Umpire Told Rookie to Fix His Hat. MLB Now Says the Umpire 'Went Too Far.'

ST. LOUIS — There are a great many ways to lose a baseball game. You can hit into a triple play. You can give up a walk-off home run. You can have your best pitcher blow the save. But this week, a game was, for a number of minutes, effectively over for a reason that had nothing to do with any of those things. A veteran umpire called a game to a stop, walked over to a rookie pitcher, and told him to straighten his hat.

The hat, for the record, was not very crooked. It was, by the accounts of everyone involved, “very slightly tilted to the side.” It was, in the language of the game, a hat that a great many people in a great many ballparks have worn on a great many afternoons without a single soul calling time. The umpire, a veteran of the job, called time. He told the rookie, according to the manager, that the kid was “not going to wear his hat on my field that way.”

The rookie, Hancel Rincon, was making his major league debut. The manager, Oli Marmol, came out of the dugout and said, in so many words, that it was “a power-hungry move.” He was ejected. The players, on both sides, then did the thing that players do when a rule has been invoked that was not, in fact, a rule: they tilted their hats in protest. The stadium, which had been a stadium, briefly became a hat convention.

This is the story, and it is a good one, because it is a story about a rule that is not a rule, being enforced by a man who is not wrong that it is not a rule, by a league that has now decided the man went too far in enforcing it. Major League Baseball, per reporting on the reprimand, told the veteran umpire that he “acted inappropriately” when he told the rookie to straighten his cap. The umpire, for his part, has admitted that the rookie “wasn’t breaking a rule.” He maintained, nonetheless, that it was appropriate to give what the manager called a “directive.” The two of them, in other words, agree on the facts. They disagree on what the facts mean. The league has now weighed in on what the facts mean. The facts are a hat.

It is worth noting, for the record, that the hat is not a new thing. The players who have worn a hat at a more aggressive angle than the one in question have, collectively, thrown a great many more home runs than the number of seconds the game was stopped for the hat. The rule, as far as anyone can find one, does not exist. The directive, as far as anyone can find one, does. And the directive is, by the league’s own subsequent ruling, a thing that should not have been issued.

There is a version of this story in which the rookie’s hat is the most important object in the game, and there is a version in which the game is the most important object in the game, and the hat is the thing that stopped it. Both versions are true. The league has, in a sense, made the hat the most important object in the game, because it has spent a great deal of institutional energy deciding that the hat was not, in fact, worth stopping the game for. Which is to say, the hat won. The hat, which was “very slightly tilted,” has won.

At press time, the league said it was “reviewing the situation.” The players said the hat was fine. The umpire said the hat was not fine. The rookie, who has been told to straighten his hat and not to straighten his hat, in the span of a single week, said nothing, which is the only correct thing to say, and which is the reason he is a rookie, and which is, in the end, the whole point of the hat.