Baseball’s silly code has Blue Jays in trouble.
It has always seemed that, if the participants in what is commonly referred to as a baseball “brawl” were really serious about fighting, the players joining the orderly procession from the bullpen would meet somewhere in centre field.
That is, the bullpen doors would open, and the members of each team, bearing such strong enmity toward each other, would tear into a mutual collision with blood in their eyes.
But no, they jog toward the mound in a tidy group, no one particularly anxious to throw actual punches but no one wanting to fall too far behind the action, either. Must be sure to send the right message.
Partners are acquired, some light shoving often takes place, and then everyone walks back to f rom whence they came. It’s all quite silly: a fight choreographed like a Broadway play.
All quite harmless too, except when it isn’t. The Toronto Blue Jays managed to lose two key performers in their Monday brawl( s) with the New York Yankees, just as they begin a final six-game push toward the playoffs and with the team chasing them, the Baltimore Orioles, in town for the first three of those games.
Reliever Joaquin Benoit tore a calf muscle in his slow jog from the bullpen and he could well be done for the year.
Second baseman Devon Travis, who missed most of last season with a shoulder injury, tweaked that same shoulder in the fracas, and aggravated it later with a swing in the same game. He was out for the opener against the Orioles and will be re-evaluated daily.
So t hat whole t hi ng seemed rather unnecessary, didn’t it? Not to hear the Blue Jays tell it. You know who still believes very strongly in baseball’s unwritten rules? Baseball players.
“The key to the success of a team is that they stick together,” manager John Gibbons said before Tuesday’s game.
He meant that he was proud of his guys for sticking up for one another, the specifics of which went as follows: J. A. Happ plunked Chase Headley in the second inning in retaliation for Luis Severino’s light grazing of Josh Donaldson an inning earlier. That was brawl one.
When Severino then reupped with a beaning of Justin Smoak in the bottom of frame, the benches and bullpens emptied again. Somewhere in there, both Jays were injured.
The fact that all of that could have been avoided if Happ had simply not drilled any Yankees in response to the Donaldson hit- by- pitch — the Toronto third baseman did come around to score, so it worked out OK for the Jays — was not an outcome that Gibbons seemed inclined to consider.
His guy was hit, so something had to be done. And it was. If people ended up hurt, that was more a freak occurrence than anything else. So be it.
“The game of baseball goes on,” Gibbons said. “What are you going to do, really?”
Despite various attempts from the assembled reporters to put it to Gibbons that, perhaps, not getting in a brawl would have been a wise move for a team with a narrow lead in the wild-card chase, he was having no part of it.
“Tensions are high, guys are competing,” he said. “Guys are looking out for one another.”
The Toronto manager also noted that the Yankee scuffles were not knee-jerk incidents. The mutual dislike between the teams had been brewing for some time, as evidenced by Mark Teixeira’s saucy bat flip on his game-tying home run in the ninth inning and his subsequent “blown save!” chirping from the dugout.
Other Yankees said they didn’t take kindly to Toronto’s general swagger, a subject that has come up before in fights and beaning incidents with the Kansas City Royals and Texas Rangers. The “Toronto vs. Everybody” T-shirts that they sell at the Rogers Centre are rather on the nose.
The Blue Jays now face the prospect of a stretch run without their leadoff hitter and a reliable setup guy in the bullpen, not that it mattered much on Tuesday. Ezequiel Carrera moved to the top of the order and scored three times in the 5-1 win, behind six excellent innings from Aaron Sanchez, who struck out 10 Orioles.
No amount of carping from this corner is going to get Gibbons, or anyone else on the Blue Jays, to change his mind about the merits of strategic beanballs, even if the sending of a message ended up sending two teammates to the infirmary. But perhaps eventually, baseball’s old code will get an update.