Look: If you want to lament any one particular aspect of the ongoing feud between the Texas Rangers and Toronto Blue Jays — the one that escalated to full-blown fisticuffs between Rougned Odor and Jose Bautista on Sunday — make it the 96-mph fastball that Rangers reliever Matt Bush fired at Bautista. By probabilities, it appears the most dangerous of all real and perceived blows in the battle, because a 96-mph fastball aimed at any part of another person seems more likely to cause significant injury than even a punch to the face.
But there’s no way Bush acted alone. Bush wasn’t even in the Rangers’ organization during the 2015 ALDS, when Bautista bat-flipped his way into becoming Public Enemy No. 1 in the Texas clubhouse. Even if no coach or teammate or executive advised Bush to plunk Bautista, he did it in deference to over a century’s worth of baseball culture. It may not be a safe or admirable part of the game, but it is decidedly a part of the game.
Do not mistake this for excusing Odor. Punching someone in the face is a very bad and unproductive way to resolve a conflict, and Rougned Odor should not have punched Jose Bautista in the face on Sunday. But Bautista raised his own fist before Odor got his shot in, and, as Dodgers pitcher Brandon McCarthy pointed out, he wasn’t “winding up to tickle him.” Odor’s punch was hardly a cheap shot. He got in a fight with an opponent who looked perfectly willing to fight back, and he happened to land the first blow.
That it all apparently stemmed from Bautista’s ALDS bat-flip, of course, seems ridiculous. Again: Violence is never a reasonable or rational response to an ultimately harmless perceived slight. But those of us who want baseball players to show emotion must recognize that incidents like the one on Sunday represent the unfortunate, if rare, byproduct of that emotion.
(PHOTO: Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)
Following any particular baseball team closely requires a huge investment of fans. There are a lot of reasons Mike Trout doesn’t rate with the likes of Peyton Manning or LeBron James in terms of transcendent superstardom, but more than anything, it’s that fans of the 29 teams that Mike Trout doesn’t play for are far too busy watching their own favorite teams endeavor a 162-game schedule to fully appreciate what Trout does on his own field every night. It’s why national television ratings remain a horrible way to measure is baseball’s popularity: Baseball fandom is largely a regional phenomenon. Most likely you love one team, you hate a couple of its divisional rivals, and you don’t really care much one way or the other about the rest.
The desire to see baseball players show more emotion on the field, I think, comes from that investment. Those of us who live and die with our teams want to feel as if the players on their rosters do, too. We want to see that a guy is thrilled about his monster homer because we feel some weird form of kinship with that guy from watching him play every single night. And we want to believe our favorite players are devastated by big losses because we don’t want to be the only ones lying awake at night fretting over every bad hop.
The bulk of Blue Jays fans presumably love the way Bautista seems to play with a chip on his shoulder because they watched Bautista blossom into one of the game’s best hitters. They know how hard he worked to turn himself from a fourth outfielder to a feared slugger, and all the doubt he faced along the way. And they love seeing Bautista emphatically, defiantly toss his bat to the heavens after a big homer because they recognize and appreciate the way that defiance fuels Bautista.
(PHOTO: Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)
And plenty of Rangers fans likely appreciate Rougned Odor more today than they did Saturday. Where fans of the 29 other teams might watch video of the fight and insist Odor should be suspended or banned or imprisoned for his punch, Rangers fans who saw the bulk of his 271 career games before Sunday’s likely recognize Odor’s part in the fight as emblematic of a hard-nosed and dedicated player who won’t back down from the bully that tried to bowl him over at the base.
Now, maybe you’re a Rangers fan who’d prefer to see his team take the high road and get back at Bautista and the Blue Jays by beating them in every single contest from ALDS Game 5 forward while saying and doing nothing about the divisive bat-flip. And if that’s the case, kudos to you for having such an adult and high-minded approach to the whole thing. I envy your maturity, for real.
But you must recognize, and we all must recognize, that injecting more emotion into a hyper-competitive pro sports environment won’t always go smoothly. Wanting a game’s victors to enjoy it implies wanting the losers to hate it, so the investment we seek on the part of baseball players will on occasion bubble over into the type of ugliness the sport endured on Sunday.
The important thing is that it doesn’t become an epidemic, but that hardly seems likely: You can count on one hand the number of actual punches you’ve seen landed in baseball skirmishes in the past decade. The Odor-Bautista dust-up stands as a largely isolated incident. When players start punching each other in the face so often that it becomes a real threat to the sport’s image and future, then the league can and will step in with some punishment harsher than the suspensions on tap for those involved this time.
Until then, it’s probably best to understand the fight as some nasty nonsense that so happens to stem from the same sentiments many of us want to see more often. If you wish baseball would be a little less buttoned-up, you have to know it’ll sometimes come unbuttoned.
