It’s just a coincidence that when Latino players get uppity, they get a fastball at their head.
Mostly because of their fragile egos. The Korean Baseball League has made bat flipping into an art and no one gets all offended at it.
Maybe pitchers should stop celebrating after a big strike out. I’m sure it causes some offense to batters.
Because they’re snowflakes?
Lots of articles about the racist underpinnings of baseballs unwritten rules. It’s hardly a secret.
Maybe it’s a coincidence that some Latino players get pissed off at the idea that a bat-flipper is trying to show them up.
*I’ve never gotten terribly excited over the bat-flipping phenomenon.
The flake part is right.
Often thrown by a Latino pitcher. Luis Tiant was a notorious headhunter.
That cuts both ways. Latino players may be more prone to celebrate, but also take more offense by being shown up.
Because they’ve been coached their whole lives by idiots who think the unwritten rules are worth more than a handful of turds.
We can agree that throwing behind a batter is a dick move. It’s a dick move because it threatens the batter with actually being beaned.
Which means that beaning a batter is a universally-agreed upon asshole move, and far worse than any offense that could be inflicted. And if that’s the system of enforcing the unwritten rules, then they’re barbaric.
Oh please. Even Reggie knew that when someone breaks the rules, Mr. Roscoe needs to come out to play.
Perhaps a pitcher who can’t out-pitch a bunt doesn’t deserve a place in the record books.
Speaking of unwritten rules, the NLCS was just won by a player who hit a go ahead HR and strutted after he hit it. And it was glorious!
Heh heh I didn’t think I’d get so much heat for my comment let me clarify. I never JUSTIFIED headhunting pitchers. As a matter of fact I applaud MLB suspensions of pitchers like Joe Kelly this season.
But humans are flawed creatures. Baseball is a high pressure business. I can understand a pitcher being humiliated and having his career threatened by a hot shot batter and getting the red ass and taking it out on a hitter by throwing at him. It’s a human reaction, and yes a petty one.
Baseball can make pitchers think twice about doing this with ejections and suspensions, so this way hopefully the pitcher will make a better “business” and human decision the next time.
By the unwritten rules, I’m certain we’ll find him in the river with concrete floaties.
His CAREER is threatened? By a hit/home run/bunt/whatever? Get the fuck over it. I thought these were grown-ass men, not babies.
Maybe this will make it clearer: throwing the ball at someone is an act of violence. It is an attempt to hurt them. It’s no different than you punching someone who pissed you off, which could get you thrown in jail.
There is no reason for a pitcher to ever intentionally try and harm a batter, period. The rule for walking on a hit is to punish the pitcher for messing up and hitting the batter. If you want to walk the batter, you throw four balls.
I personally wouldn’t mind if clearly intentional hits resulted in an automatic home run to discourage this nonsense. It’s not gentlemanly at all–it shows them to be common street brawlers in their mentality and actions. It should be a suspendable offense.
Well, actually, that’s obviously not true. In no way does that explain the reaction to Fernando Tatis hitting a home run with his team enjoying a huge lead. How is it an asshole move to try to hit a home run? And why have no many asshole moves - collisions at home plate, throwing at batters - been historically acceptable?
The biggest problem is that unlike any of the other major sports, there’s an imbalance when it comes to self-policing. In hockey, football, and even basketball, if you want to exact some retribution on another player you have the opportunity. You might get penalized, even suspended, but you can get your pound of flesh. If someone acts like an asshole, they’ll hear from a member of the other team.
In baseball, only the pitcher can extract revenge (if you exclude hard slides, spikes up, which only impacts the second baseman and SS). That leaves hard feelings and no way to self-police. Pitchers are the sole distributors of revenge, which makes the batters vulnerable and edgy.
The best revenge would be solid play and beating the opponent on the field of play. But if that doesn’t work, a fastball into the hip is a good second choice. As long as no one threw behind a batter or went headhunting, things remained mostly under control. Things have changed somewhat in recent years.
The batter should just give up trying to win at this point? You can’t be serious.
You’ve failed spectacularly.
Ian Desmond of the Colorado Rockies has this to say in the subject:
“ The golden rules of baseball – don’t have fun, don’t pimp home runs, don’t play with character. Those are white rules. Don’t do anything fancy. Take it down a notch. Keep it all in the box."
The thing that’s always stood out to me about baseball was the sheer number of things that do not advance the game in the slightest. Hockey is constantly in motion to the point where substitutions are forbidden while play is stopped, and a ref might have to stop to explain a call every 20 games. Basketball has frequent stops, but then it starts right back up, and it even has 20-second timeouts to avoid excessive dead air. Football not only has a litany of actions that can prevent the clock from stopping, it even has 10-second runoffs to keep the trailing team honest in the closing seconds. Baseball? A foul ball with 2 strikes does nothing but waste time. A failed pickoff attempt, the same. Both can be done indefinitely. Batter steps out of the box to take a few more practice swings can be done literally after every pitch. The pitcher can take his good sweet time deciding what to do. (I’ve seen pitch clocks like 2 or 3 times in my lifetime.) Time outs are virtually unlimited. There’s a lengthy delay between each half-inning, including an extra-long one in the 7th. And of course, there’s occasional fun diversions like arguing with the umpire and bench-clearing brawls.
Given all this, I can easily envision how tension, frustration, and outright murderous rage could build up to incredible levels, especially if it’s an important game or a bitter rivalry. Yes, headhunting is grossly unsportsmanlike and, in the worst case scenario, outright criminal, but that’s not the kind of thing a pitcher considers when he sees 8 of his best pitches careen uselessly into the abyss and the 9th get blasted into the stands.
(Maybe if the batter put some artistry into it…twirls, juggles, pirouettes, what have you…it would come across as less insulting? I don’t seem to remember anyone have a problem with that rolling-the-football-across-the-body touchdown celebration.)