Dave Bidini is the author of Baseballissimo and The Best Game You Can Name
After discovering that the hedgehoggish hitter John Kruk was a member of the Philadelphia Phillies, a woman unfamiliar with his work commented, "You don't look like an athlete." Mr. Kruk told her, "Lady, I'm not an athlete. I'm a baseball player."
It's a line that reflected Mr. Kruk's Everyman modesty, but it also pointed to a generous game that has been played by one-armed men – Pete Gray, Jim Abbott and Coleman Shannon, who pitched a no-hitter at 14 – the short, the gangly, the enormous, as well as the psychedelically affected, including Doc Ellis, who threw a no-hitter on LSD, and Bill Lee, who was stoned for the Montreal Expos' entire 1980 season.
Baseball, in all its imperfections, shows us who we are because very few players play perfectly.
It's the only game in which mistakes are written down and displayed on a scoreboard and kept forever. Failure is a given in baseball – a championship team will lose 40 per cent or more its games – and success is measured in small, sweet fruit, sort of like life itself.
Because of its inherently prosaic nature and low, freeing tempo of play, the events of yesterday's Blue Jays-Rangers game, in which Texas second baseman Rougned Odor delivered a bare-knuckle jab to the jaw of Toronto slugger Jose Bautista after a hard slide, seemed doubly shocking.
A frantic brawl erupted after the punch – another happened a few batters later – laying waste to baseball's reputation as the most genteel and, perhaps, gentlemanly sport. Mr. Odor's reaction to the play was obscene in a game centred around its social nature.
Baseball is one of the few sports in which conversation is a large dimension of what happens on the field. Catchers talk to pitchers, batters talk to catchers, base runners talk to infielders, and, most poignantly, first basemen talk to batters who reach base, addressing them like a Wal-Mart greeter or a maître d' asking if all is well with their evening.
Seeing this environment turn bloody and violent was to see the very heart of the sport cored by a single gesture. Lots of interesting things happened in baseball yesterday – the Pirates finally beat the Cubs, for one – but all anyone could talk about was the punch – who threw it, why he threw it, and what it said about the condition of the game.
In Canada, we impulsively reached for hockey analogies quicker than your uncle for his pack of smokes. But if hockey still harbours the occasional fight or face wash or shivving or slew foot without it being perceived as a blight, the same cannot be said for baseball – a sport where men can throw 100-mile-an-hour fastballs and not be threatened by angry batters.
There exists a civility in the game that is different than that of any other sport. It shows us that we can play hard and play well and honourably, with care for each other, without losing our minds and throwing punches. Or at least that's how it works with teams not named the Rangers.
Mr. Bautista's crime, apparently, was flipping his bat after crushing a series-deciding home run against the Rangers during last year's playoffs. Some would argue this was unsportsmanlike – although it's not like he rode the bat and waved his hat like Slim Pickens at the end of Dr. Strangelove. He certainly didn't deserve being UFCed by Mr. Odor at second base on a late spring day.
Maybe everyone should reacquaint themselves with the true essence of the sport – and recall what happened to Detroit Tigers junk-ball pitcher Dave LaPoint after he rode an elevator in his bathrobe during a road swing in the 1980s. A woman came on, and they started a conversation. She asked what he did for a living. He told her he was a ballplayer. The woman looked over his stumpy legs, full jowls and ample boiler and wondered: "Softball?"
Note to Rougned: let's keep the game civil and inherently good natured. Anything less, and the sport, and maybe more, is doomed.
Editor's Note: An earlier version of this column incorrectly identified how many games a championship baseball team would lose. This version has been corrected.