Monday night at Chase Field, Merrill Kelly stepped off the mound in the fifth inning and locked eyes on Cubs third-base coach Quintin Berry. The accusation: Berry was reading the angle of Kelly’s glove to tip off Chicago’s left-handed hitters whenever a changeup was coming. Both dugouts erupted, manager Torey Lovullo came charging out, and the Cubs went on to win 7-0. The next day, MLB told Lovullo that Berry had done nothing wrong — and Lovullo had to pick up the phone and apologize to the opposing manager.
What Happened in the Fifth Inning
The Cubs led 2-0, two outs, Michael Busch at the plate in an 0-2 count with Seiya Suzuki standing on second. That’s when Kelly and his coaches noticed that Berry — from inside the third-base coach’s box — appeared to be reading the glove angle to identify the changeup and relaying that information to Chicago’s left-handed hitters.
Kelly didn’t wait. He came off the mound and stared Berry down. Arizona bench coach Jeff Banister and pitching coach Brian Kaplan got into it verbally with Berry and Cubs bench coach Ryan Flaherty. Lovullo came out too. The game stopped, the temperature rose, and words flew from dugout to dugout.
What Kelly said afterward was blunt: according to Jomboy Media, the pitcher called it «bullshit when it comes from a coach» — someone standing outside the white lines. His argument wasn’t that it was illegal. It was that it crossed an ethical line. On the other side, Craig Counsell shrugged and called it plain old gamesmanship — the kind that’s existed as long as baseball has.
MLB Weighed In: Berry Broke No Rule
The following day, Lovullo spoke with Michael Hill, MLB’s Senior Vice President of On-Field Operations. The answer was unambiguous: Berry operated within the rules at all times. The 2026 rule requiring first- and third-base coaches to remain in their boxes until the pitcher releases the ball was designed specifically to regulate this kind of practice — not to ban it.
- Berry never left the coach’s box.
- He used no electronic device or technology.
- He simply watched, processed, and communicated with his body — something any coach is allowed to do.
That’s not cheating. That’s baseball. The contrast with the 2017 Astros scandal is categorical: Houston used cameras and monitors to steal signs electronically. This was pure visual observation, no technology involved, and the league validated it as such.
Armed with that information, Lovullo did something rare: he called Counsell directly, told him Arizona had been wrong to protest, and apologized. «We admitted we were wrong,» Lovullo said, per Yahoo Sports. End of debate.
The Real Problem Wasn’t Berry — It Was Kelly’s Tipped Changeup
Here’s the detail that makes Arizona’s argument even harder to defend: Kelly is carrying a 5.35 ERA in 2026, posting an 8-12 record over 24 starts, and hasn’t logged a quality start since July 9. If his pitches are readable enough that a coach can identify them from the third-base box, the conversation should be about how Kelly holds his glove — not about what the opposing coach is doing.
That’s not a knock on Kelly’s career. Over seven seasons in Arizona, he built something real: 65-53, a 3.77 ERA across 172 starts, and 16.6 WAR — nearly 17 wins above what a typical replacement-level pitcher would have delivered in that same time. The track record is legitimate. But this season, the pitcher who knows his own vulnerabilities best is Kelly himself.
The competitive context adds fuel to the fire. The Cubs lead the NL’s first Wild Card spot by three games; the Diamondbacks sit two games outside the playoff picture. In a series with those stakes, every play feels like a playoff battle and emotions run hot. The fact that this blew up during a 7-0 shutout loss says a lot about the frustration in Arizona’s dugout — and very little about whether Quintin Berry did anything wrong.
