Baseball Brawls

Baseball season is well into the home stretch and consequently, tempers sometimes flair.  It is not a direct correlation but during the long hot days of summer, sometimes teams and players in the thick of the division races (what at one time were known as the Pennant races but since each league now has three divisions and a “Wild Card,” the terms have to be updated slightly) get a bit angry with each other.  Especially in the head-to-head games between first and second place teams

Recently, the St Louis Cardinals and the Cincinnati Reds had a fairly standard baseball brawl.  A lot of pushing and shoving went on, although no real punches were thrown.  The brawl apparently started because the Cincinnati second baseman Brandon Phillips, spoke out to the media on how he dislikes the Cardinals and has no friends on the team.  Even though the umpires probably could have ejected half a dozen players from each team, they wound up only ejecting the two managers.

There is etiquette to baseball brawls.  Even though players have access to the baseball bats, which could be a pretty lethal weapon, they do not go after each other with bats.  It is not like the disgruntled fan that picks up his bat while listening to the game out in his garage and destroys the garage door with it.  That fan can be described as just a bit overzealous and after he has destroyed his garage door, he’s most likely abashed about it and quite embarrassed to have to tell his wife what he’s just done.  If his wife wasn’t home, he might even try to fake things and pretend it happened by mistake somehow (though it would take some serious tap dancing to convince a wife that the damage happened other than with the baseball bat – especially if she is able to match wood chips (if it was a wooden bat) or the paint scheme of the garage door or bat (if it’s a metal bat).

But whether the fan admits what he has done to his wife or tries to hide it, the only damage he has done is to the garage door so he can grab his yellow pages and call his local garage door service company to send the garage door repairman out to fix the door.  Or if he has damaged the door badly enough, just go ahead and have a new garage door installed.

It is after all, the home stretch of the baseball season, for the players and the fans.