“Beantown”
-By: Richie Kolakowski – @RichieK4410
This past weekend in baseball we had a few incidents where hitters were plunked or thrown at intentionally. I don’t really see it as a big deal, but the media has been focusing on especially one of them so let’s take a look.
The wild weekend started on Friday night when Washington Nationals outfielder Bryce Harper was hit twice by Braves pitchers. The following night Nat’s ace Stephen Strasburg fired a first pitch fastball into the hip of Justin Upton, both teams were warned following the beaning and you figure, well that’s part of the game; no harm no foul. Not so much, Strasburg returned to the mound in the second to throw three more wild pitches, two consecutive ones behind the back of Andrelton Simmons that finally got him and manager Davey Johnson tossed from the game and will probably face some sort of discipline. In this case you have a classic, “You attack my star I’m coming for one of yours” scenario. This has been an accepted part of the game since as long as I can remember. Nobody knows whether Strasburg actually lost command like he says or just took it too far.
Now it’s almost expected that someone will get plunked in an August Yankees/Red Sox series. Hell, you probably could have put money down that it would’ve been A-Rod to get hit . I personally thought it was going to be John Lackey who was going to do it, but his start came and went without incident then came Sunday night with Ryan Dempster on the mound. Dempster would throw one pitch behind Rodriguez’s legs before hitting him with the fourth pitch of the at-bat. It was quite obvious Dempster was throwing at him and it’s almost laughable that Girardi was the one to get ejected instead of the Red Sox pitcher. A-Rod actually handled it well like a professional would, returning in the sixth to smack a solo homer off Dempster and ignite the Yankees comeback saying afterwards, “It was the ultimate payback.” Now unlike our previous situation this was more of a “You’re getting hit because everyone is tired of you dragging the game, and your team through the mud and you ‘allegedly’ ratted out your teammates.” I don’t see anything wrong with either situation, as I said earlier, this is an accepted part of the game. It’s not like they threw 95 MPH fastballs deliberately at their heads trying to end their careers, they simply got their messages across now let’s move on.
14A Sports 