Protecting teammates, bench-clearing version

Speaking of stupid things guys do, let’s talk baseball fights. Last week’s Cincinnati Reds/Pittsburgh Pirates melee was one of the nastier/funnier ones in recent memory, with Reds reliever Amir Garrett charging off the mound intending to take on the whole Pirate organization by himself. He said he had to protect his teammates.

Reds right fielder Yasiel Puig— who had been traded to the Cleveland Indians about five minutes before the brawl broke out but was somehow still in the game—also got entertainingly involved; he ended up shouting what I presume were obscenities at his erstwhile teammates, some of whom were yukking it up on the periphery, when he thought they were taking the fight insufficiently seriously.

Like most baseball fracases, no one got badly hurt (though Garrett’s initial wayward haymaker had bad intent) and it had been simmering for a while. It was the second bench-clearing melee between the two teams this season, and there have been 15 players ejected and nine batters hit in the 12 games the teams have played this season. The Reds think Pirate pitchers intentionally throw at hitters.

The Pirates say they’re playing effing baseball.

Both sides are right. While it’s criminally reckless to throw a missile at another person’s head at speeds of more than 90 miles an hour (there is a law against it), everyone knows what baseball is, and no one is compelled to participate in it.

To be effective, pitchers have to upset the batter’s rhythm, and one of the best ways to do this is to instill fear in a hitter. (Not necessarily of physical harm; most hitters fear being shamed far more than they worry about being hurt.)

A pitcher needs to have access to all of the plate, and maybe a little more. Move the hitter off the plate, maybe you get more room outside. So pitchers with imperfect control will throw inside and occasionally hitters will be hit by pitches. Things can only be made so safe. And some young men sometimes seek to take offense where none is intended. In some quarters, toxic masculinity will be embraced as entertainment. But baseball fights are usually pretty farcical events, ritualized scuffles with lots of chest-bumping and “hold me back” posturing. Kind of like Democratic presidential debates.

That said, I witnessed a savage one in the 1970s, in the old Shreveport Parks and Recreation Stadium during a game between the Shreveport Captains and Jackson Mets of the Texas League. A Shreveport pitcher threw high and tight to a Jackson Met. On the next pitch, the hitter threw his bat at the pitcher and charged the mound. Both benches emptied, and the ensuing brawl lasted for at least a dozen minutes.

At one point, one of the Mets left the field to fetch a bat from the dugout. He was carrying it cocked like a hammer with his right hand a quarter of the way up the handle as he ran toward a tangle of players piled on the ground. Just as he crossed the foul line, Captain first baseman Mitchell Page (later an Oakland A and Pittsburgh Pirate but best remembered for playing Abascal in the 1994 Disney film Angels in the Outfield) calmly reached out and grasped the barrel

of the bat.

The Met looked into the first baseman’s face as the big man slowly supinated his wrist. The bat came loose.

Mitchell Page grinned. The Met ran away. That’s how you protect your teammates.

The last fight I was ever in was a soft-pitch softball fight, which makes it even more ridiculous, with grown men from both teams spilling onto the field and grabbing one another and wheeling around like teacups in a carnival kiddie ride. As with most baseball fights, no one got hurt. (Except me, a little.)

Here’s what happened. We, the mighty Shreveport Journal (“your local champs 1978, 79, 80, 81, 82 …” it said on our jerseys) were playing a local television station, the second-best team in the Shreveport Parks and Recreation Media League.

(We took rec league sports seriously at the Journal. Six players on that softball team played baseball at some level beyond high school; one of the factors that led them to hire me was that I was a competent infielder. A proud moment of my sporting life was being part of the Journal team that won the City League Basketball Championship over a team comprised of pro football players from the local American Football Association franchise, the Americans.)

Anyway, late in the game, maybe the sixth inning, the other team’s left-fielder, a Yasiel Puig-like cameraman who was their best player, hit a double to the gap in left field. Only he didn’t think it was a double. He thought it was a triple. I was standing by third base with the ball while he was still 15 feet away. He was embarrassingly out.

He had a couple of options. He could have reversed his field and headed back to second base, which would have required us to execute a run-down play. Or he could have taken evasive action to avoid the tag I was going to place on him; he could have pulled out the old hook slide.

As it turned out, he elected to surprise me. He put his head down and got low, hitting me like Ray Nitschke hit Gale Sayers. I buckled and fell backwards with him on top of me, pummeling my face with his fists. I managed to twist out from underneath him and regain my feet just as the rush of players from both dugouts swarmed over us. I got pushed back into the chain-link backstop by a wacky weatherman who shouted in my face: “What are you doing? Don’t you know he’s crazy?”

When the dust settled, the umpires decided justice required them to throw both of us out of the game. Having done nothing to warrant this (other than smirking a little), I voiced a loud and vociferous protest, threw my glove down, and sat down in the bleachers behind our dugout.

The cameraman got in his car and kept going, like the future Senator John Blutarsky and Mandy Pepperidge at the end of Animal House. We never saw him again. I heard he was banned from the league for life.

My editor instructed one of our photographers to document my bruised and bloody face. He wanted bulletin board material.

I wanted him to hire Mitchell Page.

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