Jake Arrieta and whether it's okay to publicly chastise your teammate

Baseball is funny.  A sport that is seemingly rooted in structure, order, and rules.  The shorthand for all of this is etiquette and there is a lot of baseball etiquette.  There is a certain way that baseball players are supposed to handle themselves and as a youth coach, I've fallen into this myself.  I require my players to respect their uniforms, work as a team, and slowly, I teach them the many unwritten customs of the game.  Lately, the boundaries of baseball etiquette have been pushed, particularly as the league has been set on fire with the controversy of the bat flip. 

But more recently, and something we see more often, is the post-game interview gone rogue.  There are more than a few infamous examples of this (see, e.g., Allen Iverson bemoan the idea of practice.  But what Jake Arrieta did recently warrants asking: how far is too far?

The problem with that is pretty simple: it does not bode well for the team as a whole.  Do the players feel like they can communicate with one another and work on these issues?  Or do they feel like the only way to get their voice heard is to do it indirectly through a different medium?

We are barely a few weeks into the system and already we're seeing that the Philadelphia Phillies may not be as cohesive of a unit as they first appeared.  Everything looked great for the first few games, but as baseball does, the slumps and droughts kick in and the resolve of this newly-crafted has been tested.

Jake Arrieta aired the dirty laundry.  Jake Arrieta made a decision to publicly announce his disapproval with Bryce Harper (also known as the highest paid player this side of the Mississippi river).  Jake Arrieta probably wasn't wrong for doing so.

Bryce Harper has a history of getting thrown out of games.  In fact, he has been ejected 12 times.  In Arrieta's mind, that's 12 times that Harper has disappointed his team by not being on the field.  And you know what?  He's exactly right.  The Phillies won't win many games without their best player.  

The words were pretty simple and to-the-point:  "We need him in right field. I don't care how bad the umpire is. He wasn't great for either side. I'm out there, trying to make pitches, he misses some calls, so what? We need [Bryce] out there."

How far is too far when you want to prove a point to your team and your teammates?  The answer to that question depends, to some degree, on whether the team has discussed the issue at hand.  But the overarching question is this: what kind of family are you?  Are you the family that keeps everything in house, even if the fights are knockdown, drag-out style fights?  Or, are you the type of family to passively complain to the neighbors about what your wife is doing?  Here, in this particular instance, Bryce Harper's teammates were not particularly happy with Bryce and they effectively outed him in public.  Personally, I'd hope that we can keep this issues in-house.