Marlins' Jazz Chisholm appears to rip former teammate, current Dodgers IF Miguel Rojas

There are a lot of weird, unwritten rules in baseball: don't swing at a 3-0 pitch, don't watch your home run for too long, don't bunt during a no-hitter, and so on. They've been around for a very long time and, whether or not you agree with them, will probably persist as long as there are players who feel the need to enforce them.

This doesn't mean that there isn't fierce resistance to the old ways of doing things. There's been a push to modernize the game by embracing showmanship, which young players in particular have been at the forefront of. Major League Baseball itself launched the "Let the Kids Play" campaign a few years ago, urging fans to focus on moments of spectacle and flash — bat flipping, celebrating home runs in general — in the game.

One of the kings of spectacle and flash in baseball is Jazz Chisholm Jr., last year's MLB The Show cover player in part because of the swagger, fun and, frankly, youth he approaches the game with. Given the elaborate nature of Chisholm's home run celebration, it makes sense that he would be a major player in the push to take the game less seriously.

In a new interview with The Pivot, he made his feelings about old-school ways of doing things explicit. Although he never named former teammate and current Dodger Miguel Rojas explicitly, Chisholm referenced an incident between Rojas, other Marlins veterans, and Marlins outfielder Jesús Sánchez. Marlins leaders, including Rojas, allegedly admonished Sánchez after did his own version of Juan Soto's infamous Soto Shuffle in 2021.

Without naming names, Chisholm directed his ire toward a then-Marlins captain, saying he was "not a good captain, not a good person, not even a good athlete at this point." Given what we know, we can deduce that he was talking about Rojas.

Marlins' Jazz Chisholm rips former teammate and current Dodgers infielder Miguel Rojas

Rojas came over to the Dodgers last year, his 10th in the majors, and does seem to be understood as something of a leader, or at least a mentor, in LA's clubhouse. He made news at the beginning of spring training, when he left bottles of wine in Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shohei Ohtani's lockers to welcome them to the team. The Dodgers are also an older team than the Marlins in a lot of ways — in a literal sense (the Marlins didn't exist until 1993), and in the fact that the majority of LA's players are veterans, and very high-paid ones at that. If Rojas thought that he had the authority to critique younger teammates in Miami, he probably doesn't have that same mindset in LA.

Whether or not you agree with the unspoken rules, there should be a little more consensus that Chisholm's ad hominem attack on Rojas was pretty uncalled for. Rojas will be an essential part of the Dodgers' bench this season, especially if the 'Mookie Betts at second base' experiment fails. At least the Marlins are even less than a non-issue for the Dodgers and Rojas has found greener pastures in LA.