This morning, the Inquirer’s Matt Gelb wrote what was an otherwise interesting and unique story about the amount of time Odubel Herrera takes between pitches, how it gets under pitchers’ skin (skins?), and why this practice is a hot-button issue for baseball, which is currently obsessed with pace of play. Here’s an excerpt:

“That’s the part of it that I respect,” Phillies first baseman Tommy Joseph said. “When he gets in that box, it’s all about him. He doesn’t worry about anybody else. There’s something to be said for that.”

Herrera, when asked about his tactic, smiled wide as if someone has cracked his not-so-secret code. He leaned back on a leather couch and howled. There is some gamesmanship involved, of course. Pitchers like to operate at their pace, not the hitter’s. Herrera, then, must annoy them.

“Yeah, yeah,” Herrera said, through a team interpreter. “Sometimes I even notice they are on the mound, ready to pitch, and I’m not even in the box yet. So they look at me kind of angry. So they get desperate.”

Herrera laughed.

“I like getting them angry,” he said. “I like getting in their head.”

Gelb then went on the WIP Morning Show, and in a bizarro-world exchange with Angelo Cataldi, Gelb, who is around 30 years old, and Cataldi, who typically takes the most old-school view possible on everything, debated the merits of this sort of gamesmanship, with Gelb arguing the side of purists and players who think it’s what makes baseball great, and Cataldi arguing that it drives away younger fans (I think both are right). It’s a fascinating topic, one worth discussing. But that being said, I have no idea WTF it has to do with WFC Chase F-ing Utley.

It’s en vogue right now to point out, ad nauseum, how only relatively unathletic-looking white guys can be considered “scrappy” or “grinders.” But Gelb is comparing Herrera, a good, young player on a bad team that is at a 15-year low point in popularity, to a perennial all-star who won a World Series, hit five home runs in another, and dominated his position during his time with the Phillies. Nowhere in the article is Utley mentioned, and I don’t even recall him being particularly known for prolonging at-bats. In fact, he was 46th last year in “pace,” (Odubel was 6th), which is the number of seconds a player takes, on average, between pitches. [I looked it up– Utley averages around 25 seconds for his career, Odubel is averaging 31 this season.]

Gelb is reaching, either for clicks by mentioning Utley, or in a Marcus Hayes-ian way to draw a racial distinction between two players. To be clear: No one calls Herrera a “grinder” because he’s played only one full season on an absolute shit team, while Utley, a grinder, gender-indifferent sex symbol, and all-around bad ass, was here for over a decade and produced countless celebrated moments during arguably the best stretch in Phillies history. But sure, let’s compare the two to make a pointless point.