Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1049: Throwing Baseballs at Butts

Episode Date: April 25, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan talk to Grant Brisbee of SB Nation about acceptable ballpark behavior, Madison Bumgarner, the Giants, and baseball’s latest tests of unwritten (and written) rules involving beanball wars between the Tigers and Twins and the Orioles and Red Sox. Audio intro: The Bees, "Chicken Payback" Audio outro: The Spinners, "They Just Can’t Stop […]

Hello and welcome to episode 1049 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangrass presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangrass. Hello. Hi. And we are joined by our pal Grant Brisby of SB Nation. Hi, Grant. Hello. There were a bunch of unwritten rules violations, possibly written rule violations over the weekend. A couple of hit batters or attempted hit batters and a beanball. And I like to talk to you about unwritten rules because you've devoted a lot of thought to them and a lot of writing about them. And so we'll get into that in a minute.

Since we have you, I wanted to ask you also about unwritten rules of fan behavior in ballparks. Because last week there was a Tigers-Rays game where it was taking place at the Trop and two times a Tigers outfielder dropped a fly ball because there was some guy yelling, I got it, in the stands. And in Tropicana, you can hear everyone say everything because no one's there and it's indoors and it echoes. And obviously, we know that when Alex Rodriguez did this, that was looked upon as an unwritten rule violation. And I don't know, maybe you wrote about it at the time.

I still admire that move on his part. But is there any stricture that applies to fans? Is there anything a fan shouldn't do, I guess, other than reaching into the field of play, which you're not allowed to do, or I don't know, screaming racist epithets or something, but other than that, is there anything that you would frown upon? I guess there's a couple different answers. The first one is if you're in your 20s and drunk, which anything goes. And if you're a responsible dad with your child,

then no, you shouldn't be yelling, I got it, I got it. One of Mike Kruko's, one of his favorite anecdotes when the Giants are playing, and he's calling the game, is when there's a foul ball that's close to the dugout, right?

And the opposing team is coming over to the home team's dugout, and he's kind of leaning over, and there's not a lot of help there. He always says that when he was playing, they'd go, hey, watch out for the wheelbarrow. He says it like at least three times a year, but he said like that's what they said. The guy would be over there, and they'd be going, hey, watch out for the wheelbarrow.

And that's just what they said. The guy would be up there and they'd be going, hey, watch out for the wheelbarrow. That's just what they did. If that's sort of an unwritten rule that you're not crossing if you're in the dugout, I don't see a problem with a fan yelling, I got it, I got it, except that it seems kind of unsafe. I don't know. You would have to think the fan isn't so close that you would make the outfielder flinch it wasn't there a case like this in the playoffs in the last two years i want to say that there was a case like this a very memorable case in the playoffs and i just can't remember it at fenway i think yeah i don't remember anything before last week or so so i'm not not sure yeah well i'll have to research it and i probably wrote something stupid about it and I'll DM it to you

no it was Alex Gordon and some fan yelled stop at third base and so Alex Gordon stopped at third base and that was it oh what a Fenway's classic moments we got an email actually today from a listener

who is asking us about another Bay Area fan ballpark behavior I don't know if you're aware of this it's a listener named is asking us about another Bay Area fan ballpark behavior. I don't know if you're aware of this. It's a listener named Mike, and he says, I've been down on a trip to Oakland to see the M's play at the Coliseum. We sat right behind the Mariners' bullpen. We got to meet all the Mariners' bullpen pitchers, et cetera,

but we also noticed something. Whenever a bullpen pitcher for the Mariners, and presumably any opposing pitcher, got up to warm up, the whole crowd in that area of the stadium would start to shout in a concerted way right before each pitch to psych the pitcher out. They would yell, whoop, every time a pitcher

would go into his motion and the whooping sound crescendoed right at the release of the warm-up pitch. You could tell it distracted the pitchers noticeably, especially the younger ones who did not expect it. The psych-out strategy seemed to work on Dan Altavia, who seemed to be thrown off a bit by the crowd noise while warming up. And then when he went out to pitch, he coughed up, I think, three runs in an inning, and it ended up costing the Mariners the game, etc., etc. They did it to Nick Vincent, too.

He seemed more prepared for it. more prepared for it. When someone from the crowd asked the bullpen coach about it, he said that the crowd whoops happened in both Oakland and San Francisco stadiums, but nowhere else that he was aware of. So it might be a Bay Area phenomenon. Are you aware of the whoop? I am. It did actually, I mean, I remember the whoop and candlestick. You'd have 3,000 people there for a Tuesday night Expos game, and there'd be a couple of clowns that would do it and if like a couple guys do it then the whole kind of section gets in because it's a little funny and so the whoop just for context is it probably doesn't come across that well on an email it's when he throws whoop and uh yeah i mean i remember it for the last 20 years i mean i don't know i mean i'm i'm one of the older fans around and i remember it uh the a's doing it i haven't

necessarily heard of but i thought it was just sort of everyone did it if you're close to the bullpen you you buys your ticket you gets your your money's worth you know yeah no i i don't think i'm aware of the whoop in new york so maybe it is a bay area phenomenon i've never heard it anywhere it was will myers it was will myers in the 2014 alds kind of borked the ball in right field and in my article that i wrote about it i referenced that Mike Kruka wheelbarrow story because I have five stories. That is one. And it's not even your story. It's a story about his story.

How are the Giants doing, by the way? They having a good year? You know, it's a lot of bad luck, I think. B-A-B-I-P, BABIC, right? You know? It's the bad luck that's getting them and they'll turn it around i don't know it's garbage yeah i wanted to ask you about the unwritten rules of riding a dirt bike during the baseball season or maybe that's actually a very explicitly written rule i haven't

looked very very written uh john hayman right after it happened john hayman had a tweet out where someone was talking about how bum garner shouldn't have done this because something something it's written in his contract and Heyman was like oh yeah but you know there's all these other players who were skiing or I don't know doing like judo or it was like a one-off a throwaway comment where Heyman was joking about all the stuff that other players do but clearly I at least in my interpretation it was clearly informed by knowledge of players who are doing those other things so I'm pretty sure that pretty much every single Major League Baseball player is engaging in highly dangerous activity during any sort of off day or off morning. And because they all think that they're invincible, but clearly, sometimes the ribs and

AC joints in the shoulder are not. I mean, usually, you know, 20 20 somethings are known for their excellent judgment and clear, you know, rational thinking of consequences and such. But occasionally, some of them, emboldened by being millionaires who have had nothing wrong happen to them in their lives, they'll go down a dark path and they'll do something like skiing or dirt biking. Should they trim his contract should they should they take money from him i know you had a post well one of your partners had a post yeah that was good um no no no like it it like it works in the giant's favor this finally we have like some piece of goodwill other than like oh we we haven't been paying you enough for the last five years like now it's kind of like ah but we have something like a little goodwill on our part too than like, oh, we haven't been paying you enough for the last five years.

Like now it's kind of like, ah, but we have something like a little goodwill on our part too. Yeah. This is why we haven't been paying you enough because we knew. Was it Jeremy Affelt who was supposed to, he supposedly hurt his hand separating cheeseburgers? Yeah. Frozen hamburger patties. Yeah.

So do you think, do you think that he was yeah so do you think do you think that he was separating hamburger patties or do you think that he was engaging in an off-the-knife fight no i felt i felt an idiot like he that's that's legit and i say that like he's a smart idiot don't get me wrong but he also had injuries where uh he injured his knee picking up his daughter um there's one more i can't think about but like he's he's just a clumsy French waiter and that that's it but it's not like it's not like uh you know Jeff Kent where he injured himself popping wheelies and you know he comes back and it's like oh I was washing my truck and you know and he did it with that slow laconic southern drawl that he picked up in southern

California you know and so everyone kind of forgave him at first. But yeah, I don't think it was an excuse for the hamburger patties. And I think that is something I mean, it's, it's like picking out silver linings and stuff. And this is a stupid thing to be proud of. But I think Baumgartner could have made things a lot worse by saying I fell in the shower or something stupid. I mean, you know, he basically said, I screwed myself up dirt bike and help me. And that's what he needed to do because it wouldn't have come out anyway. He could have done something just, he could have prolonged it and made it just dumber and dumber.

And so at least it's like a baseline level dumb. Since we have you, should we just get your level of panic about the Giants? Because Dave Cameron just wrote an article about how the Giants shouldn't punt. And I don't know exactly what constitutes punting. It's not like anyone ever really trades their guys in April anyway. Everyone kind of just waits to see if they will get better. So that's probably what the Giants will do. But what's your level of confidence right now? Cause I thought they were a good team coming into the year. Yeah. Yeah. Weird. Um, I'm going to write about this tomorrow on a national level.

Um, just kind of explaining, I know, I mean, national level. Well, not the dumb Maccabi Chronicles inside jokes that I asked. Everyone knows.

but I, they're at a very precarious spot because their window isn't closing. They're not necessarily 2012 Phillies or something. But they're not that far away. I mean, they've got Posey's now, 30, Crawford and Brandon Bell are getting closer to the end of their 20s. They're not that kind of young core that they used to be. And Cueto's leaving. And the farm system hasn't been

spitting out a lot of pitchers lately I mean they're hoping they will but that's why they have Jeff Samarja that's why they had to trade for Matt Boer and if Bumgarner's shoulder is you know kind of screwed up and shoulders are weird enigmatic things they would have to at least consider you know kind of shaking up the franchise I don't think they would do it in a million years but you might point to this moment as some kind of like that, that bellwether moment, like, ah, you know, that's where it all changed. It doesn't have to be like that. I mean, the 1951 Giants also started the season six and 13 and they, they came back, uh, they won the pennant, they cheated. So that's a consideration. I mean, the Gi giants might not be able to steal signs from center field

quite as adeptly but if the giants were to cheat they could win i think that's the lesson okay so the real reason we have brought you here today is for these baseball misbehaviors that happened over the weekend so on saturday there was an instance where the Tigers' Jacoby Jones was hit in the head, seemingly unintentionally, but it caught him right square in the face and he had to get some stitches and it was sort of scary. And it seemed like it was totally unintentional. It was Twins lefty Justin Haley was, and he's a rookie, and it was a one-two pitch, and he was trying to get out of a two-out one-on-jam, and it was totally not a situation where he would have done that intentionally.

But nonetheless, Tigers starter Matt Boyd threw a fastball behind Miguel Sano, clearly as retribution for the Jacoby Jones hit by pitch and Sano was thrown out and Boyd was thrown out and there was a whole little baseball brouhaha over that and then the more famous notorious infamous example happened on Sunday when in retaliation for a slide that happened on, what, Friday when Manny Machado slid into Dustin Pedroia and injured him because his foot came up a little bit as he was sliding. Then Eduardo Rodriguez threw at Machado three times and failed to hit him on all three of those pitches. And then later in the game, Matt Barnes threw one up and in that actually went a little bit behind Machado's head and hit his bat. And there was a whole thing

because Dustin Pedroia was publicly saying from the dugout steps that it wasn't him. And after the game, he said that that wasn't the right thing to do. And Barnes, of course, claimed it was unintentional while probably credibly claiming that he didn't mean to throw it up and in to that extent. So maybe we can start with the slide just because so often it seems like slides are the instigating incidents in these battles of reprisal. And it always seems from the outside like the slide is unintentional. I mean, with some exceptions like Chase Utley level exceptions, it always seems like the slides that players are mad about look pretty innocent to those of us on the outside, or at least it's a lot harder to tell if there was intention than there is with a lot of hit by pitches. I mean, what's the rule, right? Is you have to be able to grab the bag.

You have to be able to touch the bag in the process of going into the bag. That's the rule. And the rule doesn't say that you have to slide a certain point before second base. And so that's what Machado did. He's trying to thread that needle of a legal slide that's also sort of interfering with Pedroia just enough so he can't turn two or maybe gets distracted and lets the ball go by. I mean, he's trying to do a baseball thing. And growing up, even Machado, even though he's young, he just grew up trying to take people out at second base. That's what he was taught.

Interfere with the play a little bit. But at the same time, it's, you can't get your spikes up that high. You can't, like, if you slide late, you're going to jam your ankle into the bag. So you need to pick the foot up a little bit, but you can't spike a guy. So it's like this damned if you do, damned if you don't thing that he's going for. And it's legal, though. I mean, that's the thing. In the past, I think, you know,

I'm not necessarily talking about the Cap Anson days or whatever, but, like, it used to be that, like, barrel rolling into second base was what you did. I mean, Matt Holliday taking out Marco Scudero was, I'm not even going to pretend to slide. I'm just going to jump over the bag, you know, like a Labrador retriever and just roll around. And I mean, that's what it was before the rules changed. So in a way, this is sort of the natural progression to trying to legislate dirty

slides out. Like you're going to have a little bit of shrapnel on the other side. And I think this is like that. Brett Lurie had a slide like this a couple years ago that was like that. The leg's going to come up because when you slide, your foot's kind of pointing that way. It's not a big stretch to go from pointing a spiky thing that way to kind of pointing it a spiky feet up or spiky foot up at a 13- 13 degree angle or whatever so it's i don't know i i think it's unavoidable and it's also unavoidable that baseball men are going to get baseball mad and of course if your foot gets up a little bit on dustin pedroia you're just pretty much going to hit him in the neck but with you solicited uh earlier this morning when you were writing your

your article uh there's a tweet that you had seen and wanted to recover about the Boston players watching the slide over and over frame by frame a bunch of times in the clubhouse. And someone was able to link you to that tweet. But I guess when you are trying to review something like this frame by frame, doesn't that almost on its own suggest that there was no, at least there was no successful malice because if something requires a frame-by-frame analysis, it seems like, no, this was basically fine. Right, right. I mean, it took every ounce of strength I had not to include a back and to the left,

back and to the left, back and to the left joke because I've done that before. But I mean, that's like the level that you're thinking about in the clubhouse. Like that's the level they're watching it at. It's they're like, okay, now it's at the bag and then it comes up does it come up with intent does it come up with you know how can you parse that it's it's this gigantic man i mean manny machado is a large large man and he's like hurtling his body is his 200 plus pound frame

toward the body what five feet before the bag? And then trying to navigate not injuring himself, not injuring the guy, not injuring Pedroia. I mean, it's a delicate ballet and he just kind of screwed up that one part. And if you ask Pedroia about it afterward, he admitted it. He's like, you know, hey, it's baseball. You know what? I don't think he meant to do it. You know, and you can see the immediate remorse of machado going oh i got him and then he's like he's concerned about pedroia because it's they're in the all-star club together

and that means something but it it clearly wasn't intentional it was just kind of a regular baseball slide and every once in a while one of those regular baseball slides is going to get messed up like that yeah so that's weird because it it happened Friday. Pedroia didn't seem all that mad about it. Like he didn't say that there had to be payback or something. And then Saturday, those two teams played a baseball game. Machado played, nothing happened. And then Sunday, all of a sudden it happens and there's the Eduardo Rodriguez attempt the previous inning. And as you said in your piece at SB Nation, if you try once and you fail, that should be it, right? Like if you try to hit a guy in one plate appearance and you throw three consecutive pitches inside and you miss him every single time, you don't get another shot at him. You have spent your one allowance at getting back at him, right? I mean, that is just to do it. I don't know why you'd do it anyway when they did it and in response to the thing that they were doing it in response to, but if you fail the first time, just accept that it's over.

Yeah. I mean, you have to think about what would deserve as a punishment, what would deserve being hit with a baseball where nothing else would suffice? Like what is the transgression that you would have to do as a baseball player to where there is some cosmic imbalance in the world of justice if you do not get hit with a baseball and a bad slide is not it? Like you would have to, I mean, I can't even imagine. It'd be like eating the rosin bag before a game and causing an hour-long delay like like what would what would the transgression be that would be so bad that it had to be it had to be put right with a baseball to the butt i mean it would have to be a transgression like you know fisticuffs something really really nasty that just the frontier justice had to be a certain way. This was not that time. Yeah. So then the cameras

catch Dustin Pedroia after the Matt Barnes pitch nearly hits Machado in the head. The cameras catch Pedroia gesturing at him and saying, it wasn't me, it wasn't me. And that's not something we normally see. I don't know how often something like that happens after the game or via text message or whatever. That's probably pretty common. But out in the open, I don't know if you think that itself violates an unwritten rule, like the player gesturing at the player who had just received payback and thereby showing up his pitcher who was trying to back up Pedroia, however ill-advisedly. Yeah. No, I think it might violate an unwritten rule. However, I think it's called for. I think that was such an egregious attempt that got away from Barnes. It was so, so bad and could have done so, so much damage

that Pedroia was sort of in his right to say, look, hey, not me. That was weird. I can see where Machado has been under the skin of various Red Sox pitchers because A, he's so good and B, because he knows it. And they might just be talking about it during every every one of the 562 orioles red sox games in every year they might be in the bullpen just saying ah that machado don't like that guy do not like him and then there comes this situation where he is he hurts one of their you know their beloved players their their captain and you can see barnes maybe the wheels are turning like i want to i want to plunk that guy in the butt.

Like I, I want to do this. I want to take this on. This is what I want to do. And when Rodriguez couldn't get it done and he's in the game, suddenly it's like, all right, hero time.

You know, I get to be the big hero, but I mean, that's the problem with hitting, hitting players with baseballs is you don't necessarily know where it's going to go, but I can see Barnes kind of ruminating on that for a while and getting that chance. And that's how it all came about much more than, you know, than Pejoria going up to him and

going like, you know, hey, kid, can you pat him on the butt for me or something like that. So him doing it on his own makes a lot more sense to me. What if the catcher, when Machado steps in, what if the catcher just like punched Machado in the butt like you don't have to throw a pitch you just lean forward and you just punch him in the butt just charlie horse that's perfect i've been right like for that just just dead leg him you know i think the alternative like the non-violent alternative i think is to just keep the scoreboard camera like fixed on manny Machado all game long, no matter what he's doing. Just have the word fart like typed on the screen. But so from the slide and then waiting a day to do anything and then throwing repeatedly in Machado to then throwing at his head. And then Pedroia saying that wasn't me on camera to then Zach Britton saying later, if Pedroia can't control 30 grown men, then that's their problem.

control of 30 grown men then that's their problem like how many unwritten rules were tested over the course of this red sox orioles series just related to this one event yeah i mean that's at least at least four or five i mean the i i'm a fan of rodriguez missing three different times and just like the last one he gives this look like oh there are days and there are days. Because you look like the fool now. You wanted to do the frontier justice. Now you look like the fool. Backfired like Wile E. Coyote. There were a lot. I started getting tweets. Whenever there are unwritten rule transgressions, I get a lot of tweets at me because it's my brand. And people were saying, hey, there was a slide, there was a hit by pitch, and I just wasn't interested, because I've covered things like that. And I'm looking for the new hip unwritten rules. But this one had so much to dig into, that I was very glad it happened,

because no one's dead. And I mean, it's a very, very fun unwritten rule, transgression. The whole weekend was filled with them. I loved it. I forgot there was one more. After Barnes threw the ball behind Machado's head, of course, the ball was actually fouled off. The ball found the bat, and the ball rolled forward. And then John Farrell came out to argue

that the ball should have been fair. If you were to estimate, what is the approximate volume of each one of John Farrell's balls? I mean, oh, I was rushing to get this out this morning because I'm on West Coast time. And I want to get it out before everyone's all in a lunch coma on the East Coast. So I was rushing. But I meant to put that in there because that is the funniest dang thing you just you gotta just eat that you know that that barnes almost killed machado and you just sort of have to to eat it like to the point where if machado just went and took his base like feral probably should have stayed in there like yeah i know it was

yeah i'm not even gonna go out there for. To the point where he argues that it's fair. That's amazing. And you know what? If I'm feral, I might do it. Because that's like A-grade trolling. That is just... It's not like he didn't understand the situation. It's that he could have been a bigger ass about it.

And that's sort of his job and capacity to be a bigger ass when it calls for it. I love it. But yeah, it's definitely an unwritten rule that you just kind of got to let that go. And so Britton's kind of right when he's saying that Pedroia probably could have stopped this, right? Like it's all well and good that he publicly disavowed the action, but he could have either said something after the slide, like, hey, I'm okay with this, no need to do anything, or certainly after Eduardo Rodriguez attempted it and failed, he could have said, okay, it's over now. And for all we know, he did.

Maybe Matt Barnes just wasn't listening or wanted to be a hero anyway, but you'd think that it kind of is incumbent upon the injured player to pass that message along. Like you, you do often hear stories about players or coaches will pass along the message that so-and-so has to get some payback. So you'd think that the opposite would also apply and that you would pass along the message that payback does not need to be applied here. At the same time, baseball is just swimming in this mentality. It's so natural to them that Pedroia might have said like, yeah, I want him to get a fastball to the butt. I don't think he meant it, but it was kind of a clumsy slide. And here in this world, what makes sense

to all of us as baseball players, completely normal human beings is to throw baseballs at each other's butt. And like Pedroia might not have said, like, please don't throw it at his head because he feels like he doesn't need to. But he wasn't going to take away that sense of camaraderie or whatever that throwing baseballs at butts builds among pitchers. He wasn't going to take that away from the Red Sox pitchers. So I think he could have stopped it all. I think every baseball fight can stop if someone says, look, don't avenge me. I'm good. This is silly. We're all grownups here. But it doesn't happen because they're all swimming in this baseball lore where baseball's to the butt a positive thing and it builds character. It's a bonding moment. It makes me want to get a bunch of my

friends together and throw baseballs at each other's butts because there's got to be something to it. It's lasted for decades. I mean, what are we missing? What are we missing? You just have to put on a big giant boot and kick in the rear as a punishment for any sort of violation. I think it's like when you and Samson like crappy tweets to me that make me feel bad. I think that's a baseball butt in the writer world. You guys are mean.

So you pointed out that within that same interview, Britton also said that he should have been able to hit him in his body. And that's the takeaway for me here. It's the takeaway almost every time this happens, but especially this time, because people were defending Matt Boyd on Saturday by saying that, hey, he threw behind him. It wasn't all that dangerous. He wasn't actually throwing it at his head. Sure, but this incident on Sunday kind of tells us all we need to know about pitchers' ability to throw the ball exactly where they want to throw it. Eduardo Rodriguez is a major league pitcher. He doesn't have the best command, but he's still a big league pitcher.

And he was given three attempts to hit a large person, Manny Machado, and couldn't do it on any of them. And then Matt Barnes presumably was aiming for the body, and he almost hit him in the head. So we have to learn from this that pitchers, as pinpoint as their control can be, it's not really good enough to jeopardize someone's life here. And you, in your piece, you give the example of like throwing a switchblade and, you know, you probably won't actually hit the guy with the sharp end. You might just hit him off the blunt end or it'll just nick him or something, but you could get an artery or something and kill him. It happens. And yesterday

was kind of all we need to know about whether pitchers can or can't reliably hit a batter without hitting him somewhere very dangerous. No, I mean, I, I, I use the, the idea of the catcher having a spider in a jar and putting it on the hitter. I think Jeff's idea of a Charlie horse is much more practical, much better. Throwing baseballs just isn't going to work. And it's not going anywhere. This is just how it's going to be until someone gets killed. And that might not ever happen because it's pretty hard to actually do serious, serious, serious harm when trying to throw one into the butt.

But it's not going anywhere. But it's just a silly kind of tradition that's so insulated in its own bubble and weird. It's something you don't find anywhere else. So yeah, not going anywhere. But it's just, it's the oddest thing. I mean, I think it would be more effective for the pitcher to, like, just throw it straight up into the second deck of the stands and then, like, stare down the hitter. And then the fan gets a souvenir. No one's going to get killed. And the hitter knows, oh, man, I messed up.

Like, I mean, it sounds silly, but it's like if you do something for show is better than doing something for show where someone might get seriously hurt. I mean, you're putting a guy on base. It's like he's – I've seen it before where people do this in a one-run game or a two-run game and the guy comes around to score and it's like, oh, boy, I have regrets. So it's just a silly tradition. There's so many different other ways to get out your aggression on someone

who violated an unwritten rule, but just throwing baseball is just, they're hard. Have you ever picked up a baseball? Those things are hard. When something like this happens almost every single time, someone will come out and talk about how the penalties are not sufficiently severe for throwing in somebody's head, because that seems like the dangerous thing to do. So I've seen a few tweets and articles out there already saying that there needs to be a stronger deterrent. Do you think that there's any way to actually have a stronger deterrent in terms of widening the penalties for something like this? Or is that just a slippery slope for a couple of reasons? Because baseball needs to police itself somehow, or at least that's what the players would

say. Yeah, I'm going to go. I'm going to go scholarly on you. There's a book out about homicide investigations in South Central Los Angeles called Ghetto Side. And it's a very, very good book. And it talks about every society that the author researched, just going back to, you know, doesn't matter what time period, doesn't matter where in the world is it, every society has this sort of system of vigilante justice in place when they feel like they can't trust the official justice system. And it's just something that's across time, across generations, across regions. And it's fascinating because it definitely would apply here. If you're not going to trust baseball to properly get these guys out that are playing baseball the wrong way that are being too

reckless that are sliding too late something like that that's why this vigilante system is in place at the same time i don't know the answer i mean i don't what are you going to do to machado for for sliding a little bit wrong are you going to suspend to Machado for sliding a little bit wrong? Are you going to suspend him for a game? Are you going to dock his pay? That's not going to stop it, and it's not going to stop Pedroi and the Red Sox from getting mad when he slides a little bit over the base. I do think if you're talking about stopping the beanballs, yeah, I think there's going to be a way to stop that. Maybe it's with a committee, a tribunal, where you have three people looking at it to say, yeah, I think he was throwing it on purpose, or geez, I don't know. It could just

be an accident because of the game situation. And maybe giving some suspensions, a couple games for a starter, maybe a six-game suspension, something a little more onerous. And I think that would nip it in the bud if you're talking about eliminating the retaliatory hit by pitch. And if you can't tell, you can't tell and the guy skates. And that would give us so much to write about. We could just pour over these details frame by frame like we're a bunch of red socks in the dugout and determine whether or not this guy was trying to hit the other guy. Oh, I would love that as a writer. It might be safer. I was just going to say, what would we write in podcast about if this didn't keep happening? But you're right. Maybe we'd have even more to write in podcast about.

This crap bought me a house. All right. Keep going, gentlemen. Okay. We can wrap it up there. Always a pleasure, Grant. People can find Grant, as everyone already knows, at McCovey Chronicles, at SB Nation's MLB page, on Twitter, at McCovey Cron. Thank you, Grant. Thank you, gentlemen. who have already pledged their support include Patty O'Connor, Andrew Willey, Byron Ignoyan, Max Twine, and Patrick Green. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild

and you can rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. By the way, after we recorded, Matt Barnes was suspended for all of four games. Not much of a punishment, but not out of line with what baseball has done in the past.

If you're looking for something else to listen to, Michael Bauman and I have a new episode of the Ringer MLB show up. You can stream it at tunein.com slash the Ringer. We talked about the ongoing expansion of pitching staffs and we assessed the states of five teams that are off to rough starts.

And we talked to Latroy Hawkins about race and the underrepresentation of African-American players at certain positions and about relief roles and aging and his longevity, the best big league cities. So I'll leave it there. Keep your questions for me and Jeff coming to podcast at fangraphs.com.

You can also message us via the Patreon messaging system and we will talk to you soon. Right, wrong, I just can't stop it. Spending all day thinking just of you.