Thanks to a guy who sees the mound perhaps one inning a night, Washington Nationals slugger Bryce Harper may get the bean ball today against the Orioles and he knows it.
Why?
Because in Major League Baseball’s world of the bovine unwritten rule, if you admire a home run you get hit. And if one team’s best player gets hit the other teams best player gets hit. And so on and so on and so on.
Well that’s exactly what happened Wednesday night as the Nationals took yet another step towards their epic 2015 collapse when Orioles third baseman Manny Machado hit the go ahead home run off Washington ace Max Scherzer. However instead of sprinting out of the box like how you’re apparently suppose to, Machado stood and admired before he began rounding the bases.
This ended up enraging notorious crotch-grabber Jonathan Papelbon in the bullpen who took it upon himself to buzz Machado’s tower twice two innings later eventually hitting him in the shoulder while subsequently getting ejected.
After the game, Papelbon pretty much acknowledged what he did was intentional.
“Perception is reality,” he said. “If Manny thinks I hit him, then that’s what he thinks. I’m not going to sit here, go back and forth on whether I did or whether I didn’t, because it doesn’t matter. If he thinks I did, that’s what he thinks.”
Meanwhile Machado pretty much laid the situation out like it was.
“It’s something that’s uncalled for,” Machado said. “It’s [garbage]. It’s something that you don’t do. I expect more from a guy like that, with the past that he has. You’ve just got to go out there and keep playing baseball. It’s part of the game. If you can’t take the heat, just stay out of the kitchen and just go on from it. You don’t throw at somebody’s head. I think that’s [garbage]. I think we’ve just got to keep playing baseball.”
As far as Harper, he now knows he’s potentially next, since he is the Nationals’ best player.
“Manny freakin hit a homer, walked it off and somebody drilled him,” Harper said after the game. “It’s pretty tired…I’ll probably get drilled tomorrow.
Machado’s no saint when it comes being a tool on the field. I’m sure we all remember Machado’s weekend against the Oakland A’s last season that included him getting all worked up over the way Josh Donaldson tagged him out, hitting Derek Norris in the head with his back swing, getting thrown at then throwing his bat at Fernando Abad before both benches cleared.
Still though it doesn’t mean this has to boil over to Bryce Harper who had nothing to do with the incident other than playing for the Washington Nationals.
As far as I’m concerned it’s the same old school backlash that really makes the game vacuous at times.