More angst over those unwritten rules …

I read the other day where there was some discussion – again – about baseball’s famous “Unwritten Rules,” you know, the ones everybody is supposed to know about but apparently there are some stragglers who didn’t get the memo.

Seems Evan Longoria of Tampa Bay took a stab at a drag bunt in the fifth inning of the perfecto that the Oakland A’s Dallas Braden tossed on Mother’s Day, apparently horrifying legions of delicate baseball watchers who sniffed that busting up a perfect game – or in this instance merely trying to – was simply bad form, tut, tut.

Good grief! One of the things I always liked about baseball’s rules – as opposed to, say, some of the nutty golf stuff that I blathered about in an earlier blog – was that they seemed to genuinely try to embrace fairness and common sense while accomodating the spirit of competition.

How anybody can make a fuss over a batter doing whatever he can think of to try to win a ball game is about as silly as it gets. And this coming a couple of weeks after Braden had gotten himself into a tizzy over Alex Rodriguez’s apparent indifference to that other unwritten rule about the proper route for a runner returning to first base after a foul ball.

And then Braden apparently went on Letterman and mentioned perhaps dating Kate Hudson as one of those Top 10 thingys. Isn’t there some kind of an unwritten rule about that?