If by “bat” you mean flail helplessly with a piece of wood, ok, except they never drill the opposing teams pitcher. Another one of those odd, unwritten rules.
Well, I’m a Dodgers fan (where Zack Greinke has a .592 OPS.)
Career, yes. This year it’s a scintillating .379. Dodger pitchers are tearing the cover off the ball for a combined batting average of .101. Take me out to the ballgame.
Still, I wouldn’t care if both leagues adopted the DH or the AL went back to pitchers taking at bats. Baseball would be fine either way. Or the way it is now.
Back to the bat flip, I wasn’t familiar with the player in question. I watched the video. Sometimes he was just letting go of the bat. But I also saw the whole batter’s box get cleared a couple of times. Deliberately losing control of a two lb wooden projectile at those speeds is stupid and irresponsible. I’m not in favor of any official rule change, but I’m definitely in favor of clubhouse kangaroo courts fining the shit out of anyone who can’t find a better way to say “hit the cap outta that sucker, Charlie!”
Forget the pitcher. There’s the umpire, catcher, camera people, batboys, and spectators who have a chance of getting hurt by a flung bat. Grow up and man up and have some self-control.
Then they should stop doing things that allow hitters to “show them up.”
I’m pretty sure batters don’t like it when pitchers strike them out and then fist pump, tramp back to the dugout, and skip the baseline like it’s some divine ordinance. Trust me, chum, pitchers “show up” batters much more than the reverse. If pitchers don’t like it, then do something about it.
I don’t care if a guy flips his bat. I don’t care if that gets plunked next time up, either.
You mean…pitching. Because every pitcher is going to do something at some point that would allow some hitter to “show them up”. Conversely, every hitter is going to do something at some point to allow some pitcher to do the same, usually far more often.
I’m a firm believer of “act like you’ve done that before”, but my minority is growing smaller all the time.
I don’t have a problem with pitchers pitching inside, and if it is against a batter who crowds the plate, the batter is assuming the risk of getting HBP. As for purposefully hitting a batter, a bat flip (IMHO) is not an egregious enough ‘crime’. Cartwheeling around the bases after a home run, however… But don’t throw at the head. Ever.
I can agree with that.
Thats where second level thinking comes in. I don’t know about you, but Ive felt the wind of a 75 mph fastball made of something equivalent to a rock breezing by face. Its fucking scary.
The battle between the pitcher and batter is all about mind games. 60-70% of the time the pitcher wins, so the mind games statistically are in their favor. When a batter gets over and hits a homer and then flips their bat, watches the ball, and slow-trots around the bases, only the pitcher has the power to intimidate that player or his teammates with some inside pitching, and intimation factor which could neutralize the batters and get inside their heads.
In turn, on a rare occasion, you throw inside to someone like David Ortiz, and as a pitcher you risk getting a good ass kicking, so sometimes the batter commands the respect of the pitcher.
So, its a little or than about male “immaturity” than you think. Professional baseball is a big business, and the competitors are mercenaries with a job to do. If you need to brushback a smarts batter crowding the strike zone in order to keep your stats down and earn another $5 million paycheck, then that is what has to happen.
Not always. There was the memorable occasion where Roger Clemens threw a piece of broken bat in the direction of Mike Piazza when he was running toward first. The next time Clemens faced the Mets at Shea, everybody in the park knew that when Clemens came to bat, that first pitch would be coming straight at him. The pitch missed Clemens, message received, and Clemens paid his debt to society and the game went on.
BTW, I will believe to my dying day that when Piazza got a chance to catch Clemens in the All Star Game, that Piazza told the batters what was coming. They sure lit up Clemens like a Christmas tree in that game.
Clemens didn’t pay the price he actually should have, which was immediate ejection from the World Series game in which he threw a broken bat at an opposing player. To this day I am mystified as to why he was not; there has probably never in the history of Major League Baseball been someone who deserved ejection that much who was allowed to stay in the game.
Had the umpires done their jobs correctly, the Mets would not have had to throw at him.
As much as I hate to defend Clemens, I’m not 100% sure that he was aiming at Piazza. It could have been he was thinking “get this piece of shit off my field” and just whipped it off the field without actually aiming at Piazza. Perhaps if this had been a regular season game, he wouldn’t have gotten such benefit of that doubt. Umpires are understandably reluctant to toss a player in World Series play, they don’t want to decide the outcome of the game by their actions.
One cannot be sure of 100% of what is in a man’s heart but if you simply watch the video I’d say one can be 99.9% sure he was throwing the bat at Piazza. I mean, he looked at Piazza and threw the bat at him. There really is no reasonable doubt.
I blame Albert Belle.
Can non-baseball fans answer too?
I think American baseball is stodgy and archaic with its traditions and unwritten rules. Its also no fun, especially with these kind of things that precisely stifle fun. I think pitchers should get over it and just brush it off but too much momentum is on the side of them being pissy jerks about it. What you need is a period of zero tolerance so that no pitcher can throw at a batter without severe consequences, and allow the batters to celebrate however they like. Once that becomes the norm, the act of retaliation will die out on its own
There’s been some talk in recent years about how the Dodgers’ Yasiel Puig is showy and boisterous, but that in Latin American, such celebrations are normal. Indeed, I’ve seen Japanese batters take bat flipping to an art form. I think America needs to adopt those kinds of fan-friendly behaviors that let players have more fun. This isn’t the 1930’s anymore, you won’t see men in suits and hats in the stands, its all kids and families dressed casually in t-shirts and flip flops. Let the man celebrate!
That’s fine as far as it goes, but bear in mind that celebration is frowned upon in more sports than baseball. Basketball and football will actually penalize your team in substantial ways if you are deemed to be celebrating too much.
There absolutely is a point at which celebration goes beyond the level of proper sportsmanship; the debate is whether a bat flip merits accusations of poor sportsmanship. I do not believe it does, in part because I think MLB players have over the last few years become sort of weirdly obsessed with “unwritten rules” that in some cases have been pretty obviously made up on the spot. I’m not sure why we’ve seen a rise in both celebration and brittle egos.
There’s plenty of opportunities for clowning around in baseball. You’ll often see the players in the dugout interacting with the guys on the field or the runner and basemen exchanging a laugh. But flinging a 2lb piece of lumber around where it can so some pretty serious damage to another person is not my idea of “celebrating”. Baseball is the only major sport I know of where the players can throw a ball into the stands for the fans to keep. Football players get fined about $5K for that sort of thing.
Has anyone ever been hurt by a guy hitting a home run and doing a bat flip? Has anyone even come close to being hurt?
People get hurt by bats that batters lose the grip on, or broken bats. But hurt by a bat flip?
If the NFL= No Fun League, then MLB should mean Maybe Less Batflipping?
Not a bat flip, but the first example that comes to mind is when Dock Ellis beaned Reggie Jackson in 1976 because Reggie showed him up in the 1971 All-Star Game by taking him deep, hitting the light tower at Tiger Stadium, and celebrating all the way around the bases.
Dock Ellis is, of course, a particularly psychotic example of a pitcher, but players have long memories and the more mercurial ones will go tit-for-tat. And let’s look at it from the other side, when batters charge the mound because they get hit or don’t like being pitched inside. It happens multiple times a year at all levels.
Peace is maintained on both sides when the players just play the game and don’t act like jerks. When they act like jerks players respond in kind. It’s always been that way, and it always will be.