MLB Has to Do More to Control Its Bad Blood, Self-Policing Culture

Rob Manfred has enough on his plate. Major League Baseball's new commissioner has pace of play, dwindling offense and assorted business matters to worry about. That's plenty.

But there's another issue that belongs on Manfred's radar, one that some recent here-we-go-again controversies have highlighted.

This would be the league's tough-guy culture, which is getting to be a tired act.

Before we get on with the opinions and ideas that surely won't (translated: "definitely will") incite any Rabble-Rabble-Rabbling, we should get caught up. A lot has happened in the last couple of days.

Primarily, there's what went down between the Oakland A's and Kansas City Royals this past weekend. On Friday, A's third baseman Brett Lawrie got the bad blood boiling with a hard slide into second base that injured Royals shortstop Alcides Escobar:

Not surprisingly, Escobar wasn't pleased.

"In that situation, for me, that's a dirty slide," Escobar commented, per Matthew DeFranks of Fox Sports Kansas City. "If it was a double-play situation, he is going to slide hard. That's the first out, you can slide a little more easy."

But the real drama began after the slide. On Saturday, Royals right-hander Yordano Ventura responded by hitting Lawrie in the ribs with a 99 mph fastball.

Then, on Sunday, things got even messier. A's left-hander Scott Kazmir hit Royals center fielder Lorenzo Cain in the foot, causing him to hit the ground, and Royals right-hander Kelvin Herrera zipped a 100 mph fastball past Lawrie's head. Herrera was then seen glaring at Lawrie and pointing to his head.

That's a lot of ugliness, and the repercussions were plentiful. Ventura was ejected from Saturday's game, and Herrera was among five Royals ejected from Sunday's contest. On Tuesday, MLB revealed that it had fined Ventura and suspended Herrera for five games.

There was more tough-guy drama Tuesday night in Toronto. Blue Jays right fielder Jose Bautista didn't take kindly to having a pitch thrown behind him and let the Baltimore Orioles know it by hitting a long home run and taking his sweet time getting around the bases. Not surprisingly, words were exchanged.

In all, that's quite a lot of bad blood for only a couple of days' worth of games. And going off how these things usually go, it's probably not over.

Goodness knows there's probably plenty more where this came from. 'Tis a long season, and things always happen to turn moods foul. And when moods turn foul, baseball tradition dictates that foul play is fair game.

We all know this is just the way of things. But now let's talk about why this sucks and how things could potentially change for the better.

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We all want to be entertained when we watch baseball. That's what it's there for. And good news! It's doing the job really well.

As much as some like to argue that baseball is dying, the league's skyrocketing revenue and attendance figures say the opposite is true. Orioles skipper Buck Showalter may be right when he says these are the good old days.

But nonsense like the spat between the A's and Royals and Bautista's heel turn? Those have "bad old days" written all over them.

Charlie Riedel/Associated Press

What the A's and Royals engaged in was the kind of eye-for-an-eye theater that has a tradition stretching back through decades of baseball history. The core idea is that taking everything personally and retaliating in kind is not only A-OK, but the professional thing to do, dammit. 

But nobody ever comes off looking like a professional in such incidents. Rather than looking like struggles between superior professionals and lesser professionals, these incidents always come off as struggles between two warring factions of petty children. 

It's fortunate that the Bautista situation didn't get (or hasn't yet gotten) as ugly, but the general picture is more or less the same. What could have been a simple highlight of a super-sweet revenge dinger turned into a lowlight of grown men acting like children.

To be sure, such incidents are spectacles for people like us to talk about. And that calls to mind the old Oscar Wilde quote about the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

But though we dress up our conversations as debates about who was in the wrong and who was in the right, what we're really debating is which side was least idiotic. Baseball shouldn't want people having conversations like these, as they take the focus away from the good stuff. Namely, the baseball.

For now, it's kinda too bad. As long as players are ingrained with a tough-guy ethos that insists on getting even at all costs, the bad-blood battles will keep coming. 

And yet, it's worth asking: What if baseball could change things? What if it could turn the league's tough-guy ethos into a take-the-high-road ethos? 

Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press

First off: No, baseball can't eliminate all bad-blood battles before they even take place. But the league can at least try to control escalation, ideally by stamping down bad-blood battles before they get going and by making it known exactly what players are risking if they try to overrule MLB.

Take the situation between the A's and Royals. Despite what Escobar said, it's not entirely clear-cut that Lawrie's slide was dirty. But it definitely wasn't clean, as he went in really late, really hard and with his spikes up. Even if he truly thought he had a chance to break up a double play, that's not cool.

MLB could have made that clear to him right away by suspending him for the rest of the series. Doing so would have taught him a lesson and also would have denied the Royals a chance to exact revenge on him while their blood was hot.

Charlie Riedel/Associated Press

Meanwhile, imagine if MLB also put the Royals on notice. If Ventura knew he would be getting, say, an automatic five-game suspension and a fine for throwing a beanball at another A's player, maybe he would have declined to retaliate. If Herrera knew that upping the ante even further was going to mean a 10-game suspension and a fine, maybe he also would have declined to retaliate.

In a nutshell: a system in which MLB would beat the players to the policing. It could have kept the A's and Royals series from getting out of hand after Lawrie's slide and could hypothetically be similarly effective whenever there's a potential beanball war or any other budding fracas.

What happened between Bautista and the Orioles is a trickier situation. Because there was only glaring and jawing involved, only feelings were hurt. The only way to eliminate that from happening is to ban all glaring and jawing, and that's where these words from SB Nation's Grant Brisbee ring true:

"

If you take away a ballplayer's right to say chirpy things to opposing ballplayers, you're not going to stop fights. You're just going to sterilize the game and make it duller. Don't make baseball duller. Let the players complain at each other for our amusement without fear of getting suspended.

"

But while banning all back-and-forth jawing may not be a good idea, that doesn't mean MLB can't be on the lookout for particularly egregious instigators.

On Tuesday night, that was Bautista. A home run celebration isn't something MLB should be in a rush to eliminate. But there is a line between celebrating and taunting, and he crossed it. He wasn't reacting to the moment as much as he was trying to get a rise out of the opposition.

Umpires should have the license to eject such blatant instigators if they see fit. Had such a license been exercised Tuesday night, Bautista could have been tossed as soon as he crossed home plate. His last laugh would have come with a price that might have been good enough for the Orioles.

If MLB were to come up with a system like this, there's no doubt about one thing: Players would be really ticked off. It would undermine baseball's longstanding self-policing tactics and would thus strip players of their go-to methods of sticking up for themselves and their teammates.

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But eventually, the fallout could indeed be things changing for the better.

If initial complaining were to give way to acceptance, the result would be players responding to bad-blood situations by seeking to get even on the scoreboard. Rather than risk punishment with boneheaded actions, players would focus their efforts on taking it to the opposition where it really counts.

Sure, an extra layer of drama would be lost, but who's to say things would become more boring?

Lost amid the A's-Royals spat is how the Royals pulled off two pretty awesome late wins in the first and third games of the series that seemed to say, "Take that!" Take away Bautista's taunting strut and trot, and you're left with a hell of a "Take that!" home run.

These, certainly, are the kinds of tough-guy storylines that MLB could live with. They'd be dramatic, but they'd also keep the focus where it belongs: on the actual baseball.

Admittedly, what we're talking about here may be nothing but a fantasy.

Though it's shown more of a willingness to do so in recent years, baseball doesn't like to wash away its traditions. This is also a quest that would have to involve the MLB Players Association. Given that it would call for players to lose playing time and, more importantly, money, it would be a tough sell.

But at the least, an attempt to tamp down the game's self-policing culture in times of bad blood is worth considering. It's often a bad look, and MLB has allowed it to live long enough.

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