to pay. You might even get benched.

That is no longer the case, and that is one of the reasons why baseball has lost its grip on the soul of America, and why football, both college and NFL, rule the roost.

If you mess up in football, there are consequences.

In baseball, both the majors and the minors, managers and coaches look the other way and make excuses for you. It has gotten so bad that even on physical mistakes, balls put in play that are clearly errors are now pretty much all scored hits. If the official scorer does call an error, often later in the game some team official gets the call changed from E to H.

No one has the courage to say, “You messed up.’’

Every week there are new examples of bonehead plays-  and this week there were plenty. One of the biggest areas where the game has deteriorated and no one seems to care is baserunning.

Major League Baseball is now the Land of a Thousand Excuses, the Land of No Repercussions. It is Kumbaya Time all the time.

Let the kids have fun and if they mess up a basic baseball play, forget about it, there is another game tomorrow. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t dare embarrass anyone and call them out in public for their mistake. Be Kind.

“There is always a coaching moment, and it doesn’t have to be a yell… I can put my arm around you and say, ‘Hey, that can’t happen.’ But they just don’t do it.’’.

And no matter how badly they mess up, they will be in the lineup again tomorrow.

Benching is so old school.

“When the players make mistakes on the little things, nobody says a word,’’ a top talent evaluator who was a coach for many years disgustedly told BallNine.

“There is always a coaching moment, and it doesn’t have to be a yell,’’ this former coach explained. “I can put my arm around you and say, ‘Hey, that can’t happen.’ But they just don’t do it.’’

Why don’t they do it?

Because they are afraid of upsetting the wrong people, the upper management Nerds, pouty players and they are afraid of losing their jobs.

They are spineless.

“They want to be everybody’s friend,’’ the evaluator said. “It’s like the parent who looks the other way on their kids’ bad behavior all the time. You keep lowering the bar and lowering the bar. Forever in this game there were certain things that just were not acceptable.

“And now if nobody says anything then it is not the players’ fault that they don’t know how. You can’t blame the players because nobody is making little things important. If the only thing that is important over the last month is that his exit velocity has increased, he’s hitting more balls in the air, that’s all that matters,’’ he said of the mindset of the robots who have no people skills in the front office.

“The strikeouts don’t matter,’’ he added. “The screwups in the field don’t matter. The screwups on the bases don’t matter and the screwups in every other area of the game – where they don’t hit a cutoff man, where they throw to the wrong base, where they lose the count or the outs, nothing else matters.’’

Only our man did not say screwups, his word started with an “F’.’

“It’s like with pitching,’’ he added. “They’ll say, ‘he’s having a good year.’

“A good year? He’s got a 4.90 ERA? ‘Well. his swing and miss rate has improved.’

“When all you chase is swing and miss, command doesn’t matter, pitching to contact doesn’t matter, getting deep into a game doesn’t matter. Just being a good pitcher doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is his swing and miss rate.’’

The Nerds have no idea how important these little things are to the game, and the evaluator agreed, putting it bluntly: “They have no idea because when they were playing Strat-O-Matic, nobody ever talked about the little things. But when I was on a field and you were on a field, we knew what was important because we were taught how to play the game.’’

Exactly!

The people in charge don’t demand accountability. They don’t know accountability. Accountability is yelling at clouds. Let me yell.

I was watching Saturday night when Yankees outfielder Jasson Dominguez, 22, made one of the worst base-running mistakes I have ever seen. To call it a base-running mistake is not correct. It really was a baseball-thinking mistake – as in Not Thinking.

With two outs and the Yankees trying to claw back against the Red Sox in a game they trailed 4-0 in the seventh inning, it was now 4-2 because the Boston Nerds took out dealing starter Hunter Dobbins after six shutout innings and only 82 pitches.

Dominguez was on second base. Since he has been with Tampa in the minors, scouts have told me Dominguez has an amazing ability, really a talent, to lose concentration in the middle of a game on defense and on the base paths.

And this one was a dandy.

There he was on second with lefty Justin Wilson facing Trent Grisham. The count was 2-1 and I can’t tell you how many times I have been in Fenway Park late in a game between the Red Sox and Yankees through the decades where the energy was electric. This was another one of those electric moments.

Dominguez took his lead off second, Grisham swung through the pitch and Dominguez just stood there well off the bag. I immediately realized he lost the count, he thought there was already two strikes on Grisham and that was strike three. It took a second for Boston catcher Carlos Narvaez, a former Yankee, to realize his good fortune but as soon as he did, he fired to second to Trevor Story. It then dawned on a sleep-walking Dominguez that the ball was still in play, that was only strike two. He made a dash to third and was easily tagged out by Marcelo Mayer, who promptly celebrated.

The Martian was Lost in Space.

The Red Sox would hang on for a 4-3 victory, the middle victory of a three-game sweep. On Sunday the Yankees could not even muster a run as Dominguez went 0-for-3 dropping his batting average to .237 and in that game, Ben Rice was picked off second base. All the while, Aaron Boone just chewed his gum.

It is not just the Yankees either, it is everywhere. One of the few managers trying to get his players to play the right way is the Angels Ron Washington, who holds his players accountable.

On Tuesday night in Atlanta, the Mets put on a Bad Base-running Clinic with Juan Soto getting doubled off first base on a fly ball hit to the right-field wall that was caught by a leaping Ronald Acuna, Jr. The play was right in front of Soto, yet Soto was complaining about the first base umpire not making the out call quickly enough, but the ump wanted to make sure to see the ball. In the third inning, Soto was picked off first base and then right after that Pete Alonso was easily thrown out at second base trying to stretch a single into a double. That is three outs on the base paths the Mets gave away and eventually lost in 10 innings. Little things mean a lot in baseball.

Players never practice base-running anymore and it shows.

What’s worse is that most managers don’t practice accountability anymore because they have taken their cues from upper management.

This generation of baseball Nerds simply don’t understand the nuances of the game. Teaching the intricate parts of the game has gone out the window for full-blown metrics. That includes the top teams and the worst teams … like the Pirates.

If you really want to get irritated, watch the Pirates’ Oneil Cruz play.

How is BlooperBall happening, game after game after game? As for Dominguez, this evaluator did not hold back.

“He’s lackadaisical, he doesn’t pay attention to little things,’’ said the evaluator.

Why was Dominguez back in the lineup on Sunday? Why did Aaron Boone and the Yankees Lineup Makers put him in the starting lineup after such a brainless play?

This was not a physical error, this was a mental error of huge proportions, and the Yankees then went into a major offensive funk.

There are all kinds of ways to know the count if you are unsure. Dominguez could have checked with the third base coach or first base coach. He could have turned around and asked the umpire. He could have looked around Fenway Park at any of the count counters on the scoreboard. He did none of the above.

Afterwards, as soon as I heard Boone’s postgame comments, I knew there would be no repercussions.

“He thought it was the third strike,’’ Boone said. “So, you know, obviously he feels terrible about that. I talked to him … probably something that won’t ever happen to him again.’’

That it happened in a Major League game is beyond belief, getting picked off second because you thought it was strike three and the inning was over.

This was Dominguez’ 82nd MLB game. He played 353 games in the minors. He wasn’t sitting on the bench and mindlessly lost the count, he was in scoring position in a tight Rivalry Game.

What I find really funny is that Dominguez said he thought it was strike three, yet, with two outs, and in Dominguez’ mind two strikes on the batter, the moment Grisham began to swing Dominguez did not take off running.

No one questioned that his excuse made no sense. If you thought it was two outs, two strikes, as Grisham swung, why were you just standing there frozen?

Would have been a good question to ask Aaron Boone, too.

Everyone just goes about their business after countless mistakes, blindly reciting the next metric. The game suffers and no one in charge cares.

I ask again: Where is the accountability?