Did you read the very next sentence in that post? Where I said Intentionally hitting a batter should
—not-- happen. I didn’t specify a penalty, but I would be ok with a year long suspension. Heck, give the team a penalty like one less roster spot. I’m just not advocating for blood.
I’m not so sure the union would be fully opposed, batters are players too after all. They might only accept lesser penalties though.
They tend to be opposed because the suspensions are unpaid, meaning less money to players overall. Even the harmed batters get paid if they are unable to play.
If I was the commish, I’d put (non-drug) suspension pay (and fines) into a fund that goes back to the players, so that suspensions don’t reduce overall payments to players, but still hit the suspended players right in the pocket. That goes along with increasing suspensions for unsafe practices like beanballs.
For too long the sport has supported committing assault as a response to being shown up.
Harsher penalties are absolutely needed. But equally important is for people in a position of authority to stop condoning it. When a manager says, “yeah, the player will get beaned tomorrow, what can you do,” of course it will continue to happen.
Imagine if La Russa had said “he was wrong to swing at a 3-0 pitch, but let’s behave maturely and let me address it. This idea that it’s OK to injure a player because you feel insulted is dangerous, childish, and has no place in baseball.” Maybe Mercedes still gets thrown at tomorrow, but when enough managers repeat it enough times, things will start to change.
La Russa is in a position to effect change, and he did the opposite. He deserves harsh criticism for that.
This is inappropriate and must not happen again. I am not issuing a warning but I am strongly reminding everyone not to make this personal.
RickJay
Moderator
This is one of two reasons why the “La Russa’s issue is just that Mercedes missed a sign” is such nonsense.
Players miss signs now and then. I’ve never seen a manager make that big a deal about it in a press conference, especially when the missed sign didn’t affect the game’s outcome.
More pertinently, though, La Russa did not say that was the only problem. La Russa, in his own words, and he’s a grown man who can speak for himself, made it very clear that his main problem was Mercedes violating the alleged unwritten rule.
You gotta be kidding me. The NFL and NHL would like to have a talk with you.
I’m pretty much for zero tolerance for that kind of bullshit and always have been. But at any rate as noted above the answer to violence is not more violence like we’re a couple of macho shit-kickers in bar. It’s lengthy suspensions. Possibly even legal actions, as in assault charges, if it is egregious enough. A ten start up to a season-long suspension for having been judged to have intentionally beaned a hitter should largely nip that nonsense in the bud pretty quick. Oh and that would be an unpaid suspension.
Leave the dugout during a bench-clearing brawl? 10% of your annual paycheck as a fine. Hell, make it 20%. Make it hurt enough and it will stop.
I think it’s a jerk move to swing on 3-0 when you’re blowing the other team out. Doubly so against a position player whose presence on the mound is like a white flag. Go ahead and swing on 3-1.
That being said, if LaRussa put the take sign on and Mercedes ignored it, cuss him out in private and fine him. But if he failed to put the take sign on, it’s on LaRussa as well.
Bottom line, I think they’re both in the wrong. Don’t show up the other team and don’t show up your own player.
And in forty years of playing and umping baseball I have been taught it’s the jerk move to TAKE that pitch, that drawing walks in such a situation is, in fact, a huge asshole approach. “Get the bat off your shoulder” is the usual advice when winning a terrible blowout.
The same NFL where Vontaze Burfict got earholed after shitty hits against the Steelers? The same NHL which straight up allows players to fight on the ice during altercations? That’s literally the impetus for my hypothetical.
I’m perfectly ok with strong penalties being levied against pitchers attempting intentional harm. I simply provided a different approach that highlighted the absurdity of the “unwritten rules”.
And here we have the issue with the unwritten rules. Mercedes is damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t, unless he deliberately swings to miss. And yet I constantly hear “RESPECT THE GAME”.
Hitters charge the mound and take swings at pitchers from time to time as well. The problem isn’t a lack of retaliation, it’s a lack of sufficient official sanction for behaving badly. That’s the kind of lack of accountability that bugs me.
Can’t have that, the batter broke the rules.
I don’t know that it ever came up in a press conference, but John McGraw hated players missing signs or worse, ignoring them.
Once when the N.Y. Giants were playing Pittsburgh, Red Murray was due up in the bottom of the ninth in a tie game with a runner on second and nobody out. McGraw told him to bunt the guy over to third. Instead, Murray homered over the left field fence. Game over.
McGraw fined him $100 (which was a sizable chunk of one’s salary back then.
*yes, I am a fount of ancient and obscure baseball stories. This one is circa 1912.
They were pitching the next day? They have the authority to order a player to do this?
Oh please. The idea that the only reason the Twins were upset is because Tony LaRussa is ludicrous. It is not a serious idea. Tony LaRussa does not control how that team or it’s manager feels. This demonization of TLR is absurd. He’s definitely not perfect, but good lord that doesn’t mean you just go off the deep end either.
The unwritten rules exist for two reasons.
They’re unwritten because they are so stupid they’d be laughable to codify.
They aren’t officially prohibited and what teams can get away with they will do.
And TLR is an ass. He’s not a monster but he’s a great symbol of why this dinosaur of a sport is dying… Like the dinosaurs.
I like baseball. I don’t love it but I like it. I’d like it if it stays a major sport in the US and doesn’t become a marginalized activity like badminton or jai alai or water polo. I find it encouraging that there are efforts to improve the entertainment value of the game which violates the credo of doing things because “goldarnit my great-grandpappy did it that way”.
Agreed. This sort of unwritten rule stuff dampens my enthusiasm for the game. I enjoy watching players like Tatis, Acuna (even though he plays for my team’s biggest rivals), and Mercedes. These players tend to be the bane of the ‘unwritten rule’ folks. I think those players are the way to making the sport more relevant in the future. If their fun is neutered, I think I’d just lose more and more interest in the sport.
“When I was playing*, it was an unwritten law that if a batter ever hit a pitch when the count was three balls and no strikes, the next time he came up there, boy, he was knocked down four consecutive times.”
*pitcher, 1919-23; outfielder 1928-34 (hit .398 in 1929).
“If you made a mistake, Connie (Mack) never bawled you out on the bench, or in front of anybody else. He’d get you alone a few days later, and then he’d say something like, “Don’t you think it would have been better if you’d made the play this way?”
And you knew damn well it would have been better.”
Did someone make this suggestion?
A tweet from October:
Joe Posnanski & Michael Schur discussing this (click on “Shared Timestamp” to jump there):
“Off by over a week. Pathetic.”
Fivethirtyeight posted an analysis today of how bad Mercedes’ homer was according to the Derision Index for Superfluous Slams. It’s not exactly scientific, but it’s amusing.
Two things I did find notable: retaliation for supposed disrespect picked up starting in 2000, and high-DISS homers have increased in the last few years. “The nonexistent rule that told him he shouldn’t have done that might soon be even less existent.”