Brushing Back the Present

I’m getting sick to my stomach watching the Patriots roll to another Superbowl. I don’t like that team. Never have. They are arrogantly humble. Except when they dance on their opponents’ midfield symbol, though it’s not like everyone doesn’t do that in these days of over-glorified celebration.

          Even baseball seems to have fallen upon these trends. Brushbacks have gone the way of light-hitting shortstops. Today, you throw inside on a guy, he dusts himself off and shoots a look back to the mound like you’ve said some unthinkables about his mother. Like it’s his homeplate. What in the name of Bob Gibson has happened?

          People love to say how they don’t condone violence. They like to say that in the face of aggressive sporting events where testosterone spews from all orifices involved without so much as a pause.  But people encourage. I encourage it and so do you. I encourage when I watch the Yankees play the Red Sox and want badly for Kyle Farnsworth throw up and in on David Ortiz just to remind whose plate he’s standing over. You might do it when you wait up until all hours of the night to catch the latest NBA fight. The adage is, you went to a fight and a hockey game broke out. So don’t tell me people don’t like violence.

          So what is there to do? Throw inside? Make batters afraid to keep inching closer and closer toward first base with each at-bat? Maybe. For some, it needs to happen. Not the Scott Rolen types, the ones who hit a home run, drop their heads and run the bases. But his teammate Albert Pujols, maybe just once someone should plant a ball in his ribs and see how much enjoys staring down those blasts.

          Same with Barry. He’s already on drugs and wearing more body armor than mideval knights. So why not throw one that hits him square where god has put the most padding. It’s possible he’s already been stung there enough already.

          Somewhere along the lines, pitching inside, brushing back hitters, playing the game of baseball, became a faux pas. Stuffy executives on high from their Madison Avenue perches gave a nod or made a wink and it became discouraged. Even though people like violence. Even though it could be argued that basebrawls are somewhat inherent to the game. That’s why it troubles me so much to here people say that fighting should be banned in hockey. That would be like saying you couldn’t hit-and-run or execute a suicide squeeze. It makes no sense.

Tensions rise. Blood pumps. Adrenaline flows. And pitchers need to throw inside. And if scuffles occur, I doubt baseball’s popularity would suddenly deflate. I think people would be relieved. Baseball would be back.

Now it is possible that it never left. That I’m missing the thousands, not hundreds, of these incidents occurring on a seasonly basis. But I doubt it. I feel like the game, and those in charge at its highest levels, have sent the wrong message. Offense is everything. Runs are all that matters. It started with the lowering of the mound during Gibson’s era, continued with the dreaded DH and has become the embarrassing standard to which baseball bows to at this juncture.

Ultimately, what is there to do with this seismic shift in baseball, this realignment of baseball’s dogma toward the offensively inclined? The same thing people should do with all of baseball’s problems: Blame Mark McGwire.