What the well-dressed player is not wearing

(Because you can put your baseball bracelets on a bookshelf.)

R.A. Dickey, the best player on the NY Mets right now and one of the best pitchers in the Majors, might be forgiven for losing a bit of concentration in yesterday’s 6-1 loss to the Cincinnati Reds.

In an age where ballplayers wear their uniform any way they damn well chose (as well as accessorizing with those clunky rope necklaces that are all the rage, as well as other accoutrements), the umpires made Dickey cut off a bracelet which one of his daughter’s made for him for his trip to Mt. Kilimanjaro last January.

When I first heard this, I thought it was gamesmanship by Reds’ manager Dusty Baker, but in fact, according to the story in The New York Times,

Dickey was asked by the umpires at the start of the second inning to remove the bracelets. After some animated discussion, Dickey snipped them off with scissors.

Dickey did not blame the loss on the episode, but he said he was “a little bit angry.” He became even more annoyed when the home-plate umpire James Hoye went back to the mound in the third, further delaying the game. Dickey said Hoye wanted to inform him that the request was not made by the Cincinnati Reds as a means of gamesmanship. Collins said Jim Joyce, the crew chief, told him the league had directed umpires to regulate uniform violations.

Dickey said it was strange to see this occur this late in the season. “If you look around the league, there are all kinds of things that go unsupervised, whether it’s a glove string that’s too long or a Band-Aid on somebody’s arm,” Dickey said. “It’s almost like a holding penalty. You can call one on every play.”

According to a piece in the NY Daily News:

“The rule is, as they explained it, you’re not supposed to have anything on your wrist,” [Mets manager] Terry Collins said. “They must be newly enforcing it. Twenty-three starts, he hasn’t had to take it off yet. Tonight it’s an issue.”

“In the moment I was a little bit angry, because those were a couple of bracelets my girls had made for me before I went to Kilimanjaro,” Dickey said. “I’d had them on every day since January.”

Dickey was annoyed again in the third, when Joyce delayed the game to clarify that the Reds were not involved.

“The one thing I did not really understand was when they came out to the mound and delayed that game,” Dickey said.

“I didn’t understand the need for that. That seemed a little bit much.”

Dickey ended up putting the remnants of the bracelets in his hat.

Uniform violations? As Dickey and Collins pointed out, all of a sudden it’s an issue? Don’t tell me it’s distracting to the batters. (I wear four “bracelets”: a Livestrong, another one in honor of a colleague who had cancer, and two friendship bracelets from my daughter from years ago; all of them are meaningful to me.)

If MLB wants to crack down, how about the players whose uniforms resemble something closer to pajamas (Dickey wear his pants legs high, old-school)? Or better yet, those players who can’t wait to get into the clubhouse to start taking off their unis? In last night’s Yankees-Rangers game, as soon as the last out was made, closer Rafael Soriano yanked his jersey out of his pants while celebrating on the field with his teammates; Jose Reyes used to do the same thing. Could it be that the split second the game is over, the rules don’t apply? Where’s the pride and respect?