Fight Night

It is amazing how baseball works when you really get down to it. When all was said and done after the Yankees and Blue Jays came to blows last night (mainly Bombers catcher Jorge Posada and Toronto reliever Jesse Carlson), my wife turned to me and asked, "How do they go home and explain that to their kids?"

I didn't know how to answer it. On Baseball Tonight on ESPN and and the MLB Network's MLB Tonight, various talking heads discussed the need to "protect" teammates and this just simply being the way baseball is. I am someone who tends to agree. Baseball has this sort of small way of policing itself. Pitchers try to claim the inside part of the plate from batters lunging out over it. A pitch gets high and tight, a batter gets mad, and the cycle begins. Sometimes it ends with a couple of hit batters, and sometimes it ends with Graeme Lloyd and Jeff Nelson flying after Armando Benitez (video) or Posada and Carlson (photos).

But does it make any sense at all? I kept on trying to answer my wife with something that had some sort of substance. And I couldn't really come up with anything. My only answer was that this was just how baseball worked. The only way I could explain it to my kid (some day) would be the great saying "do as I say, not as I do"!

Any one of the Yankees who ran out to help Posada's cause could have been injured, which would have greatly derailed New York's desire to win the World Series this year. While Posada's anger can be understood (having a baseball thrown behind you at 90+ cannot be a fun experience), you have to wonder if this veteran should have known better than to go after Carlson after their exchange. What would people be talking about this morning, if Sabathia had wrenched his shoulder pulling the Yankee backstop from the pile? Just a thought...

What do you think? Do baseball brawls make even the slightest sense?