User Comments, Suggestions, or Complaints | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Advertising
Page rendered in 0.5511 seconds
48 querie(s) executed
| ||||||||
You are here > Home > Baseball Newsstand > Discussion
| ||||||||
Baseball Primer Newsblog — The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand Saturday, April 03, 2021Cincinnati’s Nick Castellanos tossed as Reds, St. Louis Cardinals scrap at plate and outfield
RoyalsRetro (AG#1F)
Posted: April 03, 2021 at 09:22 PM | 51 comment(s)
Login to Bookmark
Tags: cardinals, nick castellanos, reds |
Login to submit news.
You must be logged in to view your Bookmarks. Hot TopicsNewsblog: How Fernando drew thousands of extra fans
(19 - 8:22am, Apr 18) Last: Cooper Nielson Newsblog: OMNICHATTER for the weekend of April 17-18, 2021 (43 - 7:28am, Apr 18) Last: Rennie's Tenet Newsblog: Empty Stadium Sports Will Be Really Weird (12717 - 6:31am, Apr 18) Last: Ben Broussard Ramjet Newsblog: Minnesota Twins, Timberwolves postpone games in wake of police shooting of Daunte Wright (242 - 5:34am, Apr 18) Last: Lassus Newsblog: MLB salary down 4.8% in 2 years; top 100 earn half (15 - 11:50pm, Apr 17) Last: The Duke Newsblog: NBA 2020 Season kick-off thread (2692 - 11:14pm, Apr 17) Last: "bothsidesism" word 57i66135 Newsblog: The Athletic: Communication failures, poor decisions and messy breakups: How it all went wrong for the Colorado Rockies [$] (79 - 11:03pm, Apr 17) Last: Lowry Seasoning Salt Newsblog: In the minors, a major change as the Atlantic League plans to move the mound back a foot (84 - 10:23pm, Apr 17) Last: Lowry Seasoning Salt Newsblog: Why the Cubs' awful offense could trigger full rebuild if downward trend continues this summer (22 - 10:02pm, Apr 17) Last: Eric J can SABER all he wants to Newsblog: Blindsided Joe Girardi mum on player's sudden decision to take leave from team (6 - 9:15pm, Apr 17) Last: Starring Bradley Scotchman as RMc Newsblog: OT - Soccer Thread - Spring is in the Air (136 - 8:08pm, Apr 17) Last: Pirate Joe Newsblog: Cardinals' Yadier Molina becomes first MLB player to catch 2,000 games with one team (46 - 7:17pm, Apr 17) Last: Hank Gillette Newsblog: Pete Rose to sell picks for baseball, other sports through website (35 - 6:19pm, Apr 17) Last: Howie Menckel Newsblog: White Sox lefty Carlos Rodon throws no-hitter against Cleveland after losing perfect game in ninth inning (77 - 5:15pm, Apr 17) Last: SoSH U at work Newsblog: Waiter, there's OMNICHATTER! in my soup!, for April 16, 2021 (40 - 1:58pm, Apr 17) Last: salvomania |
|||||||
About Baseball Think Factory | Write for Us | Copyright © 1996-2021 Baseball Think Factory
User Comments, Suggestions, or Complaints | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Advertising
|
| Page rendered in 0.5511 seconds |
Reader Comments and Retorts
Go to end of page
Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.
1. Meatwad Posted: April 04, 2021 at 12:25 AM (#6011502)1) I don't think Woodford hit Castellanos on purpose. His control was so bad that he may have trouble staying on a big league roster through the end of April. Plus, that hasn't been STL's style over the years.
2) I also don't blame Castellanos for being angry. The pitch got him high enough to warrant a response and I was pretty impressed with his constraint after the HBP.
3) Obviously the benches don't clear if Castellanos just gets up and runs to the dugout after scoring. But neither do they empty if Molina doesn't grab at Castellanos's neck as he was walking away. You either toss both players or neither.
4) I also don't think that Andrew Miller's subsequent plunking of Naquin was intentional. But that's 3 hit batsmen by STL to 0 by CIN in this game, and Castellanos is the only one ejected. Doesn't look good.
That said Castellanos was just being a dick but I don’t think ejecting him was the right thing to do.
Speaking of being a dick I know you think you’re being cute here but honestly, I think this would have been great. Send a message that MLB is taking this very seriously. There is no reason for benches to clear during a pandemic that has killed over half a million people. If Castellanos and Molina wanna fight let them throw down. If the NHL can eliminate bench clearing brawls so can MLB.
7 - Yeah, I’d love to see that.
from mlb.com (takeaway: Castellanos has no idea what the phrase ‘Let’s [expletive] go’ means):
“I mean, look, I wore [92 mph] in the ribs. That don’t exactly feel good, you know?” Castellanos said. “I asked Yadi if it was an accident. He said, ‘Of course, it’s an accident.' Alright, Yadi is a dude, Yadi is a boss. Alright, I give him the benefit of the doubt. Alright, it’s an accident. I take my stuff off. I even asked the pitcher if he wanted the ball back. … I go to first and the only thing I’m thinking about is scoring.”
Woodford noted that the pitch was unintentional.
“Sinker got away from me. I'm just out there trying to go out there and do my job,” Woodford said. “I was just confused, honestly. There was nothing intentional from my [end]; I'm not out there trying to hurt anybody or throw at anybody.”
St. Louis did not like Castellanos' offering of the ball back to their pitcher.
"The baseball is really hard. And I think it got a rib and probably ticked him off,” said Cardinals starting pitcher Adam Wainwright, who was replaced by Woodford. "You never offer the ball back to the pitcher though, that's tired. He should know better than that."
Later in the inning with Mike Moustakas batting, Woodford threw a wild pitch past Molina that scored Castellanos from third base with a headfirst slide. Woodford was covering the plate when the two came together. Castellanos stood up and flexed over Woodford.
“I dove. I felt him kind of land on my side,” Castellanos said. “I saw the umpire said safe. I stood up and said, ‘Let’s [expletive] go’ and I walked off.”
That led to Molina defending his teammate with a shove to Castellanos’ back, which emptied both dugouts and bullpens.
“What I saw was a really aggressive, big baserunning play by Nick … where he had a great read and made a really aggressive and great slide to get in and score a big run in the game,” Reds manager David Bell said. “I know he got up, he was excited; I saw him celebrate a little bit. Then I saw him walk off, walk away, and the next thing I knew, I saw a lot of people running on the field.”
It's much harder for MLB to enforce. All of the other team sports feature the same number of participants on the playing surface at once. MLB's balance is often 9-1. Catchers are not going to let pitchers face off against a charging batter, so the third-man in rule is going to be broken virtually every time.
I'd like to see them crack down on this idiocy more than they have, but enacting NBA/NHL style rules is not likely to be successful.
- the catcher grabbing the batter before he charges -I’m fine with that. That’s still one on one.
- 9 to 1 players on the field - this is simple, if any other player other than the hitter and pitcher or catcher leaves his position he is suspended. Similarly if the catcher grabs the hitter when he charges and the pitcher leaves the mound the pitcher is suspended.
- the pitcher/catcher issue is a tricky one but not impossible to overcome. If the commissioners office uses some common sense (so yeah I see where it can go wrong) it is not difficult to figure out who is third man in whether it’s the pitcher or catcher. I also think by establishing a clear threshold we will see hitters not charging the mound.
- as part of this MLB has to make sure pitchers ruled to have thrown at a hitter face serious consequences.
I guess it’s not necessarily “easy” but I think with the right motivation it shouldn’t be particularly difficult either.
The catcher is going to protect his pitcher regardless whether he manages to stop him before he gets to the mound or after. That is not going to change. So you're already looking at 2-1 situations a lot of the time, and once that happens, teammates are not going to sit back in the dugout and let it play out.
This should be done through stiffer penalties for charging the mound. If that doesn't work, I don't see why establishing a protocol on third-man in or not leaving the bench would.
And there's the rub. Most times, we don't know.
If MLB is going to wipe these things out, it has to be through greater penalties for the participants. Adapting rules from another sport with a completely different playing structures is not the way to get there, IMO.
It'll change if you say any catcher who intervenes get a 30 game suspension without pay. The catcher is armored up, it's not fair to let him get involved.
Let the pitcher and hitter fight it out until the umps get there to break it up. Anyone else gets involved it's 30 days no pay. If the batter takes hit bat with him, he gets 80 games, no pay.
I think you’re being defeatist here. I know it’s hard to imagine a situation where catchers don’t do that but if you change the rules and by extension change the culture it can change. As a hockey fan I can tell you it’s doable. There are a lot of things about hockey that 20-30-40 years ago no one would have expected to change but faced with new rules the players have adapted very quickly with minimal fuss. It can be done, the will just needs to be there.
Hockey features two players fighting each other. Baseball features one player trying to fight another player 60 feet away. If the catcher intervenes, which he's going to do, the batter isn't going to turn his wrath on him, he's going to try to get free to go after the person he's mad at. And we know this, because it's what happens. The second man in a baseball fight is the third man in the actual confrontation.
Getting rid of these situations should be possible. Applying rules from other sports, competitions that are fundamentally different from baseball, does not strike me as the most effective way to do it.
The problem, as always, is baseball doesn't seem to care about getting it out of the game. It's not like MLB has tried everything and maybe they should look elsewhere. They've tried nothing.
And this completely writes off the structural differences between the sports, most notably the significant disparity in the number of players on the field at the same time and the nature of the combatants. The idea that catchers are just going to let an angry batter go after his pitcher strikes me as pretty damn fanciful thinking. And if there's a 2-on-1 situation, the rest of the offensive players are not going to just sit back on the bench and let the umps try to handle it.
And hockey still has a hell of a lot more fighting than baseball. Yes, it's eliminated bench clearing brawls. But it hasn't eliminated fighting.
So the catcher shouldn't even try to stop the batter from getting to the pitcher, even though he often prevents a fight? He's automatically the third man. Yes, that won't lead to any unintended negative consequences.
But we agree on one thing. Baseball has shown no interest.
Somebody really needs to write down these unwritten rules. And maybe rule #1 should be "pitchers need to grow a thicker skin." You can't talk to them, you can't glare at them, you can't toss the ball back to them, you can't cross their mound. I assume next it will be "getting up and trottting down to first base is tired."
as controversial as that Knicks-Heat playoff game was when the entire Knicks bench emptied onto the court and the league suspended 3 or 4 of them for each game in the rest of the series - well, you don't see that anymore.
so 9 against 1 is a complete red herring. now we're just down to the potential "2 vs 1" issue.
hockey instigating severe penalties for a "third man in" on a fight, as well as the punishment for leaving the bench, have changed the game significantly as well.
of course, I'm sure there were naysayers who said none of that would work.
Just curious in all of your years watching baseball, how many times have you seen a guy who got hit by a pitch, pick up the ball and offer to throw it back to the pitcher? Does that sound a bit unusual?
add in how many times have you seen a guy score on a play at the plate and stand up and flex like Castellanos did? Ultimately speaking wasn't Castellanos actions a bit unusual for any player in your long history of watching the game... and wasn't it a bit antagonistic in point...
You can ##### about the Cardinal's being hypersensitive, but nothing in Castellanos actions was normal for the game.
Which is the issue. You might think teams will allow their guy to be involved in a 2 vs. 1 fight, where one of the combatants is actually geared up for combat, but I find that unlikely.
Likewise, if you think catchers won't defend their pitchers from the angry batter, well I don't see that either, particularly as infrequently as these things actually happen.
So right there, your No one is allowed to leave the bench rule that works in the NBA is not going to work in MLB. Similarly, the third-man in rule is going to be ignored (and, let's face it, the third man, the catcher, is just as often a peacekeeper as he is an instigator.
If only baseball could be as fisticuffs-free as hockey, where a scant 17 percent of the games had a fight during the 2018-19 season.
Fighting in baseball is just different than other sports, and pretending otherwise is silly. It often involves one angry guy and one guy actively trying to avoid a fight. The antagonists are usually 60 feet away from one another when tempers flare, with another opponent much closer to the angry batter, someone who is going to try to protect his player. One team has as few as nobody else on the field of play, while the other has seven or eight (sometimes close to the combatants). Fighting is much more rare in baseball than in hockey, which also has a specific box to deal with in-game miscreants.
Could baseball borrow from basketball or hockey if it actually were interested in taking any steps to get brawls out the game (which, it doesn't)? Sure, possibly. Thinking that you could just drop the hockey and basketball models onto an entirely different sport and it will work just fine is ridiculous.
None of this is hard and it will work. MLB just doesn't see it as an issue.
And that's why no one ever did steroids again.
I don't see catchers allowing enraged batters to attack their sometimes apologetic pitchers without putting up a defense, regardless what possible suspension they might face. You're welcome to believe otherwise.
That's preposterous. A batter charging the pitcher will be stopped by the ump, when he's not always stopped by the younger, more athletic and closer catcher.
And, let's face it. As is the case with many MLB benches clearings incidents, nothing happened here. They looked like dicks, largely because they get pissed off about things like flexing or offering the ball back or glaring. But no punches were thrown. A bunch of people ran on the field and they kind of hugged one another and then they went back to their dugouts.
But maybe we can get rid of group hugs around home plate by just letting the pitcher and batter slug it out until they get tired, the way hockey handles it. And if we're lucky, perhaps MLB can go from a few incidents like this a year to fights in one-sixth of the games. The model is right there.
does anyone think this? I don't.
And the steroid example is particularly stupid. Anybody using PEDs believes he has a way to beat the system. They're not working on a model of I'll get caught but it's worth it.
Yes, they're certainly not as airtight as your "It works in hockey," line of reasoning.
It's still a deterrence-based argument.
This isn't as dumb as your Barry Bonds couldn't put a donut on his bat argument you used to toss around, but it's damn close.
I don't see catchers allowing enraged batters to attack their sometimes apologetic pitchers without putting up a defense, regardless what possible suspension they might face. You're welcome to believe otherwise.
Make it a year without pay. Still think they'll intervene?
Won't happen because MLB doesn't see the current situation as problematic.
And because it would probably require them to meaningfully address the whole issue of throwing at batters (batters started to charge the mound because they felt the league wasn't taking the issue of pitchers throwing at batters seriously. I'd say it really started with no consequence for Ed Farmer putting several Royals on the DL. Yes, there were fights before then but it wasn't common or nearly automatic. And for a long time if a batter wanted a piece of a pitcher nobody would intervene.) and frankly that's hard. Because there's the whole range from throwing at to buzzing to pitching inside to it just got away. And hell, he just leaned into it.
Posey would.
Not particularly. I mean I couldn't tell you how many times -- and usually the ball has bounced well away or been picked up by somebody else already -- but I'd say it's a fairly standard "this is how little your intimidation has affected me" move and perfectly acceptable under the circumstances.
I'd imagine that batters find "oops, sorry, didn't mean to drill you in the ribs with a 95-MPH pitch" a bit "tired" too.
add in how many times have you seen a guy score on a play at the plate and stand up and flex like Castellanos did?
Guys are flexing, fist-pumping, pounding their chests, jumping up and down, pointing at their fellow baserunners, pointing at somebody in their dugout, pointing at somebody in the other dugout, throwing a safe sign, etc. on virtually any "big", "exciting", "close" or even "mildly positive" play. Castellanos certainly was personal here (while the vast majority of others likely are not) but these actions are already negatively construed some proportion of the time -- i.e. aren't we constantly discussing the effrontery (or lack thereof) of bat flips?
You really get the sense of this watching MLB in Australia (and I assume other foreign countries). They can barely sell any ad time so all I get between innings is (the same over and over) highlights from the last few years. Other than things like Pujols' 3000th hit and Dodgers win 8th straight NL West, pretty much every highlight they show features some form of boasting. And some of these are things like a walk-off HR in a June game.
Where in the heck are you seeing "attack" happen? Or even enraged? Seriously. Castellanos comes in sliding, gets kneed in the back(probably not intentional) on the tag, gets up, says a few choice words and walks away. He's not standing there for like a minute. He basically has enough time say f*ck off and walks away.
Molina then shoves him in the back; that's bush league.
How in the heck are you thinking that comment was referring to the Castellanos play?
We're talking about implementing rules changes to prevent all types of on-field brouhahas, Hugh.
Sorry, I didn't read all the posts, my mistake on assuming that quote was specific to the Castellanos play.
SOmeone makes a pt about hockey and you proceed to go off on it because it's not like baseball. True its not like baseball but you're missing a larger pt.: Fighting in many sports has been cleaned up to a great extent the past several decades.
No one mentioned basketball, the same protocols that they have in hockey were put in basketball and obviously the fighting we used to see has been hugely stopped. I dont know enuf about the other sports, but I think this is more of a trend we have seen in the last 40 or 50 years (you dont see insane yelling and screaming in tennis as much anymore either but I dont watch much). To not acknowledge that amounts to just copping an attitude and not trying to have a debate.
hockey figured out how to sharply limit fighting beyond 1-on-1 (you kids... redux)
baseball can do the same, if they like.
not "the same rules as other sports."
but there is a path to shutting this stuff down totally, or mostly.
Fighting in hockey dwarfs fighting in baseball. There are, on average, fights in every six games in the NHL. Baseball teams probably go an entire year without having an actual fight (where punches are thrown, not like what happened here). Hockey has gotten rid of bench-clearing brawls, and fighting has gone down, but brawling is still far more prevalent in hockey than it is in baseball.
And I would say that Ron and others are missing a major point. You can't simply apply rules in one vastly different sport to baseball and expect the same results, primarily because baseball is structured so damn differently than any of the other major team sports.
Let's look at the third-man in rule that has worked so well in hockey. It does work, because in hockey, two guys square off, the rest let them go at it, and you avoid the big scrums that used to be prevalent.
Apply that to baseball. In most cases, the third man in is the catcher (since it's the pitcher who the batter is angry with). If you prevent the third man in (as Ron wants) by assessing huge penalties if he intervenes, then you're punishing the guy who more often than not is the player who prevents a fight from taking place. But throw a zero tolerance rule in there, and if deterrence works, he can't play the peacekeeper role any longer. Moreover, if, as Ron suggests, a stiff deterrence will prevent the catcher from getting involved, perhaps it would also make the batter more likely to charge the pitcher, knowing the fight will be one on one.
The bottom line is baseball doesn't actually have many fights. It has a few situations like this where guys come out of the dugout and preen and grab a dance partner from the other team and they all look like jackasses, but ultimately no punches are thrown and nothing really happens. And, yes, on rare occasions, a full on donnybrook ensues. But, for the most part, fighting is not a major part of the sport. It's distinctly possible that enacting some zero tolerance rule the way hockey did with third-man in or basketball did with its no men can leave the bench can result in more actual fights than we have now. You know, because baseball is a much different sport and consequences unintended.
There's still a lot of fighting in hockey simply because the NHL doesn't want to get rid of it. What they wanted to get rid of was the team brawls, and they've done that. But 1-on-1 fighting just hasn't been addressed and there's little sign it's ever going to be, even in the Concussion Age that we're in now. That said, fights are way down anyway from their historical norm, seemingly mostly because fewer teams see an advantage in employing goon "enforcers" who suck at hockey, like they did in the past. I would guess this is a result of the league getting tougher on discipline for dirty hits, in contrast to the "anything goes" attitude that persisted until fairly recently, but that's speculation on my part. Regardless, the excerpted comment (more or less repeated in #44) is irrelevant.
Aside from that, obviously a rule stating that you get suspended if you leave the dugout/bullpen during altercations will result in players no longer leaving the dugout/bullpen during altercations. This seems so blindingly obvious that I can't believe there are any objections to this. Same goes for a rule saying that defensive players leaving their positions will be suspended; e.g., if the first baseman runs in to a scrum at the plate, he'd be suspended. It would be extremely easy to get rid of the "9 vs. 1" dynamic that SoSU is concerned about - you join in, you get suspended, easy as that.
So that just leaves the batter/pitcher/catcher dynamic, but why is this complicated? Any of the three that are involved in an actual fight will most likely be suspended anyway. So you don't really need any additional rules to address this.
With those rules in place, the Castellanos incident would have been a few seconds of Castellanos and Molina jawing at each other and that would have been that. Real fights would be extremely rare - they are anyway - because fighting just isn't much of a part of the culture in baseball like in hockey and almost no one actually wants to fight. So cutting out these posturing bench-clearing time-wasters seems like the only point in any rules changes to begin with.
I think if the pitcher knew he might have to fight the batter 1-on-1, intentional HBPs would go way down. If the intentional stuff goes down, batters will be far less likely to charge the mound; they'll be assuming mistake rather than beaning.
Not for Castellanos, who just got a two-game suspension. Getting thrown out of the game was harsh but I could see it. But a suspension, just come on. Nothing for any of the Cardinals.
Yadi is the one who turned it into an altercation. He deserves the longest suspension.
You must be Registered and Logged In to post comments.
<< Back to main