Umpire Doug Eddings had enough to handle Friday night at Coors Field without making a rookie’s cap part of the plot. But once St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Hancel Rincon’s tilted hat caught attention, the whole thing spiraled fast.
Rincon came into the sixth inning with the Cardinals up 4-1 against the Rockies. Colorado catcher Hunter Goodman asked Eddings whether Rincon was allowed to wear his cap at an angle.
That should have been the end of it. Instead, Eddings told Cardinals catcher Pedro Pagés to pass along a message: straighten the cap.
Rincon did as he was told, though he later said he had no idea why the request was made.
From there, the night turned into a mess. After Rincon ran into trouble and was removed, Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol came out during the pitching change to confront Eddings. Marmol was ejected, and afterward he called the umpire’s move a “power-hungry move.”
Eddings later admitted Rincon had not broken any official rule. He pointed to an “unwritten rule” and said the cap could have been a distraction.
That explanation only made the whole thing look more unnecessary. If an umpire is policing the angle of a pitcher’s brim, the game has gone off the rails.
Marmol’s account of Eddings saying the rookie would not wear his hat that way on “my field” made the whole episode even harder to defend. Umpires are there to run the game, not to turn a harmless detail into a showdown.
For Mariners fans, the whole scene lands with a familiar kind of absurdity. Seattle watched two pitchers make tilted caps part of their identity in very different ways.
Félix Hernández’s slightly crooked cap was part of the look. So were the long sleeves, the intensity and the stare that let hitters know trouble was coming.
Hernández won a Cy Young Award, threw the first perfect game in Mariners history and spent 15 seasons carrying the weight of the organization. Nobody needed to measure the angle of his brim to know he belonged.
Fernando Rodney took the idea even further. His cap sat noticeably off-center every time he took the mound for the Mariners. Rodney said the angle helped hide his eyes from hitters and baserunners, and he also tied it to his late father, Ulise, a fisherman who wore his own hat tilted to block the sun.
That’s the point Eddings missed. A cap angle can be part of a player’s identity, strategy or both. It is not an issue for an umpire to manufacture out of thin air.
The Cardinals still had the last word on the scoreboard. After giving up the lead, they came back in the ninth behind Iván Herrera’s go-ahead home run and pulled out a 7-6 win.
Eddings tried to make the night about his authority. The Cardinals turned it back into baseball.
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