2015 ROYALS—The "Brawl" in Chicago

April 23^rd, 2015—White Sox

The rowdy Royals are at it again, but like most baseball fights the “brawl” in Chicago isn’t nearly as bad as it looks.

I watch video of the fight—pretty much frame by frame—and don’t see all that many punches being thrown; like most baseball fights it’s mainly a lot of pushing and shoving. Baseball fights tend to involve a couple guys who are actually mad at each other and a bunch of their teammates who come out on the field because baseball tradition demands it.

After Opening Day—when Jeff Samardzija appeared to hit Lorenzo Cain on purpose—it wouldn’t be surprising if the Royals were looking for a chance to retaliate, but since this is the American League and pitchers don’t hit, retaliating against Samardzija will be complicated; you just put it on your to-do list and wait for an opportunity.

17 days later Samardzija provides one.

In the top of the seventh inning Christian Colon lines into an inning-ending double play and for some reason, Samardzija yells at Colon from the Chicago bench: the Royals don’t like it.

In the bottom of the seventh inning Adam Eaton hits a ball back to pitcher Yordano Ventura and while running to first base Eaton says something to Yordano. Ventura responds with the two words everyone in America can lip read and once again the second word is you.

(See? Ventura’s English is coming along just fine.)

The story I hear is Eaton thought Ventura quick-pitched him and said something to Ventura about it. The Royals pitcher responds with an F-bomb and Eaton never gets to first base; he makes a left turn and heads for Ventura.

The first base umpire and Eric Hosmer control Eaton and the home plate umpire gets in front of Ventura. Yordano makes an “I’m fine, everything’s cool” gesture. Mike Moustakas comes in from third base and pushes Ventura toward the Kansas City dugout. Adam Eaton is being led down the first base line, away from the infield.

The two guys who started things are walking away from each other and everything appears to be under control; but other players arrive late on the scene and that gives the two guys who really are mad at each other—Samardzija and Cain—a chance to settle their differences.

At this point the “brawl” still appears to be a lot of milling around; you can see more violent behavior from a group of suburban housewives at half-price sale. If someone is actually throwing punches, it’s not visible on the replay I’m watching. Then the group splits like an evolving amoeba; the group on the left surrounds Samardzija, the group on the right surrounds Cain.

Lorenzo’s being drug away from Samardzija by Royals hitting coach Dale Sveum. No one on the White Sox appears to have control of Samardzija. Everybody else is just struggling for position and generally doing a whole lot of nothing.

People are still milling around when the camera pulls back and Jarrod Dyson can be seen running onto the field.

Dyson is usually at the front of these things, so he must’ve been in the bathroom or up in the clubhouse when the disagreement started. (Imagine coming back from the men’s room and realizing your friends have left to storm the beaches of Normandy without you.)

Cain’s still being restrained by Sveum and third base coach, Mike Jirschele. Suddenly Samardzija charges into the picture. Clearly, none of his teammates are holding Samardzija back and that’s one of the reasons this thing keeps going.

Sveum swings Cain out of Samardzija’s way, like a matador pulling his cape back as a bull charges. Samardzija misses Cain, but bowls into Jirschele. Samardzija and Jirschle fall to the ground and that’s when Royals pitcher Edinson Volquez does something amazing:

Edinson Volquez throws the single worst punch I’ve ever seen in my life.

Volquez’ punch misses by a large margin and he spins around; if he connected with Samardzija’s head he would have done a lot more damage to his hand than what seems to be the very thick skull of Jeff Samardzija.

Edinson’s attempted haymaker draws the attention of some of the White Sox and now Volquez goes into a boxer’s stance; as long as you define “boxer’s stance” as someone who is backpedaling rapidly while trying to look dangerous.

Meanwhile…

Two White Sox coaches get a grip on Dyson; one of them has Jarrod in a chokehold from behind. Jarrod looks like he might have a little more experience at this stuff than Volquez; he slips out of the choke hold, then throws one of the coaches to the ground with a “Take that, motherfucker!” look on his face.

At that point I look to the right side of the video screen and Volquez is now down on the ground. I rewind the video to see who decked Eddie, but it turns out the Royals’ Raging Bull decked himself; he was dancing around in his boxing stance, slipped and fell flat on his face.

This “brawl” appears to have a lot more huffing and puffing than houses being blown down.

At one point Volquez is being restrained by an umpire who appears to be old enough to collect Social Security and—as I said about Brett Lawrie earlier—if a middle-aged umpire who looks like he needs a dose of Metamucil can hold you back, you just don’t want it that bad.

Still, there might have been some punches thrown somewhere; Chris Sale comes out of the crowd holding his nose or his mouth like he’s taken a shot to the face—but it also might have been an elbow thrown without malice. You get into the middle of these team-wide shoving matches and you can get hurt by accident. But Sale must have been mad at somebody; later he went to the Royals clubhouse looking for trouble, but didn’t find any.

When the Royals get back to Kansas City I ask Edinson Volquez—who is a very likeable guy—just what he thought he was doing during the “brawl” and he starts laughing and says:

“I don’t know, it’s like I went crazy!”

And so we get back to Yordano Ventura.

This is his third on-field incident in the month of April and that suggests a pattern: if teams can rattle Ventura and get him off his game, they will and there will be more blowups and altercations that hurt his career and the Royals chances of success.

The Royals have to decide how they want to respond to what’s been happening: at times other teams appear to be baiting them and so far the Royals have taken the bait. And once the Royals respond they get criticized for being out of control.

Somehow these nice guys from the Midwest (actually, a lot of them are nice guys from Latin America) have become the Bad Boys of Baseball.

After the White Sox “brawl” (which is giving it way too much credit) a newspaper columnist criticizes Yordano Ventura and asks what happened to that nice young man who seemed mature beyond his years; but that image was a false one—that Yordano Ventura never existed. That Ventura was a figment of the media’s imagination.

Ventura’s the same player he always was; a kid with a chip on his shoulder and when he gets into an altercation, he’s dragging his teammates along with him.

April 26^th, 2015—White Sox

If you want to know something valuable about outfielders, watch them go after a fly ball near a fence: once they hit the warning track, some outfielders are done—they slow up. They’re not going to risk injury by slamming into a wall or a rolled up tarp.

In this game Alex Gordon goes after a foul pop fly down the left field line, hits the warning track and just keeps going; he leaps over the low fence separating the field from the fans. Gordon catches the ball, dives head-first into the stands, lands upside down in the second row of seats and then holds his glove up with the ball inside so the umpires can see he made the catch.

Just in case you haven’t seen the play, here it is:

Plays like this are part of why Old-School ballplayers love Alex Gordon.

Talk to guys who played Big League baseball back in the day and you might hear about the current generation of ballplayers being soft. They don’t break up double plays, they don’t run over catchers; pitchers are afraid to hit somebody and say what are you gonna do about it?

It’s been my experience that every generation thinks the generation that follows it sucks, but no matter how Old-School the retired player is you never hear a bad word about Alex Gordon. As far as the Old-School guys are concerned, Gordon plays the game the right way and that includes running into solid objects in order to make important catches.

BTW: After he gets to know me, Alex admits that after he runs into a wall, knocks himself silly and is lying there on the ground while the crowd wonders if he’ll ever get up:

“Sometimes I milk it.”

Hey, when you make a catch so spectacular the other team’s fans cheer you, enjoy the moment.

April 29^th, 2015—Indians

Against the Cleveland Indians Alcides Escobar takes a 96-MPH fastball to the face. The initial diagnosis is a bruised cheek, but even if the physical damage is not severe, getting hit in the head can cause a ballplayer psychological damage.

In 2014 Omar Infante was hitting .348 when he took a Heath Bell fastball to the jaw.

Infante’s lifetime average was .276 so it seems pretty unlikely that Omar was going to keep hitting .348, but after taking that pitch to the head, Infante hit .247 for the rest of the season—almost 30 points below his lifetime batting average. To be fair, getting hit in the face may have had nothing to do with Infante’s drop in average, but it definitely didn’t help.

When a batter takes a pitch to the head, pay attention to what happens next: how does he react to inside pitches? Does he hang in there when like-handed pitchers throw sliders and curves? Does he still lean out and cover the outside corner of the plate?

If word gets around that a batter is afraid, pitchers will buzz the tower—baseball slang for pitching up and in—back the batter off the plate and then get him out with pitches away; pitches the batter does not want to lean out over the plate to reach.

During the White Sox series, Mike Moustakas took a Chris Sale changeup off the front shoulder and then the pitch deflected into Mike’s jaw. Mike went down and laid there for a while. Later I ask what he was doing right then and Moose says he was using his tongue to check all his teeth. His teeth were all there so Mike got up and took his base. Mike got lucky; it could have been a lot worse.

Still, getting hit in the head is scary; so how did Mike react to taking a baseball off the jaw?

After taking one to the face Mike Moustakas went 11-for-24, a .458 average. When I tell Moose he actually got better after getting hit in the head, we both crack up.

April 30^th, 2015—Tigers

On the last day of April the Royals start a four-game series with the Tigers. Detroit’s playing well and people in the media are calling it a big series. Rusty Kuntz disagrees: “You guys think it’s a big series, but it’s not.”

Rusty thinks if you play a four-game series with a really good team and split, you did OK. You didn’t gain ground, but you didn’t lose any either. Rusty thinks the series that follows—a mid-week series with the Indians—is much more important.

Cleveland’s scuffling and that’s when the Royals can make up ground; they need to sweep the Indians or at least win two out of three. If you want to go to the playoffs, hold your own against the good teams; beat up on the bad ones.

The Royals win the first game against the Tigers and finish the month of April with a 15-7 record.

It’s a good start, but the Royals already have some injuries: Alex Rios broke a hand, Greg Holland went on the DL with a pectoral strain and Omar Infante pulled a groin (fortunately, it was his groin).

The Royals have also had an unusual number of on-field altercations and are being called the “Bad Boys of Baseball.” But the scuffles, hit batters and outside criticism brings the team together; the Royals are going to protect their own.

Lorenzo Cain says: “We’re a family here. We’re going to back each other. That’s the way we work.”

After the first month of baseball, the 2015 Royals are developing an us-against-the-world mentality.

Next up: May.