Yankees' José Caballero targeted by MLB for crackdown on plate routine of waiting to engage pitcher

“I’ve seen other guys do some other things and they don’t call anything on them,” Caballero said. “They’re just picking on me.”

Caballero was acquired from Tampa Bay last July 31 and Yankees manager Aaron Boone acknowledged his thoughts on the utilityman spun 180 degrees with the swap.

“He’s one of those guys I would yell at from the dugout,” Boone said Wednesday morning. “He was a pest and I didn’t like it. Now I like him because he's a good player and he's on our side. But, yeah, we've had a laugh about that.”

During a June 14 game at Toronto, Caballero twice was deliberate in raising his head until eight seconds remained on the pitch clock, leading to a warning by plate umpire Steven Jaschinsk. That prompted a delay of more than two minutes while Caballero, Jaschinski, Boone and crew chief John Tumpane discussed the situation.

Benches and bullpens cleared at the end of the eighth inning during Monday night's series opener when Pirates reliever Dennis Santana yelled at Caballero for taking too long to get ready in the batter’s box. Then on Wednesday, Wolcott charged Caballero with a violation in the sixth inning while the batter faced Carmen Mlodzinski with the Yankees trailing 2-0. After a delay of 2 1/2 minutes, Cabellero took a called third strike that stranded a runner.

“He’s not allowed to do an inordinate amount of time looking down, trying to get the pitcher to cause a violation,” Wolcott told a pool reporter. “There’s no other hitter that gets in the box, takes the amount of the time that Caballero does while looking down, not making eye contact with the pitcher. Obviously it’s caused a lot of problems in the past. It’s not going to be allowed anymore.”

MLB adopted the pitch clock for the 2023 season in an effort to cut game times. It has been 15 seconds with no runners and 18 seconds with runners since 2024.

In cracking down on Caballero, MLB cited a provision in its Pace of Game Procedures that states: “Conduct by batters designed to deceive a pitcher into beginning their windup or coming to the set position in violation of these regulations shall be considered circumvention."

Crew chief Adrian Johnson said the series opener skirmish caused MLB to take action.

“It’s not allowed anymore. It was the cause of a bench-clearing situation on Monday night. Major League Baseball stepped in, and they wanted enforced,” crew chief Adrian Johnson said. “We were instructed not to warn him. We were instructed to violate him.”

Boone said MLB didn't inform the Yankees before the game of the change in stance.

“It's embarrassing,” he said.

Based on previous conversations with MLB, Boone instructed Caballero to “make sure you’re looking up at nine so that you are alert by eight.”

“He actually said that they were making new rules today and it’s on me because I was deceiving or something like that to the pitcher, which doesn’t make sense,” Caballero said. “I don’t know, maybe my English is so bad that I don’t understand, but deceiving kind of means that you’re trying to trick someone and I’m not trying to trick someone because I do the same thing over and over. You can check my last 50 at-bats and see if I do it the same or not, or check maybe 100 at-bats or 150.”

MLB issued a memo in 2023 warning batters not to keep a foot out of the batter's box, which Willson Contreras called “the Willson rule.”

Caballero claims he is being singled out.

“For everyone, it is eight seconds. For me was nine," he said. "But now they just don’t want me to do my routine so it’s kind of like tricky for me because it’s the way that I get settled, the way that I try to approach my at-bats.”

Caballero is concerned about giving pitchers control of the timing of pitches.

“If I get in the box and they have 16, 17 seconds left, they can hold the ball on me all that time and I’d be tied up," he said.

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