Max Scherzer and Joe Girardi Almost Fight Because of Foreign Substances

Hey, what's up fellas? How you doing? Manettinelli here. Okay. Rule number one, don't make Max Scherzer angry. You wouldn't like him when he's angry, but that's exactly what Phillies manager Joe Girardi did in last night's Nationals Phillies game. It's the fourth inning when Girardi asked the umpires to check Max Scherzer's hair for a foreign substance. Now Scherzer had already been checked after the first inning and the third inning, which he already wasn't very happy about. So you can imagine what his reaction was when he was asked for a third time to be checked. Now, as pretty much everyone knows a few days ago that major league baseball started to enforce rules 3.01 and 6.02 C and D. There's a lot of rules in baseball. Now how this is supposed to work is that all starting pitchers are supposed to be checked twice a game after innings. Now Girardi requested a third check because Scherzer was kind of unnaturally running his hand through his hair multiple times during that inning. So this is what Girardi said. He said, I've seen Max a long time since 2010. Obviously he's going to the hall of fame, but I've never seen him wipe his head like he was doing tonight ever. So it was suspicious for me. He did it about four times. It was suspicious. I didn't mean to offend anyone. I just have to do what's right for our club. So again, as you can imagine, Scherzer wasn't very happy about this third request. He throws his hat and glove. He unbuckles his belt. He wants to take his pants off. You can see him saying, I've got nothing. I got nothing. I got nothing. They ended up touching his head to inspect his hair. And Max says, I got sweat. Now pitchers are already upset that they're going to have to get checked twice a game in between innings, but you're really going to start to piss people off if you're going to come out anytime a pitcher's doing well to inspect them for a third time. Here's what Max said after the game. He said, I wasn't heated. I think he was a little bit heated, but he gets pretty pissed. So maybe on a scale of one to 10, this maybe it was like a two or three for him. But for me, it'd be like probably a seven, eight or nine. He said, I was just trying to show I have absolutely zero on me. I have nothing on me. Check whatever you want. I'll take off all my clothes if you want to see me. No, thank you. I have nothing on me. I'd have to be an absolute fool to use anything tonight when everybody's antenna are so high. Now, this wasn't all the excitement. As Scherzer left the mound, he stared down Girardi. Then Max and his coaches started showing Girardi his hands. Kevin Long, Nationals hitting coach starts yelling over at Girardi. Girardi didn't like that. So he jumped out of the dugout, inviting Kevin Long to come meet him in the parking lot. Jim Hickey pretended someone needed to hold them back. And Girardi may be old, but I ain't fighting that guy. He kicked my ass. He ends up getting tossed for coming out onto the field and challenging everyone to a fight. So why was Scherzer going to his hair so much more than normal? Well, this is what he said. He said, I was just using rosin tonight. Typically I like to lick my hands. That kind of gives me some tack. But like I said, I was using a lot of rosin tonight. So I was eating rosin. I was like, all right, I don't want to eat rosin. It tastes gross. That's when I was like, okay, the only sweaty part on me is my hair. So that's where I was just trying to get that moisture to mix with the rosin. But even that wasn't working. I had zero feel of the baseball tonight whatsoever. For me, that's the confusing part. I'm just trying to get a grip on the ball. And even watching the previous at bat, the ball slipped out of my hand and I almost drilled somebody in the face. So there's a couple of things that come to mind with this. Number one, this is not helping pace of play, right? We're trying to speed up the game. This is doing the opposite. Number two, do managers start asking all the time for pitchers to be checked after they've already been checked twice to throw them out of rhythm? This guy's got a no hitter. Check them. This guy just struck out four guys in a row. Check them. Now there needs to be some probable cause in order to ask the umpire to go check a pitcher for a third time. But as you can see here, pitchers are now going to need to use different things than they've used all season to try to get a little bit of moisture. So I'm sure other pitchers are going to look suspicious also now in a memo right here from MLB to teams last week. It said a manager will be subject to discipline if he makes the request in bad faith. Example, a request intended to disrupt the pitcher in a critical game situation, a routine request that is not based on observable evidence, et cetera. But here's my thing. What is bad faith? That seems pretty vague to me. Maybe we toss the manager. That's what we should do. We should toss the manager. If you request for a third time to go out and check and there's nothing on the pitcher, boom, you're out of here. That should stop the manager from constantly requesting that a pitcher gets checked. And number three, this is going to get bad. Hell, it's already bad. Okay. This is like a circus out there. So do we have to make new adjustments to the new rule? I don't freaking know. What a mess this is. Let me know what you think in the comment section below. Subscribe to the channel, hit the notification bell, give it a thumbs up, all that good stuff. We'll talk to you later. If you've enjoyed this video and want to learn more about building the elite swing, check out our new course. We have over two hours of content, almost 30 hitting drills. We break down the exact mechanics that you're going to want to implement into your swing. I've put the link in the description. If you want to go check it out.