Baseball Brawls and Pratfalls
Since the All Star break, MLB has gone unhinged: Last night the Milwaukee Brewers went a little Lord of the Flies in the dugout; Manny Ramirez did the California split, bashing Red Sox Nation in the process (and as Slate suggests, perhaps fairly); last week Minnesota Twins manager Ron Gardenhire was suspended for one game for an outburst that led fans to throw hats and baseballs on the field, prompting White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen to pull his team from the field; Ozzie made news of his own when he decided to drop the vanilla replies commonly delivered by most MLB managers and flat-out admitted that he had ordered his pitchers to intentionally hit opposing batters; and the reigning baseball crime of the year remains this incident in Dayton, Ohio, in which a baseball thrown into the stands by a player during a bench-clearing brawl led to a fan being rushed to the hospital. More than peanuts flying around the stands these days…