Take Me Out to the Old Brawlgame

Hockey, schmockey. What a goon sport baseball is becoming.

Here is a mere sample of this season’s unsportsmanlike conduct:

--Pedro Guerrero of the Dodgers threw his bat at a pitcher, David Cone of the New York Mets, just because Cone came inside with a curveball.

--Jose Oquendo of the St. Louis Cardinals slapped Will Clark of the San Francisco Giants upside the head with his glove, just because Clark slid hard into second base. When Clark struck back, Ozzie Smith attacked him from behind.

--Jim Rice of the Boston Red Sox grabbed his manager, Joe Morgan, just because Morgan sent up pinch-hitter Spike Owen to bunt, seeing as how Rice hadn’t sacrificed since 1980.

--Pete Rose, manager of the Cincinnati Reds, thumped umpire Dave Pallone with his forearms, just because Pallone had been slow to make a call.

--Billy Martin, manager of the New York Yankees, scooped up dirt by the handful and threw it at umpire Dale Scott, just because he, too, didn’t care for a call.

--Guillermo Hernandez, relief pitcher of the Detroit Tigers, sneaked up behind a sportswriter and emptied a pail of water on him, just because the guy had written something Hernandez didn’t like the season before.

--Shawon Dunston, shortstop of the Chicago Cubs, got into a shouting match with his manager, Don Zimmer, in the dugout during a game.

--George Bell, outfielder of the Toronto Blue Jays, refused to participate in a spring exhibition game because his manager made him the designated hitter.

--Steve Lombardozzi, infielder for the Minnesota Twins, drove over to teammate Dan Gladden’s house the other day, just to get into a fistfight with him there.

Baseball has rarely had such an ugly season.

Every time you turn around, another brawl has taken place. The Angels and Cleveland Indians got into a nasty one recently.

Naturally, about half of these things get started when a pitcher hits somebody with a pitch. If the pitch is anyplace higher than the batter’s shoelaces, that means he must have been throwing at the guy’s head.

Poor Eric Show of the San Diego Padres is so concerned about touching off World War III whenever he pitches in Chicago, he can’t even aim for the inside corner anymore. Ever since that skullball incident involving Andre Dawson--who can lean over the plate as much as he wants now--the Cubs and their fans are ready to riot if Dawson feels so much as a cool breeze from a pitch.

Baseball players are becoming a bunch of pampered, spoiled brats.

If they see an inside pitch, they point a finger at the mound and yell, “C’mon, man! C’mon!” even if the pitcher is throwing knuckleballs.

If they break so much as a toenail, they go on the disabled list for four to six weeks, because “my career comes first.” Remember: The team doesn’t come first. The career comes first.

If anybody slides hard into second base to bust up a double play, they go around screaming, “Mommy, Mommy, that man tried to hurt me.”

Heaven forbid if a manager asks them to move to a different position. Either they whine and moan about being left off the All-Star ballot, or demand to be traded someplace where they will be appreciated.

They call themselves team players, then pull stunts like Rice’s, which finally showed the public this guy’s true colors. Jim Rice is in it strictly for Jim Rice. He can’t bunt, can’t run, can’t field, and can’t hit home runs anymore, but the manager embarrassed him by taking him out.

Although Rice makes more than a million dollars a year, he has hit 30 or more home runs only once since 1979. When Morgan sent up Owen to bunt for him, Rice was embarrassed. What he should have been embarrassed about was that Owen also had more home runs this season than he did.

Baseball players have always misbehaved, but each year it gets worse. They feed you all this talk about setting a good example for kids, then go out and argue with umpires, curse, spit, hurl helmets, push away cameramen, foul up fundamentals, stand at the plate admiring home runs, move into totally obnoxious home run trots and charge the mound if the pitcher refuses to throw the ball across the center of the plate.

When Guerrero threw his bat, a writer described it as the sort of stunt a Little Leaguer would pull. He immediately got all sorts of mail from complaining parents, insisting that he had needlessly insulted their children, who would never behave that badly.

Yeah, sure. Every child in America behaves impeccably during baseball games. Not one of them emulates anything he has seen the big league players do. They’re all angels.

Keep that in mind the next time you do your kid’s laundry and accidentally find his pouch of chewing tobacco.

For some of us, at least, going to a baseball game is not much fun anymore.

The scoreboard and the organist conspire to tell us when to clap our hands. Some jerk in the left-field upper deck starts another boring wave, so we have to watch that miserable thing go around and around, and cover our ears against the din.

The games themselves are so slow, usually, we sit there begging the pitcher to throw the stupid ball. You swear if he goes over to first base one more time to check that runner, you are going to leap the wall, sprint out to the mound and scream into his face: “Pitch the damn ball!”

And then he pitches it, two inches inside, so the batter throws the bat at him, whereupon the catcher grabs the batter, which inspires the benches to empty, and boy, oh, boy, another fight. Baseball fever--catch it.

It won’t be long before we have to including the boxing in the box score.