If baseball players could actually fight, the kind of spectacle we witnessed Wednesday night in Arlington might actually have been worth watching. As it was - as so-called basebrawls all are -the bench-clearing battle royale between the
Anaheim Angels and
Texas Rangers was silly. I had more fun watching 90-year-old
Evander Holyfield beat up an insurance salesman.
Baseball players can't fight worth diddly. One guy throws a baseball at another guy then glares at him. (It's easy to be tough when you're hurling heat.) The batter then drops his bat (thankfully) and charges the mound like he really wants to inflict some harm. But you get the feeling both guys are hoping someone stops them before they reach each other because once they do, they look like third-graders tussling in the playground. There's a lot of flaying and slapping and air-punching before the participants wrestle each other to the ground and await the cavalry.
Then it gets even more comical. Their teammates "charge" (term used very loosely) from their respective dugouts and start looking for someone to either punch, slap, wrestle or ask about the best post-game nightspots. And that doesn't include the clowns who come jogging in from the bullpen some five miles away. By the time they reach the action they're out of breath (they are pitchers, after all; think
David Wells) and just happy to say they were in the vicinity.
On Thursday, six players and both managers were suspended for the debacle in Texas, which was ignited when Texas reliever
Scott Feldman plunked Angels hitter
Adam Kennedy in the ninth inning of an eventual 9-3 Rangers win. Feldman said the pitch "got away" and he did not intend to hit Kennedy. Uh-huh. So too did his punch. The best Feldman did was hit Kennedy in the armpit.
Earlier in the game, two Rangers had been hit by Angels pitchers Kevin I-hold-the-record-for-wild-pitchers Gregg and Brendan Donnelly.
Feldman received the longest suspension, six games. Rangers manger
Buck Showalter was hit with four games, while Angeles manager
Mike Scioscia, who had actually told his players not to respond to the earlier plucks, was suspended for three games.
Others were suspended as minimally as one game.
The suspensions weren't nearly enough.
Baseball needs to stop this madness now. At a time when the sport is going through steroid detox (it is, isn't it?), baseball also needs to address the immature and thuggish image it offers when its players go wild. (That's right, I said thuggish, a word often bandied about when NBA players went at it. Funny, it didn't come up in any articles about the Angels-Rangers brawl.)
The two-step in Texas offered an especially unfortunate juxtaposition to the annual Little League World Series, which began this week. Lord help us if any of those kids were allowed to stay up late enough to watch
SportsCenter Wednesday night. Daddy, I thought hockey season was over.
Actually, that last line isn't totally fair. The
National Hockey League
- another sport where the players couldn't beat up a hairdresser (Please, no emails from kick-boxing hairdressers) - made a real effort to expunge fighting from the ice, and last season was one of its most family-friendly in years.
The
National Basketball Association
all but eliminated punch-outs by targeting the players' weakest spot - their wallet. Following a series of fights that were tainting the league's already shaky image, longer suspensions for fighting were mandated and made mandatory for any player who leaves the bench during a fracas. An NBA player making the league-average $5 mill loses $61K per game. That's a lot of candy, even for a kid millionaire. So despite
Ron Artest recent counsel to a group of youths at the Judge Mathis Community Center in Detroit - and whose idea was that? - that they should stick up for themselves ("Someone started trouble and I ended it," he said. Uh-huh.), most NBA players are letting trouble end itself these days.
Not so in MLB, where the "code" still reigns. The code states that if one of "my guys" gets hit, then at least one of "your guys" must get hit, too. Does anything sound more childish?
The first "guy" that got it in the Angels-Rangers mess actually got plunked ten days before. Or almost plunked. Ranger pitcher
Adam Eaton gave up a three-run homer to Angels hitter Garret Anderson then threw his next pitch behind the batter,
Juan Rivera. Eaton was immediately tossed by home plate umpire Rob Drake.
That's when
Bob Watson , baseball's playground monitor (a.k.a VP for on-field operations), should have stepped in. Eaton was ejected for intentionally throwing at Rivera, which should have been worth some sort of suspension. Instead, Eaton went unpunished, which set the stage for the rematch 10 days later.
Scioscia, the Angels manager, says MLB dropped the ball by not suspending Easton. I agree. "You can't have it both ways," he said. "And can't ask a team not to retaliate, which is our philosophy, but yet not back us up when it's obvious that players are throwing at us."
I'm as old-school as the next guy when it comes to most things. My kids know how easy they have it because I tell them every day. But when my son got plunked twice by a wild Little League pitcher this season and glared at the hurler, I yelled for him to get his butt to first base before I came out there and kicked it myself.
(Okay, I didn't exactly say that but when I yelled, "Hey!," he knew what I meant and jogged straight-away to first.)
Donnelly, who was hit with a four-game suspension, was sanguine about the whole thing. Too sanguine for my taste. "Baseball is baseball," he said. "Things have a way of working themselves out."
Yeah, just like on a third-grade playground.
