posted 2007/08/23 at 15:07
Jeff Passan: "Accidental Villain" (Yahoo! Sports)
Ever since Jose Offerman got charged with assault for charging the mound in a minor-league game with his bat, hitting both the catcher and the pitcher who had just beaned him, I've had to think about the relationship of violence to sports. Actually, I'd been thinking about it earlier than that; during the lead-up to Barry Bonds breaking Hank Aaron's MLB home run record, my British brother-in-law kept suggesting that someone should fund an effort to get pitchers facing Bonds to deliberately hit him in the head with their pitches, in an effort to make sure Bonds didn't break the record. (This was before I stumbled on that article that talked about how all the extra gear Bonds wears makes it possible for him to fearlessly crowd the plate.) I suppose the fact that my hatred of violence does not extend to fighting in hockey also kind of plays into this as well.
Still, the Passan article brings up the fact that a baseball in the hands of a major league pitcher can quite easily be a lethal weapon, even taking into account all the protective gear that batters wear while they're in the batter's box. This raises an interesting question for me, because I'm not sure exactly where the line is being drawn in the Offerman case. He was quite deliberately beaned before he charged the mound, so the notion that Offerman's conduct merited additional action on the part of local law enforcement kind of puzzles me, because he was just attacked by a potentially lethal object himself. Yes, the tradition of pitchers beaning opposing batters at key moments is somewhat of a characteristic of the history of baseball, but that doesn't make it any less dangerous. The notion that the only thing differentiating Offerman's conduct from the conduct of the pitcher that beaned him is a mere sense of tradition doesn't make that much sense to me.
I don't think I've ever been able to create a fully plausible explanation as to why I tolerate, and to be honest really really like, fighting in hockey when I'm so opposed to violence in the rest of my life. I mean, part of it has to do with the fact that the players seem to police themselves much better through fighting than the league could ever hope to do (witness the rash of injuries to star players several years ago when the NHL made fighti instigation an automatic game misconduct), part of it has to do with the fact that the NHL probably wouldn't survive if they took fighting out of the game, and part of it has to do with the fact that it's kind of hard to put your weight behind a punch when you're on ice skates. Still, there have been instances in the past where I think a fighter's conduct has gone beyond the pale, such as Claude Lemieux nearly killing Kris Draper, and Todd Bertuzzi ending Chris Moore's career, although in both cases there was an element (hitting from behind) that clearly differentiates them from the normal "throw the gloves down" hockey fight.
I'm still trying to figure out the Offerman scenario, though; there's no question that he shouldn't have charged the mound with his bat, but at the same time I'm trying to figure out what makes that worse than the fact that the opposing pitcher deilberately threw a baseball to hit his body. Is there something I'm not seeing here?
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon