Posted By Jeff Fletcher on April 25, 2010 2:49 pm

All of this talk about baseball’s unwritten rules and Braden-ARod got me thinking about the unwritten rules of being a baseball writer. Believe it or not, they do exist. Unlike baseball’s unwritten rules, which are mostly about respecting your opponents, the reporter rules are mostly about courtesy.

While I’ll invite any of my colleagues to chime in with their own rules, here are the ones I could come up with off the top of my head:

• Respect a one-on-one interview. This is maybe the biggest one, and the one that will get you the most crap from your colleagues if you violate. The rule is that before a game, if someone is interviewing a player one-on-one, you don’t join in. If there are two people talking to the guy, that becomes a group and it’s fair game. This rule doesn’t usually apply after a game.
• Don’t try to interview a player before he’s changed into his baseball gear. A guy walks into the clubhouse in his street clothes, tosses his car keys into his locker and a reporter jumps him. That’s annoying to the player because it means he’s either going to be delayed getting ready to else he’s going to have to change while talking to you, which brings me to…
• Don’t talk to a player without his pants on. There is rarely an interview that is so time sensitive that you can’t wait a second for the guy to put on some clothes. Just common decency really.
• Don’t call the manager “coach.” He’s not the coach. He’s a manager. In fact, don’t call him “Skip” or “Skipper” either. Call him by his name. He won’t bite you.
• Never interrupt the flow of daily questions with feature questions. If there are five reporters talking to a guy about that day’s game, or something else newsworthy like an injury, wait until all those questions have been asked before interjecting with: “Jim, who was your favorite player when you were a kid?” It is for this reason that generally you should avoid doing any sort of feature questions after a game. The players are programmed to talk about the game and then get the hell out of there as quickly as possible after a game. No one wants to sit and talk for 20 minutes about the lack of African-Americans in the game following a 6-5 10-inning loss.
• If a guy has a prickly personality and needs to be asked some tough questions, start him out with some softballs. Here in San Francisco, where we had to ask Barry Bonds about a lot of steroid stuff, this became an art. Barry was likely to cut off the interview and walk away if he didn’t like the questions, so it was important to get in a few easy ones before asking the necessary tough questions.
• Don’t interview the starting pitcher for that day’s game. Some guys are OK with informal chit-chat, but not interviews, and other guys don’t care at all. Typically the starter is ignored entirely by the media before a game. Once I saw a writer do a whole lengthy interview with the starter, because he forgot who was pitching. The starter was a young player and he was too polite to refuse.
• Don’t mention in the press box how quickly the game is moving. That’s our version of players not mentioning a no-hitter in the dugout. It’s an almost certain jinx due to lead to a 15-inning game.
• When in a group interview session with electronic media, let the TV and radio people ask their questions first and then wait for them to leave before asking the really good questions. The idea for this is that the writers normally have more in-depth and insightful questions to ask, and we don’t want Joe TV Intern who was eating hot dogs the whole game to get the benefit of our brilliant question-asking and put the answer on the air before we can have it in the paper. It’s not that big of a deal to me, because our questions are not usually as insightful as we think they are. Besides, nowadays we can put the answers online faster than they can get them on TV anyway.
• Don’t call players by their nicknames. The point of this one is that we should keep it professional and not appear to be getting buddy-buddy with the players. However, there are some guys with whom this just doesn’t work because no one calls them by their first name, like Giants hitting coach Hensley (Bam Bam) Meulens.
• No cheering in the press box. This is actually a written rule in most places. Legitimate media members have no trouble abiding by this, but sometimes interlopers wind up in the press box who just don’t get this.

That’s all I can come up with for now.