Selig continues poor punishment record

Given the events of last nights altercation between the Milwaukee Brewers and Atlanta Braves, I would have expected some kind of punishment to be handled down, but once again the kids are running the house with no guidelines to controlling the household.

First and foremost, I will state that I agree with the Gomez suspension for 1 game. You can not jaw with everybody around the base paths and not expect something to occur. I also agree with the suspension of Reed Johnson, though I like how he then hid behind his coach after getting his shots.

Like one of my previous posts , how does McCann not get anything out of this, just like Matt Kemp earlier this year? How can not punish the secondary and third party offenders who commit equal or greater offenses than the people caused the initial starters. McCann ignited the fight, yet he gets nothing. This can no longer occur now or with the new commissioner in a couple of years.

You can not have these major brawls night after night in baseball. People might say that it is going to occur over a 162 game season with 30 teams, but honestly how is it even remotely acceptable in baseball, but in any other job where you work 3 times the hours a night for double the number of nights a year? If you start a fight at a normal job, you are out of a job, but in baseball you might not even get a fine.

This needs to change now, any person who does joins a fight should get ejected and suspended for future games. Period!

Selig allows fights to continue in MLB

If you have not heard by now, during the 4-0 victory for the Brewers over the Braves during Wednesday’s game, there was a little scuffle between Carlos Gomez and the rest of the Braves after his home run which ignited a beach clearing brawl. In this post, I could take the high level perspective on this and talk about the unwritten rules, but I want to have a different take on the events that occurred.

Bud Selig has lost control of the ship or at least lost control of the ability to right the ship when events occur that require a review and change in the rules. Even before I started this blog I knew the rules had to change, I even mentioned some of these rule changes within a previous post.

This is a simple rule change, simple! Any player who joins a fight outside of the original parties are ejected and hit with a suspension. This fact eludes Bud Selig that the rules have to change or at least he has to make the attempt to change the rules, even if the players union might reject them, then it is not on Bud.

Some will say that fighting is part of the game and that these “unwritten” rules are part of the baseball tradition. This complete bull, traditions are meant to be broken(or else there would still be gladiator fights at the Colosseum) and the rules should be changed. Baseball has been stuck behind this “unwritten” rules for too longer and something has to change, the first being the way we police the game.

One additional question I have out of the game today, how does Brian McCann not get ejected from the game? He escalates a volatile situation by standing in front of the plate and then gets in the face of Gomez. This is another problem with the MLB umpiring today, the inability to get the call right when large scale situation occur. Like in the NBA and NCAA basketball, the use of replay could have led to additional player being dealt with during the game [cough] [cough] Kelly Johnson [cough].

What do I expect in the end? Nothing. Bud might hand out a couple of fines and maybe a 1 game suspension, but nothing to address the root cause of the issue. In the end, what will it take for change? Season ending injury, career ending injuries or maybe incident that might end the reign as commissioner.

Only time will tell.