Skip to content
Sports
Link copied to clipboard

Baseball's 'manhood' isn't worth the potential cost of its strangest custom | David Murphy

Throwing at a batter's head is stupid, and being stupid isn’t manly.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of human nature is its ability to fully grasp the future consequences of the status quo and yet refuse to act until those consequences become reality. For instance, we fully grasp that:

1. The human head can suffer catastrophic damage if it is struck with a dense projectile traveling at a high rate of speed.

2. One example of such a projectile is a major-league fastball.

3. The people who launch these projectiles are pitchers,

4. All pitchers are human.

5. All humans are fallible.

6. Thus, no pitcher hits what he is aiming at 100 percent of the time.

7. Thus, the more times we allow a pitcher to aim for a section of a hitter's body that doesn't include his head, the greater the probability that, at some point, he will end up striking a part of the body that does.

Play all of this out over enough reps and you arrive at something that starts to look an awful lot like mathematical certainty.

It's bound to happen, isn't it?

Let's do the hypothetical thing. What if Matt Barnes' fastball ran a few more inches inside? Or, what if Manny Machado ducked outside instead of in? Why did the deer cross the road? Because it was scared, and your car was moving really fast, and instincts aren't perfect. It doesn't really matter: The deer's dead, and, Machado could have been too. Or, if not dead, out for the season, or the rest of his career. Pick a fracture, any fracture: orbital, nasal, psychological. One of the two or three best players in the game, a sure-fire star for at least the next decade. There lies Manny. At least now we can honor his memory by making sure this tragedy never happens again.

We really are stupid, aren't we? Prideful, more like it. That's the only reason such an antiquated custom can continue to exist. Baseball's I-know-nothing-I-see-nothing approach to its weird little ethos of frontier justice is just a bunch of guys who've spent the bulk of their formative years inside a clubhouse that thus provides them with their sole sense of manhood. And it isn't just the players. The league office's immediate suspension of Barnes was an improvement over where things stood a decade ago, but the best way to prevent future incidents is to crack down on ALL retaliatory strikes. Barnes might have been telling the truth when he said he wasn't trying to hit Machado in the head.

But the closer any pitcher gets to attempting to do so, the greater the chance he misses by a critical number of inches. No pitcher has total accuracy. And this is Matt Barnes we're talking about.

Frankly, intent doesn't matter. If you throw over somebody's head, you're too dangerous to be on a mound, regardless of your disposition.

But let's be honest: This is about baseball's code. I understand the appeal. In a sanitized world, baseball's code is a vestige of a simpler time, when the American male drove muscle cars and sexually harassed his coworkers at will.

The day after Barnes whistled a bean ball behind Machado's head in apparent retaliation for a slide that injured Red Sox star Dustin Pedroia, Orioles manager Buck Showalter expressed some well-deserved disgust for a handful of media members who'd advocated further retaliation.

"I've said many times, when people talk about throwing and stuff, how are you going to feel when you're standing at home plate and some guy got hit in the head and there's blood coming out of his ears?" Showalter said to Baltimore reporters. "Do you really feel that manly making that decision? Is that really smart?"

No, it's stupid, and being stupid isn't manly. In fact, you can remove all that mandy-pandy nonsense like safety and empathy from consideration and it's still stupid. Baseball is no longer a game played by guys on break from the oil refinery: Machado is a financial asset worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Major League Baseball. Giving any disgruntled pitcher the tacit right to attempt to hit him with a pitch introduces a non-negligble amount of risk to the equation.

Given the rather slim odds of something bad happening, you'd understand the tradeoff if the practice offered some sort of tangible reward. But there is zero. The only benefit anybody stands to realize from a continuation of the status quo is the ability to lecture future generations of youngsters about a time when this was still a country of the men. And, even then, the youngsters will talk amongst themselves as they always do: I can't believe he said that, but, you know, he's just old.