NEW YORK — New York Yankees shortstop José Caballero has become the latest flashpoint in Major League Baseball’s ongoing effort to keep games moving, after the league directed umpires to penalize him for a plate routine that officials say crosses the line into deception.
MLB grew frustrated with Caballero’s habit of deliberately delaying eye contact with the pitcher until just before the pitch clock hit eight seconds. On Wednesday, the league told umpires that the behavior constituted an attempt to deceive pitchers — and that it would no longer be tolerated.
Plate umpire Quinn Wolcott called a pitch-clock violation against Caballero in the sixth inning, resulting in a strikeout and the ejection of hitting coach James Rowson. The Yankees dropped the doubleheader opener to the Pittsburgh Pirates 5-3 in 10 innings.
Caballero pushed back on the ruling. “I’ve seen other guys do some other things and they don’t call anything on them,” he said. “They’re just picking on me.”
The shortstop was acquired from Tampa Bay last July 31, and Yankees manager Aaron Boone admitted his opinion of the player did a complete reversal after the trade.
“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.”
The tension had been building for weeks. During a June 14 game in Toronto, Caballero twice waited until eight seconds remained on the clock before looking up, prompting a warning from plate umpire Steven Jaschinski. That incident caused a delay of more than two minutes while Caballero, Jaschinski, Boone, and crew chief John Tumpane sorted things out.
Then, on Monday night, benches and bullpens emptied at the end of the eighth inning after Pirates reliever Dennis Santana shouted at Caballero for taking too long to get set in the batter’s box. Two days later, Wolcott issued the violation in the sixth inning while Caballero was facing pitcher Carmen Mlodzinski with the Yankees down 2-0. After a delay of about two and a half minutes, Caballero took a called third strike, leaving a runner stranded.
Wolcott explained his reasoning to a pool reporter: “He’s not allowed to do an inordinate amount of time looking down, trying to get the pitcher to cause a violation. There’s no other hitter that gets in the box, takes the amount of 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 introduced the pitch clock for the 2023 season to help shorten game times. Since 2024, the clock has been set at 15 seconds with no runners on base and 18 seconds with runners on base.
In taking action against Caballero, MLB pointed to a section of its Pace of Game Procedures, which 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 Monday’s bench-clearing incident was the trigger for MLB’s intervention. “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 it enforced,” Johnson said. “We were instructed not to warn him. We were instructed to violate him.”
Boone said the Yankees were not notified before the game that MLB had changed its approach. “It’s embarrassing,” he said.
Based on earlier conversations with the league, Boone had told Caballero to “make sure you’re looking up at nine so that you are alert by eight.”
Caballero said the new enforcement didn’t make sense to him. “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.”
This isn’t the first time MLB has issued a memo targeting a specific batter’s habits. In 2023, the league warned hitters against keeping a foot outside the batter’s box — a rule that player Willson Contreras dubbed “the Willson rule.”
Caballero says he feels the standard being applied to him is different from everyone else. “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.”
He also raised concerns about giving pitchers too much control over timing. “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,” Caballero said.
