MLB Bullets is spoiling for a fight

Today we get to learn how to play the game “the right way.”

• There were three bench-clearing brawls in baseball on Wednesday, one between the Padres and Rockies and two between (of course) the Yankees and Red Sox. David Schoenfield has a recap on all three fights and offers his take.
• Whitney McIntosh decides to pick some winners and losers in the Padres-Rockies brawl. I can make it simpler: they’re all losers as are we as baseball fans.
• Tim Brown has a rather strange piece analyzing the fight from the point of view of Padres catcher A.J. Ellis, whose only job here was to try to stop the fight from happening but he couldn’t because he’s old and in catcher’s gear.
• The Padres say that the brawl will bring their team together. With luck, they’ll all be united in a long suspension.
• MLB has handed down a six-game suspension to Boston pitcher Joe Kelly and five games to Yankees infielder Tyler Austin. We’re still waiting on the Rockies-Padres suspensions. Here’s one example where the commissioner caring much less about your team plays to Colorado and San Diego’s advantage.
• The “best” moments from the Red Sox-Yankees brawl.
• Bob Nightengale chalks up all this up to being just another compelling chapter in the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry.
• Even Drelich says the fight showed that the Red Sox are united as a team but Drelich isn’t sure who is to blame for the brawl.
• Gabriel Baumgaertner has a brief history of Yankees-Red Sox brawls.
• Certainly this bad behavior by professional baseball players isn’t setting a bad example for the youth of America. Because the “adult” managers of one youth baseball league in New Hampshire was upset that a girl dared to play in the league so they conspired to keep hitting her in the head with pitches until she quit. Man, I’m in a foul mood today. I wonder how bad I’d feel if the Cubs had lost yesterday. Oh yeah, they did.
• Rangers shortstop Elvis Andrus will miss six-to-eight weeks after being hit in the right elbow with a pitch. Elvis has left the building.
• David Brown writes about how Angels reliever Kenyon Middleton is sorry about hitting Andrus and wants to apologize. He insists it was not intentional.
• It’s hard to make an injury funny, but somehow Amanda McCarthy manages to do it. When oft-injured Braves pitcher Brandon McCarthy dislocated his shoulder covering first on a play, his wife Amanda managed to own him pretty hilariously on Twitter. I’ve been seriously wondering why Amanda McCarthy doesn’t have her own show somewhere. Maybe she does and I just don’t know it. When you count streaming, there are more channels than there are people on the earth today. Somebody is probably filming my life right now and is very, very bored.
• OK, now for baseball news that makes people happy! Especially if you’re an Angels fan, because Zach Kram writes that we may not be appreciating how great pitcher/DH Shohei Ohtani is yet. He compares Ohtani to what you’d get if you combined Noah Syndergaard with Kris Bryant. So he’d be a Norse god with sparkling blue eyes?
• Jon Heyman asks how did everyone (including himself) get Ohtani so wrong? For one, we need to stop pretending that anything that happens in Spring Training, other than injuries, matter. I guess gate receipts matter too.
• By the way, Ohtani wants to play more. The Angels have been giving him regular off-days around his pitching starts and Ohtani wants fewer of those.
• Also, a kid asked Ohtani if he could have one of his bats so Ohtani went and got him one.
• Grant Brisbee looks at all of MLB’s recent rules changes (and a bunch of rumored more) to speed up the pace of play and thinks they could have some unintended negative consequences.
• Brisbee also rants against the possibility of a mercy rule in MLB, which will probably never happen but he wants to rant some more against MLB. (His characterization, not mine.)
• Matt Snyder writes that Pirates outfielder Gregory Polanco looks like he’s finally breaking out and living up to his earlier hype. He could have waited a few more days.
• Bradford Doolittle wonders if Polanco’s breakout could get fans in Pittsburgh excited again. Or at least not mad at the Pirates. It’s hard to be mad and in first place.
• Liz Roscher explains why the Mets are off to their best start in franchise history.
• Jon Heyman looks at seven teams that are off to surprisingly good starts and weighs how much stock you should put into their hot starts.
• A look at how the players who are heading for free agency at the end of the year are doing so far.
• Jon Heyman gives odds on where Orioles shortstop Manny Machado will sign. He has the Cubs as the third-most likely team which reminds me that Machado and Albert Almora Jr. grew up together and consider each other to be family to the point where they call each other “cousin.”
• Danny Heifetz lists the six strangest things in the first 11 games of Phillies manager Gabe Kapler’s managerial career.
• Forbes is out with their annual list of the most-valuable MLB teams and to no one’s surprise, the Yankees are number one. The Cubs are up to number three.
• At the bottom are the two Florida teams and one reason may be that the Marlins’ Double-A affiliate in Jacksonville outdrew the Marlins in Miami on Wednesday.
• Jeff Passan praises the Orioles plan to sell $0 tickets to kids as a way to build interest in the game.
• The Nationals signed free agent first baseman Mark Reynolds.
• The Nationals have also designated Miguel Montero for assignment.
• Two members of the Class-A San Jose Giants both hit for the cycle in the same game. It’s believed to be the first time in history that it’s happened. It’s never happened on the major league level. Of course, the game was in Lancaster.
• Reds infielder Cliff Pennington pitched on Thursday, becoming the first player in history to have made his regular-season pitching debut after his postseason pitching debut. He pitched for the Blue Jays in the 2015 ALCS, if you remember.
• Some great fielding porn as Padres catcher Austin Hedges makes a terrific grab of a foul pop and turns a double play.
• Meg Rowley did something interesting and did a critical analysis of the rulebook to see what subtext meanings she could elicit about the game of baseball. I found it fascinating at least, but I went to school for too long because basically, I never learn.
• And finally, more history. Giants pitcher Chris Stratton one-hit the Padres Thursday night and the one hit he allowed was to pinch-hitter Clayton Richard, of all people. It was the first time in history that a team’s only hit was by a pinch-hitting pitcher.

And tomorrow will be a better day than today, Buster.