Where was Rob?

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Baltimore Orioles fans

The commissioner’s lack of thought or action over the unwarranted Kevin Brown suspension is more than just a terrible look.

In 1988, the Democratic National Convention rocked to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s list of doings and concurrent demands of Republican presidential nominee George H.W. Bush, “Where was George?” Those who knew too well of (speaking politely) Kennedy’s rakish and adulterous ways snarked right back, “Dry, sober, and home with his wife.”

This week’s uproar over Orioles broadcaster Kevin Brown’s suspension on perhaps the most nebulous grounds imaginable should have prompted the demand, “Where was Rob?”

Since not enough owners proved dry and sober enough to look all the way deep, the commissioner has another term to serve, through 2029. How delicious is this: Manfred got his extension on the same day Brown was last seen and heard on television for the Orioles. And from the moment we learned the Orioles took Brown’s matter-of-fact comparison between the Orioles’s lack of success in the Rays’ home stadium the past couple of years and its success there this year as fouling their nest, Manfred’s silence has been as deafening as a heavy metal concert.

The clip in question has been viral this week. It’s impossible to hear it and conclude that Brown was anything other than absolutely complimentary about the 2023 Oriole turnaround in Tropicana Field. The turnaround was included in the team-provided game notes. That didn’t stop Orioles boss John Angelos or a designated subordinate from suspending Brown.

It took Awful Announcing to unearth the suspension. It took about ten seconds from their posting it aboard the social media site formerly known as Twitter for the suspension to go pandemic-level viral. It took about that much time, too, for the Orioles to start taking it on the chin for Angelos’s stupidity. But it’s still too much time without a peep from the so-called steward of the game.

Major league broadcasters poured out support for Brown en masse. One, Yankee broadcaster Michael Kay, said that if Angelos didn’t like Brown speaking the plain facts, “then he’s thin-skinned, he’s unreasonable, and he should actually get a call from Rob Manfred, the commissioner of baseball, because it’s unconscionable that you would actually suspend a good broadcaster for no reason whatsoever.”

So far as anyone knows at this writing, Angelos hasn’t gotten the call. Not even after broadcast legend Al (Do you believe in miracles? Yes!) Michaels said (to ESPN’s Jeremy Schaap), “I thought that it was either a joke or there was something much more insidious behind the suspension. And now that I realize that it had everything to do with what was said about Tampa Bay and playing the Rays. I agree, there should be a suspension here. They should suspend the doofus that suspended Kevin Brown.”

Manfred is renowned for a good many things that don’t include statesmanship. Baseball’s version of Winston Churchill he isn’t. But the commissioner has a very broad mandate within the rules outlining his job to act in the best interests of baseball and to act against a team, a player, a manager, an umpire, anyone who’s done something he believes detrimental to the game and the trust the public holds for it.

Commissioners have not always deployed that broad power wisely, of course. Without saying so outright, or with mealymouthed denials, Kenesaw Mountain Landis upheld the disgraceful colour line that wouldn’t be broken until after his death. (His successor, Happy Chandler, told Pittsburgh Courier legend Wendell Smith, “I’m for the Four Freedoms, and if a black boy can make it at Okinawa and go to Guadalcanal, he can make it in baseball”—and proved it by approving Branch Rickey’s signing of Jackie Robinson.)

Bowie Kuhn tried and failed to suppress Jim Bouton’s Ball Four but succeeded in stopping Charlie Finley’s post-Messersmith fire sale of several key Athletics players. The former merely left Kuhn resembling a damned fool. The latter, with its concurrent cap of $400,000 for player sales, probably did as much as any capricious free agency spending spree to abet the salary structure’s inflation and block truly less-endowed teams from sustained financial competitiveness.

And Fay Vincent’s foolish attempt to strong-arm three Yankee officials including then-manager Buck Showalter out of their testimony on behalf of drug-troubled relief pitcher Steve Howe just might have been the wick that lit the powder keg forcing Vincent—already in enough owners’ crosshairs over intervening in the 1990 spring lockout and other business issues—to resign before he could be fired in 1992.

Maybe Manfred didn’t like the thought that calling Angelos out or even disciplining him over the Brown suspension might amount to biting one of the hands that feeds him. Maybe he thought that calling Angelos out or even disciplining him over Brown would have compelled him to address the known Oriole brass objections to Brown’s observation included implications that they were “cheap.”

Translation further: Maybe Manfred thought calling out and disciplining Angelos over Brown would amount to admitting the Orioles tanked their way to where they are today. Manfred has objected to tanking verbally in the past while doing little to nothing in the public perception to put a stop to something that amounts to fan abuse. Tanks for nothing.

But there are times when a commissioner must consider that, as longtime New York Times writer George Vecsey once formulated (and as I’ve borrowed shamelessly over the years), the common good of the game isn’t the same thing as merely making money for the owners.

Manfred thought nothing of dropping a heavy fine upon Astros owner Jim Crane;  suspending general manager Jeff Luhnow, manager A.J. Hinch, and former bench coach Alex Cora; and, eliminating key draft picks from the team over the next couple of years, after the exposure and investigation of Astrogate. If he could act in the game’s best interest over its worst cheating scandal ever, he could certainly act on behalf of saying there’s no place for censorship on the baseball air.

He could, but he hasn’t.

Brown is due to return to the Orioles’ television booth tonight, when the American League East leaders open a weekend series against the Mariners in Seattle. Sports Illustrated‘s Jimmy Traina offers a sobering point when suggesting that Brown will be in a somewhat untenable position going in:

He’ll return to the airwaves with no explanation of him going MIA. His every word will be dissected and fans watching, while admiring and respecting Brown, will fully expect him to watch his every word, which hurts his credibility.

The poor guy has basically been neutered. A quick check of Brown’s Twitter account shows he hasn’t tweeted since July 26. Before that, Brown rarely went two or three days without tweeting. He’s probably terrified to say anything because he knows he can’t address the injustice he experienced honestly.

It’s just surreal to think about the irreparable damage that has been done by the Orioles in this situation.

“Free Kevin Brown” chants in Camden Yards a couple of nights ago must have fallen upon deaf ears in the commissioner’s office. Those fans would have been justified completely if they’d altered those chants with chanting “Where was Rob?” This time, answering “Dry, sober, and home with his wife” won’t be enough.

The doofus who suspended and thus may also have neutered Brown remains unsuspended yet. Where is Rob?

Bird brains

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Kevin Brown

Kevin Brown, in the Orioles broadcast booth at Camden Yards. He’s said to be returning 11 August—the Orioles’ administration must have felt the heavy heat when the suspension they won’t call a suspension went viral.

I had to look. On 23 July, which proves to have been Orioles announcer Kevin Brown’s last day on the television air, the Orioles won a second straight from their American League East rival Rays in Tampa Bay. They’ve won nine of thirteen since. So, at least, the Orioles icing Brown so witlessly didn’t affect the team on the field.

The Oriole ownership that thinks it was worth suspending Brown indefinitely for pointing out what was in the team’s own game notes guides—that the Orioles did better in the Rays’ stadium this year than they had over the previous two—had better not even think that nine out of thirteen means they can win no matter who’s doing the television play-by-play.

Because if they’re foolish enough to think that, the roasting they got from Gary Cohen, the lead broadcaster for the hapless Mets, whom the Orioles just spent a weekend sweeping (and out-scoring 19-6), may seem like a jacuzzi bath compared to what they’d invite then.

“That was really all he said,” Cohen said of Brown’s plain-fact, non-opinion description of the Orioles’ issues in Tropicana Field. Then, with Mets first base legend and co-colour analyst Keith Hernandez sitting to his right, as the Mets led the resurgent Cubs 5-1 in the bottom of the fourth Monday night, Cohen let the Orioles have it but good.

And for that, the Baltimore Orioles management decided to suspend Kevin Brown. Let me just say one thing to the Baltimore Orioles management. You draped yourself in humiliation when you fired Jon Miller, and you’re doing it again. And if you don’t want Kevin Brown, there are 29 other teams who do.

It’s a horrendous decision by the Orioles. I don’t know what they were thinking. But they’ve gotten exactly the reaction that they deserve. And it’s just a shame, because the Orioles are playing so well, and now they’ve diverted attention from that, and now made themselves a laughingstock.

Cohen is hardly alone among baseball’s broadcast family. Some of them, and some of us writers, would say we don’t know if the Orioles’ administration was thinking. It wasn’t as though Cohen had failed to speak on behalf of telling it like it is on the air in the past. The Mets beat writer for The Athletic, Tim Britton, remembered a 2019 interview in which Cohen couldn’t understand why every baseball organisation doesn’t believe in letting its broadcasters speak the truth.

“Many believe that in not telling the truth, that you’re doing a service to the organization, and the fact of the matter is it’s just not true,” Cohen said then. “Because if everything is great and everything is sunshine, then when things really are great, there’s no differentiation.”

Part of being a baseball fan is experiencing the highs and lows as they happen and understanding them for what they are. I think that’s what the Mets have always allowed their announcers to do. There’s always a line to tread, there’s always a path that would be the wrong one to go down, but if you do your job correctly, then you know where those lines are and you express yourself in a well-informed way. Then everybody wins.

If only Cohen had been around for a time when it wasn’t quite true with the Mets. When an ancient Mets regime trashed and then sent Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Seaver out of town in the notorious “Saturday Night Massacre” in 1978, the Mets ordered cameras not to show dwindling Shea Stadium crowds, or fabled “Sign Man” Karl Ehrhardt holding up his once-fabled WELCOME TO GRANT’S TOMB placard.

They also didn’t let their announcing team speak of it readily, much the way the Orioles today are known to object when certain former players are mentioned on broadcasts. Finally, the original Mets broadcast team of Lindsay Nelson, Bob Murphy, and Ralph Kiner broker up when Nelson—fed up with both the censorship and the dismantled Mets’ losing ways—took a hike.

Cohen may not remember either that a later Mets administration decided they’d had it with  Tim McCarver’s analytical candor, too, telling him to take a hike in favour of Seaver himself (who’d been a Yankee TV analyst for five years), whom the Mets believed was more likely to be a “team player.” (Read: Shill.) But he was hardly alone in roasting the Orioles, merely the one who went absolutely viral first and most when Awful Announcing‘s scoop on the suspension hit social media running.

“Somebody didn’t like the facts very much,” said the Red Sox’s lead television announcer, Dave O’Brien, calling the Brown suspension “a fiasco, that that’s allowed to happen. And I think every announcer in the league feels the same way . . . I thought it was a joke, initially, when I read it.”

“It’s amazing to me,” said Yankee broadcaster Suzyn Waldman, while the Yankees met the White Sox in Chicago. “How can you do your job if you can’t tell the truth? But he didn’t even say anything negative. He was extolling how good they are, because look what they’ve done this year, and in the past they didn’t do it. So I don’t understand. When I saw the clip, I was waiting for him to say something horrible. And it was not.”

“[Brown] continuously provides an example worth emulating & sets a high bar,” Xtweeted Royals play-by-play announcer Jake Eisenberg. “That not only goes for on the air, but also off the air. This situation is ridiculous, and that’s an understatement at best.”

The Orioles’ administration may have felt higher-temperature heat than a Las Vegas summer over the disgrace. The Athletic has Xtweeted “sources with knowledge” have told their reporter Britt Ghiroli that Brown will return on 11 August. When Ghiroli herself reached the Orioles for comment, the team declined and “a spokesperson” for co-owner John Angelos even said “there was no suspension”—but refused to answer her followup questions.

“Who cares what they called it?” she fumed. “We all know what it is.” Indeed we do. We also know it exposed the Oriole brass as censorious bird brains.

Censorship, Oriole style

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Kevin Brown

Kevin Brown, discoursing on the Orioles’ previous futility against the Rays in Tampa Bay versus their success there this year through that evening . . . the discourse that got him suspended indefinitely, as things turned out. (NASN screen capture.)

Apparently, all you have to do is speak the truth on the air, and if the baseball team whose games you announce or analyse is owned by people for whom the truth is inconvenient, you can be suspended indefinitely. The MASN’s lead Orioles play-by-play man, Kevin Brown (not the former major league pitcher), has learned the hard way.

All Brown did was say on the air that the Orioles—the American League’s most pleasant surprise of the year, leading the East—had won more games against the Rays in Tampa Bay this year (three out of five) than over the previous three. (Three of 21.) It was the plain truth. No insult intended. It wasn’t even an opinion.

But Brown seems to have been suspended indefinitely since late July, when he made the foregoing observation advancing a series finale between the two teams in Tropicana Field. The jarring scoop belonged to Awful Announcing Monday:

[We’ve] confirmed through multiple sources familiar with the situation that Brown has been suspended indefinitely, that it came after the Rays series, that he only wound up on the radio for the Phillies’ series thanks to another controversy about a different announcer’s apparel, and that the comment here seems to be what’s at issue. The Orioles dispute an official suspension took place, but none the less Brown has been off television since July 26th.

The online outrage only begins with The Cooperstown Casebook author Jay Jaffe: “OMG this is the weakest sauce imaginable by the Orioles.” But this is hardly the first time the owning Angeloses have spread this kind of weak sauce.

The factual graphic behind Brown’s fateful observation.

In 1997, Peter Angelos all but fired his lead radio announcer Jon Miller. The reasons included speculation that Miller’s weekend gig as a lead ESPN baseball announcer (with Hall of Fame second baseman turned colour commentator Joe Morgan) rankled both the Orioles and their radio flagship WBAL. Until they didn’t.

“Orioles officials,” wrote the Washington Post‘s Mark Maske, “said Angelos disliked Miller’s willingness to criticize the team harshly on the air when it wasn’t playing well.” Oops.

Miller, of course, went on to become the voice of the Giants in San Francisco. He probably saw oceans of downs and oceans of ups calling Giants games for what are now 26 years. He’s also accepted the Frick Award as a Hall of Fame broadcaster, in the same season the Giants won the first of three World Series titles in the span of five years.

Nobody seemed to want Miller fired when two Diamondbacks errors but three baserunning mistakes by then-Giants outfielder Ruben Rivera, ending with Rivera thrown out at the plate, prompted Miller to pronounce, “That was the worst baserunning in the history of the game!”

Whether Brown ends up staying with the Orioles on the air or whether he finds himself compelled to move onward (if he does, there should be no shortage of teams ready and willing to bring him to their mikes), this gives a disgraceful look to a baseball team who has gone from notorious tanking to AL East leadership and become must-see television approaching the hard stretch drive.

The Angeloses are hardly pioneers in baseball censorship. When the Yankees ended 1966 in dead last place (this was quite before divisional play), another Hall of Fame voice, Red Barber, committed his own such heinous crime—denied a camera pan of a near-empty Yankee Stadium, Barber intoned, “I don’t know what the paid attendance is today, but whatever it is, it is the smallest crowd in the history of Yankee Stadium, and this crowd’s the story, not the game.”

Oops. Among the reported mere 413 in the stands was Michael Burke, appointed by CBS (who’d bought the Yankees controversially in 1964) to oversee the Yankees. When the season ended officially, so ended Barber’s decade-plus Yankee tenure. The Ole Redhead elected to retire from there, but his purge was as wrong then as is Brown’s suspension now.

“Speak what you perceive as the truth,” said the late Hall of Fame broadcaster Tim McCarver. “If that’s outspokenness, that’s fine.” That was said after the Mets dumped him as a television analyst in 1998, proclaiming outspokenness wasn’t all that fine—and that Hall of Fame pitcher/franchise icon Tom Seaver, a Yankee broadcaster for five years, would do better as a “team player.”

Brown wasn’t even being outspoken, and he’s been put in the deep freeze for who knows how long. It’s difficult not to imagine the Angeloses answering “Honesty is the best policy” with “That’s what you think.”

“Down goes Anderson! Down goes Anderson!”

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Tim Anderson

White Sox shortstop Tim Anderson hits the deck after Guardians third baseman José Ramírez (second from left, restrained further by a White Sox player) answered Anderson’s foolish challenge to fight with a flying right cross to the side of his head. White Sox first baseman Andrew Vaughn (25) would ultimately drag Anderson off the field as the two teams scrummed.

Once upon a time, Tim Anderson said he wanted to be today’s Jackie Robinson when it came to putting the fun back into baseball on the field. When the Yankees’ Josh Donaldson greeted him with, “Hi, Jackie,” during a game last year, the White Sox shortstop decided the joke’s shelf life expired not long after Donaldson first dropped it on him a couple of years earlier.

The benches and pens emptied, and Anderson’s White Sox teammates urged and nudged him back to the dugout before any serious damage could be done. The following day, Anderson—hammered with “Jack-ie, Jack-ie!” catcalls most of the day by the Yankee Stadium crowd—smashed a three-run homer that finished a doubleheader sweep, holding an index finger to his lips as a “shush” gesture to the catcallers.

But that was then and this was Saturday in Cleveland against the Guardians. In the sixth inning, Guards’ star José Ramírez went diving into second to beat a throw in from the outfield and finish his stretch into an RBI double. He slid right between Anderson’s legs.

Anderson had infuriated the Guards the night before with a tag knocking rookie Brayan Rocchio off the base, turning a double into an out when the original safe call was reversed rather controversially. Now, he seemed to try dropping a too-hard tag upon Ramírez to no avail. According to Ramírez, Anderson said he wanted to fight.

Ramírez held up his right arm as if hoping Anderson might help him up from the ground. Getting none, Ramírez rose on his own and pointed at Anderson, apparently objecting again to Anderson’s needlessly harsh tagging. Anderson assumed a boxing position as rookie umpire Malachi Moore tried to keep the pair separated.

Oops. Moore decided the better part of valour was to back away. Anderson threw a pair of rights as players on both sides approached. Then, somehow, some way, Ramírez swung a slightly wild right that caught Anderson flush on the left side of his face and knocked him to the ground. It was like Argentine boxing legend Oscar Bonavena’s wild punching style before Muhammad Ali outlasted him in 1970.

Guardians broadcaster Tom Hamilton couldn’t resist referencing another Ali fight when Ramírez connected: “Down goes Anderson! Down goes Anderson!” That went almost as viral as the scrum itself.

This wasn’t the usual bench-clearing incident in which the “brawl” was usually just a lot of hollering, shoving, more hollering, more shoving. This was two players swinging as if they’d mistaken themselves for hockey players. “It’s not funny,” said Guards manager Terry Francona post-game, “but coming [into the clubhouse] and listening to Hammy, it’s hard not to chuckle.”

It might have been Francona’s only chuckle of the evening. Not only did the White Sox finish what they started, a rather rare win, but Francona plus White Sox manager Pedro Grifol and their combatants Ramírex and Anderson were thrown out of the game post haste. So were Guards third-base coach Mike Sarbaugh and relief pitcher Emmanuel Clase.

Anderson wouldn’t talk to the press after the game, but Ramírez had plenty to say. “He’s been disrespecting the game for a while. It’s not from yesterday or from before,” the Cleveland third baseman began.

I even had the chance to tell him during the game, “Don’t do this stuff. That’s disrespectful. Don’t start tagging people like that.” In reality, we’re here trying to find ways to provide for our families. When he does the things he does on the bases, it can get somebody out of the game. So I was telling him to stop doing that and then as soon as the play happened, he tagged me again really hard, more than needed, and then he reacted and said, “I want to fight.” And if you want to fight, I have to defend myself.

Cynics suggest Anderson should get a two-week suspension for starting the fight in the first place. They say, not implausibly, that he shouldn’t exactly protest such a suspension, because his season—injuries contributed to his pre All-Star break .223/.259/.263 deflation, though he was bouncing back after the break—is much like that of the White Sox whole. Lost? Try disappeared.

Anderson has been admirable in the past for wanting baseball to be fun again, on the field and encouraging more black youth to consider the sport as a profession. He’s been capable of big moments, maybe none bigger than the game-winner he drove into the corn field behind the outfield in the first Field of Dreams game.

He wants to be remembered as an impact-delivering player. He overcame a lot to make himself a two-time All-Star. He looked like a classic baseball hero that night in Iowa. He may have thrown too much of that away Saturday night.

White Sox general manager Rick Hahn used the trade deadline to start dismantling the sorry enough team he’d built. Saturday night was actually the first White Sox win since the deadline itself. They’d lost thirteen of their previous seventeen until Saturday night. It’s not implausible to think Hahn will continue the remaking he began come the offseason.

But it’s also not implausible that Anderson, a player who’s meant plenty to the White Sox in the past, might be in his final days in their silks. If this proves the catalyst for that, it would negate enough of what he wants to mean to the team and to the game he loves. Far worse than his face or his ego getting dropped by a flying right in a foolish fight, that would hurt.

It really was in Rizzo’s head, after all . . .

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Anthony Rizzo, Fernando Tatis Jr.

This is the 28 May collision—on a strike-’em’out/throw-’em-out double play—that turned Anthony Rizzo’s season into disaster whose cause nobody could figure out until this week.

Yankee and other fans now have the answer to what compelled a veteran first baseman with a jeweler’s eye for the strike zone to drop from an .880 OPS on 28 May to the arguable worst hitter in the game since. They should not like that nobody in his organisation could catch on sooner.

On that day, Anthony Rizzo took a bump on his head from the hip of the Padres’ Fernando Tatis, Jr., who was scrambling back to first on a strike-’em-out/throw-’em-out double play that ended the top of the sixth in Yankee Stadium. Watch the play from any angle you wish.

Yankee starting pitcher Gerrit Cole struck Xander Bogaerts out swinging, with Tatis well off the pad at first. A very alert Yankee catcher Kyle Higashioka whipped a throw up the first base line to an equally alert Rizzo. The throw went up the line low but Rizzo speared it cleanly to tag Tatis out on his lower right leg.

You should see clearly that, without intent, Tatis’s right hip caught the right side of Rizzo’s head hard as Rizzo bent down to apply that tag. Rizzo lost his hat, stood up as the ball fell from his mitt, then walked several steps toward second base before collapsing.

The Yankees thought it was a neck injury at first. They got Rizzo out of the game post haste, moving D.J. LeMahieu from third to first and Isiah Kiner-Falefa from left field to third, sending Greg Allen out to play left and to bat in Rizzo’s lineup slot. (The Yankees hung in to win the game, 10-7; Rizzo himself had pitched in with an RBI single prior to the fateful collision.)

Rizzo didn’t return to the lineup until the Yankees played the Dodgers on 2 June. In the interim, according to most reporting, he passed official concussion protocols. Yet, come Thursday, the Yankees let it be known that Rizzo was indeed dealing with post-concussion syndrome and that it was no questions asked traceable back to that 28 May play.

Nobody caught on after the original protocols passage. Rizzo himself says he began noticing “fogginess” last weekend, against the American League East-leading Orioles, where he’d previously couldn’t figure out how he dropped so far off the batting table.

“I remember talking to someone and they said, ‘Do you feel like you’re coming out of this soon?’” the first baseman finally told reporters. “I answered honestly that no I don’t because I couldn’t feel what you’re trying to feel as a hitter.”

I guess now we can link two and two together. Over the last few weeks, you just start going to different checklists of mechanics, timing, consistently being late. Why am I being consistently late? I’ve made these adjustments plenty of times in my career. I just didn’t forget how to do this all of a sudden. Everything (the doctors and I) talked about and everything they came back with basically came back on a silver lining of I’m not crazy for walking back to the dugout consistently thinking how I missed that pitch because I usually don’t miss that pitch.

The Yankees should be thinking about how they could have missed Rizzo dealing with and playing through both a concussion and its following syndrome for almost two months. They should be demanding answers from their own medical people and from baseball’s government itself.

All advanced knowledge coming forth over the last few decades doesn’t quite mitigate that baseball medicine is still not exactly sport’s equivalent to the Mayo Clinic. It still remains rare that a baseball team’s medical staff gets to the deepest heart of an injury issue before a career is compromised or ended.

And it still takes something such as Rizzo’s case to shake Joe and Jane Fan out of their smug dismissiveness toward slumping players to acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, there was a physical or neurological cause for the slump, as we now know was Rizzo’s case.

Ask Met fans who still dismiss Jason Bay as a mere bust. Signed to a four-year free agency deal, Bay was one of the game’s better outfielders and run producers . . . before he incurred two concussions as a Met, one hitting the outfield wall in 2010 and the second  hitting one in 2012.

Never mind teammates and his manager praising his work ethic, nobody put two and two together and figured two concussions might have had something to do with his dying bat. Bay and the Mets parted under mutually acceptable terms; he signed with Seattle, was given a clean bill of health, but after one horrid season called it a career.

Last winter, Twins fans inexplicably poured phlegm, bile, and acid over the very idea that Joe Mauer should be on the next Hall of Fame ballot. Their rage was over that fat contract extension Mauer signed when he was still the best catcher in the American League . . . and before he suffered the first of two concussions when he took a hard foul tip off his mask behind the plate.

Those fools called Mauer a thief because the concussions wouldn’t let him play to his previous level. Never mind the Twins yanking him out from behind the plate after that hard foul tip. They weren’t taking chances, especially after seeing what concussions did to their former first base star Justin Morneau.

Does the name Pete Reiser ring any bells? It should. That Brooklyn Dodgers legend with Hall of Fame talent ended up a Hall of Fame might-have-been, thanks to an insane playing style that caused him one too many concussions when he still couldn’t learn a concrete outfield wall—like the one they had in Ebbets Field—didn’t suffer fools gladly and he couldn’t make them collapse on contact.

Pistol Pete may have been lucky that he ended up with a somewhat long post-playing life as a minor league manager and major league coach. He also had an impact on the game beyond his own self: the Dodgers made Ebbets Field the Show’s first ballpark to feature padded walls after they traded him to the Boston Braves following the 1948 season.

Ryan Freel had it even worse. That cheerful character of an outfielder got blasted into a concussion on a collision with both an outfield teammate and the warning track in 2007; then, a second one in 2009, when he was hit flush on the head by a pickoff throw. Career over a year later.

Baseball began its concussion protocols in 2011. A year later, troubled by assorted mental issues and possibly remaining aftereffects of his two concussions, Freel committed suicide. Knowing what he’d been through playing baseball, his family donated his brain to Boston University—for research into chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). In due course, it was determined Freel had Stage 2 CTE.

It’s bad enough that too many fans and too many sportswriters who ought to know better continue to dismiss the injured as malfeasant, especially when the injured take what those people believe to be longer than needed to recover. Too many sports teams behave likewise even today, too.

And too many fans still can’t draw the proper line between hard nosed and bullheaded, any better than Pete Reiser and others did. Baseball players shouldn’t have to blast themselves to smithereens to prove they’re delivering maximum effort.

Even the Yankees couldn’t figure out how Rizzo cratered after that 28 May game. They thought he was fine physically. They knew he wasn’t laying down on the job. Manager Aaron Boone kept insisting his man was going through a particularly protracted patch of slumping.

Rizzo himself didn’t think about further testing even though he’s admitted to feeling foggy and having days where he felt he’d been “waking up feeling hung over and you didn’t drink at all.” He also has to figure out how to balance his health to his itch to compete. He’s only too well aware that too many people, including those with and against whom he plays the game, still think injuries and their impact are mere excuses for poor play.

“[W]hen people come up and (are) like, ‘You haven’t been the same since the collision,’ I want to go tell people off because that’s not who we are as competitors,” he admits.

Even still, I feel like being injured or playing through a back injury or ankle injury in the past, you just adapt. Your body adapts. Obviously with this, I did everything I could and it’s unfortunate. The hardest part is missing time because I want to be out there. I want to be playing, but also to the level that I know I’m capable of playing at.

Easier said than done, alas. Even in today’s advanced medical atmosphere, professional athletes still can’t let themselves have the time they absolutely require to return to complete health. Often as not, their teams can’t. More often than that, Joe and Jane Fan don’t want to hear it. More often than that, Joe and Jane Sportswriter whip them into that froth.

Maybe the Rizzo case will start waking them up at long enough last. Maybe.