BEANBALL RUINS COORS FIELD FUN
Grown men behaved like boys Wednesday when the Rockies and Cubs started a rock fight. Four players (two Cubs, two Rockies) were plunked by pitches.
Instead of playing baseball, the Rockies and Cubs ruined a perfectly lovely afternoon at the park by acting like petulant children and starting a rock fight.
Beanball war!
If baseball is poetry, then what happened Wednesday was hardcore rap, not suitable for younger audiences. These fightin’ Rockies and battlin’ Cubs? Gotta keep ’em separated.
“If we played them again, it would be a pretty spicy series,” said Colorado third baseman Nolan Arenado. He was among four players (two Cubs, two Rockies) who got plunked by a baseball while at bat during an otherwise ho-hum game, won 10-1 by Chicago.
Cubs starting pitcher Cole Hamels, whose control is so pinpoint accurate he walked only a single Colorado hitter during the course of seven innings on the
mound, plunked Arenado with a fastball in the left forearm.
An accident? A pitch that got away? No way, no how.
“It didn’t look right to me,” grumped Rockies manager Bud Black.
When two National League teams, whose not-too-distant history includes German Marquez beaning Chicago star Kris Bryant in the helmet and Colorado winning a do-or-die playoff game at Wrigley Field, get together and play six regular-season games within the span of nine days in June, competitors in both dugouts can grow so weary of looking at each other that high
jinks ensue.
So when Arenado dug in the batter’s box against Hamels in the bottom of the third inning, he figured one of his body parts was due to get dented by a baseball.
“I kind of had a feeling it was going to happen,” said Arenado, who jawed at Hamels, then expressed his displeasure to the Cubs dugout after getting hit.
Responded Cubs manager Joe Maddon: “We get hit a lot. (Anthony) Rizzo gets hit a lot, (Bryant) gets hit a lot. I’ve always said: ‘You got two options. Go to the mound or go to first base. But don’t sit there and jibber-jabber. Make up your mind. Do one or the other.”
Well, Maddon does make a good point.
Hockey fights are the 21st century representation of caveman mentality. But at least in the NHL, when a player gets under the skin of a competitor, they drop the gloves, put up their dukes and get it over with.
In baseball, it’s buzzing the tower and glares from 60 feet, 6 inches. It’s puffed-up masculine pride to the point of parody. It’s another indictment of a boring game with way too little meaningful action. And in those cases when a beanball war causes the dugouts to empty, the resulting brawl is almost always cheesier than anything ever staged in a wrestling ring by Vince McMahon.
Because boys will be boys, even if they’re old enough to shave and have a mortgage. The Cubs and Rockies threw stones until the bitter end, even after being warned by the umpiring crew to knock it off.
Chicago reliever Brad Brach hit Colorado catcher Tony Wolters in the bottom of the ninth of the last scheduled game of this season between these teams, an act that was either: A) the lowest depths of athletic cowardice, or B) the baseball equivalent of nanny-nanny, boo-boo.
Baseball is full of unwritten rules, most of them dumb. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why they’re unwritten, because if you committed these rules to paper, any reasonable person would have trouble reading them without breaking out in laughter: Don’t speak of a no-hitter in progress! Don’t flip the bat in admiration of a homer leaving the park! But of all the game’s unwritten rules, by far the dumbest is: Retaliate! Retaliate! Retaliate!
It’s a stupid Game of Stones. If your pitcher hits my batter, then my pitcher must prove his manhood and worth as a teammate by returning the favor and plunking one of your hitters. But Mom, he started it!
The rusty screw of testiness in this Chicago-Colorado series was turned to the breaking point when Rockies rookie pitcher Peter Lambert not only beat the Cubs twice in a span of six days but also hit Bryant twice, during consecutive trips to the plate Tuesday night by the star third baseman.
Told he instigated all this sassiness between the Cub and Rockies, Lambert did not see the joke, refusing to crack a smile, while sitting at his locker in the Colorado clubhouse and offering nothing more than the shrug of a man pleading the Fifth.
“Pitching inside is part of the game,” said Maddon, who loves Black like a baseball brother. “I don’t begrudge anybody that.”
But actually hit a batter with a purpose pitch and — woah, boy — every self-respecting bad dude in this silly game holds a grudge like it was his last miserable dollar.
Unwritten rules exist in baseball to give grown men an excuse to act like boys.