“Making [maternal fornicators] shut the [fornicate] up”

Posted on May 23, 2022 by Jeff Kallman

Tim Anderson can only hope to shush the Yankee Stadium louts rounding third on a late Sunday three-run homer . . .

You think of the damnedest things at times, in the immediacy of controversy. When Tim Anderson checked in at the plate in the top of the eighth Sunday, in the second game of a Yankee Stadium doubleheader, his uniform number suddenly seemed very large and very, very vivid.

Seven. The number retired by the Yankees in honor of their Hall of Fame center fielder Mickey Mantle. A player whose off the charts performances and record were equaled only by his off the charts flaws as a man who finally told the world, as he battled cancer by way of a liver transplant, “This is a role model: Don’t be like me.”

Seven. Now on the back of the White Sox’s shortstop, a black man who declared three years ago that he wanted to be the Jackie Robinson of bringing and keeping fun in the actual playing of professional baseball, in front of a crowd that roots for the team whose third baseman didn’t know when what he called a joke wasn’t funny anymore.

By Josh Donaldson’s own admission he’d first needled Anderson by calling him “Jackie” shortly after that 2019 interview, and that Anderson and himself shared a laugh over it. By Donaldson’s further admission, he’d pulled the joke a few times since, right up to Saturday’s game. He said he intended nothing racial by it. Pardon the expression, he may be a minority of one.

The White Sox took the first game 3-1 Sunday and led 2-0 in the nightcap, on a pair of two-out RBI singles from Andrew Vaughn and Reese McGuire, when Anderson checked in against Yankee reliever Miguel Castro.

Every time Anderson batted Sunday the Yankee Stadium boo birds hammered him with boos and jeers, which you’d just about expect in any ballpark when a particular field or plate antagonist on the visiting team shows up and goes to the serious work of play. But Anderson was also hammered with more than a few noisy chants of “Jac-kie! Jac-kie!” during the twin bill.

Such is the lack of class for which particular fans are known to be particularly shameless. Yankee fans are no strangers to the loutish among them who would do such things as taunt an opposition pitcher during his pre-game warmups over his known battles with anxiety and depression. They may not love such louts among them, but they never seem in too big a hurry to thwart them, either.

That lout contingency would hardly reject a chance to hammer an opponent taunted by one of their own with a particularly nasty racial reference during a game the day before, a reference that led in due course to a sharp exchange of words behind the plate and the benches and bullpens clearing, with Anderson needing to be restrained from potentially tearing Donaldson apart.

Even Donaldson’s own manager demurred from defending his man entirely after Saturday’s incident. “I don’t believe there was any malicious intent in that regard,” began Aaron Boone. “But you know, this is—just in my opinion—somewhere he should not be going.”

Donaldson went 0-for-4 at the plate during the doubleheader’s opener, which the White Sox won after busting a one-all tie in the ninth inning thanks to A.J. Pollock sending one into the left field seats and Adam Engel sending Vaughn home with an RBI double. He sat out the nightcap, during which the Yankees could summon up a measly three hits to no avail against three White Sox pitchers.

Now, in the top of the nightcap eighth, with first and second, on 1-1, Castro threw a slider that hung up just enough for Anderson to drive it the other way into the right field seats for what proved the final 5-0 score.

A Yankee fan wearing the jersey of retired Yankee first baseman Mark Teixiera threw the ball back onto the field on a no-doubt line, perhaps blissfully unaware that Teixiera as a player (and now a broadcaster) had too much class to applaud such depths. Unlike the Toronto fan in Rogers Centre who handed an Aaron Judge home run ball to a young fan wearing a Judge jersey, this fan probably wouldn’t have shown that kind of character if there’d been an Anderson fan adjacent to him.

A young White Sox fan wearing a replica of the team’s mid-1980s game jersey snapped a photo with his cell phone as Anderson continued his travels around the bases. When Anderson stepped on the plate it was as though planting an exclamation point at the end of an emphatic sentence.

As he took a few steps toward the White Sox dugout, Anderson put his index finger to his lips as he looked toward the crowd, just as he had rounding third. He didn’t talk to reporters after the game but a hot microphone courtesy of the game’s broadcast aboard ESPN captured his no-doubt explanation: “Making [maternal fornicators] shut the [fornicate] up.”

Anderson probably knows in his heart of hearts that it’s easier to pass the proverbial camel through the eye of the proverbial needle than to shut the worst of Yankee or any other fans the fornicate up. Not even the evidence that Donaldson hasn’t exactly been a friendly opponent to Anderson and other White Sox in the recent past would convince them otherwise.

“[I]n this clubhouse,” said White Sox relief pitcher Liam Hendricks before Sunday’s doubleheader, “we have TA’s back in everything. It’s like having an inside joke with a guy you are a nemesis with, I guess you could say, but yeah, that’s not how it went down in this clubhouse and I don’t understand how, if [Donaldson] ever thought about [his “Jackie” taunt] like [a joke], it’s straight delusional.”

Anderson sent a message back on enemy territory in the best way possible. If only it could have been as joyous as the one he sent in the bottom of the ninth in last August’s Field of Dreams Game, against most of these same Yankees.

“The game’s never over,” Anderson said after that one. “And once [Yankee reliever Zack] Britton walked [White Sox catcher Seby Zavala], I knew there was a chance to start something real dope.”

That was then, this was Sunday. The hankering to know just what MLB’s reported investigation of the Saturday incidents determines heightens. But now Anderson finished something real dope under unwarranted provocation from a real dope.

On Anderson, Robinson, Donaldson, and jokes

Posted on May 22, 2022 by Jeff Kallman

Tim Anderson has to be restrained by teammates including Jose Abreu, and plate umpire Nick Mahrley, after Josh Donaldson took what he calls a joke too far Saturday.

That’d teach him. Three years ago White Sox shortstop Tim Anderson gave Sports Illustrated reporter Stephanie Apstein an interview in which he likened himself to Jackie Robinson. Not as a race pioneer, but as the kind of pioneer looking to break down another barrier, the barrier against having plain fun and letting it show while you play baseball.

Anderson didn’t kid himself. He as much as said he didn’t and probably wouldn’t face the kind of obstacles Robinson faced. What he did say, in language as plain as the plays he makes at shortstop or the hits he nails at the plate, was that he didn’t care two figs what you thought of him having fun playing, you know, a game.

The impetus for the interview was his then-recent suspension for hollering an insult back at Kansas City pitcher Brad Keller, after Keller hit him on the rump roast with the first pitch, two innings after Anderson demolished a Keller pitch for a two-run homer, looked to his dugout, and nailed a delicious bat-flip as he proceeded up the first base line.

“I kind of feel like today’s Jackie Robinson,” Anderson told Apstein then. “That’s huge to say. But it’s cool, man, because he changed the game, and I feel like I’m getting to a point to where I need to change the game.” In other words, Anderson planned to have his fun while he played. Oh. The hor-ror.

“Anderson’s point is more nuanced than it might sound,” Apstein wrote.

Robinson remains an American hero, and Anderson will never face the Jim Crow horrors Robinson and the first generation of black major leaguers endured. Also, plenty of players, white and nonwhite alike, have had fun while playing the game.

But, as a rule, baseball does not encourage individualism. As other sports have evolved to showcase their stars’ personalities, the baseball old guard has held tight to its principles. Run out ground balls. Keep your mouth shut. Gently place your bat near home plate—a player should react to a home run just as he would react to the news that an acquaintance filed his taxes on time.

Yankee third baseman Josh Donaldson remembered Anderson’s “I kind of feel like today’s Jackie Robinson” only too well. On Saturday, the Yankees and the White Sox had a dustup on the field over it, a few innings after Anderson says Donaldson greeted him with an apparent “What’s up, Jackie?”

A few innings later, as Donaldson approached the plate with the Yankees up 6-3, White Sox catcher Yasmani Grandal engaged him in a little chat. It didn’t look like anything drastic at first—from the outside. The next thing anyone knew, plate umpire Nick Mahrley was moving between the pair and the benches and bullpens emptied. With White Sox teammates moving Anderson back to the dugout before any serious damage could be done.

Nobody other than the immediate participants had any clue until White Sox manager Tony La Russa spoke to reporters following the 7-5 Yankee win. “He made a racist comment, Donaldson, and that’s all I’m gonna say,” La Russa said. It took Anderson himself to elaborate.

“He just made a disrespectful comment,” the shortstop said of Donaldson. “Basically was trying to call me Jackie Robinson, like ‘what’s up Jackie?’ I don’t play like that. I don’t really play at all. I wasn’t really gonna bother nobody today. But he made the comment, and it was disrespectful. I don’t think it was called for.”

Donaldson didn’t deny calling Anderson “Jackie,” but he did say the motive had nothing to do with race and everything to do with Anderson telling SI he felt like the Robinson of defunding baseball’s Fun Police.

“All right, so first inning I called him Jackie,” Donaldson told reporters post-game.

He’s gonna bring back fun to the game. [In] 2019 when I played for Atlanta, we actually joked about that on the game.

I don’t know what’s changed — and I’ve said it to him in year’s past. Not in any manner than just joking around for the fact that he called himself Jackie Robinson. If something has changed from that, my meaning of that — has not any term trying to be racist by any fact of the matter. It was just off of an interview of what he called himself.”

Donaldson may have lacked racial intent but his timing Saturday was a terrible look. “The very simple problem with Josh Donaldson calling Tim Anderson ‘Jackie’,” tweeted Business Insider writer Bradford William Davis, “is that he perverted honour into mockery.”

Could there have been those thinking Anderson, who’s normally as unpretentious as the morning sun, did likewise when he suggested himself as the Jackie Robinson of letting the kids play? Robinson broke barriers far more severe and grave than those between ballplayers letting joy in accomplishment show and ballplayers still artery-hardened enough to continue thinking you should play a game as though you’re wearing a three-piece suit in the board room.

And I for one have long tired of the hypocrisy saying one moment that you need to play professional baseball like a business but saying the next—as in, contract talks, free agency markets, or collective bargaining agreement skirmishes—that you need to remember you’re only playing a kids’ game, dammit.

Maybe Anderson was being just a little grandiose in 2019, while his heart was clearly enough in the right place. Maybe Donaldson chose the absolute wrong conversational weapon to send a message that baseball’s Fun Police aren’t about to be defunded without a fight.

Or, giving him the benefit of the doubt about the exchange he cited from 2019, maybe Donaldson doesn’t get that a joke has a finite shelf life. As in, immediately after he and Anderson laughed about it the first time. Cracking it three years past that expiration date doesn’t mean a laugh or a tension dissipator but a nasty cut to the heart and soul.

“This game went through a period in time where a lot of those comments were meant,” said Grandal post-game, after telling reporters they didn’t want him to tell them what he actually said to Donaldson behind the plate. “And I think we’re way past that. And it’s just unacceptable. I just thought it was a low blow and I want to make sure I’ve got my team’s back. There’s no way that you’re allowed to say something like that.”

Baseball government told Anderson with a suspension that there’s no way he’s allowed to call Keller, who’s white, “a weak-assed [N-word]” after he got drilled in 2019. Let’s see if baseball government tells Donaldson the same way that there’s no way he’s allowed to call a black player “Jackie” even as a joke, three years after the joke’s shelf life expired.

“Hey, Dad? Want to pitch me a walk-off?”

Posted on August 13, 2021 by Jeff Kallman

Tim Anderson, finishing the hype-busting Field of Dreams Game with a two-run homer in the bottom of the ninth Thursday night.

The game finished by crossing its original protagonist, Field of Dreams, with The Natural. The most poetically inclined screenwriting/directing team in film couldn’t imagine climax that surreal.

A pair of two-run homers in the top of the ninth to yank the Yankees back into the lead at 8-7. A two-run homer in the bottom of the ninth to win it for the White Sox, 9-8. This wasn’t the way they won ballgames during the 1910s evoked by the special uniforms the two teams wore for the occasion.

Hey, Dad? Want to pitch me a walk-off?

It was as jolting a climax as ever provided by David Freese, Aaron Boone, Joe Carter, Kirk Gibson, Chris Chambliss, Bill Mazeroski, or Bobby Thomson. Even if it didn’t win a World Series, push a Series to a seventh game, send a team to a Series, or put them in the postseason at all in the first place.

It defied the game’s subtexts. The ones not spoken often if at all in the hype. The ones involving Field of Dreams‘s unlikely turning of baseball’s worst gambling scandal into a fantasy of reconciliation; and, The Natural‘s study of a live young prospect shot Eddie Waitkus-like, into long, long wandering, into a haunted elder returning to prove neither he nor his old dream died, for however long it still had to live.

No volume of pre-game hype—this game’s tribute to artifices of fantasy was as hyped as any sports event could be—could have promised and delivered that kind of a ninth inning. Even Field of Dreams star Kevin Costner, escorting both teams onto the field from the corn beyond the wall, asking the crowd, “Is this heaven?” with the crowd hollering back, “No, this is Iowa,” wouldn’t have dared demand that in a script.

But there was Liam Hendricks, the engaging White Sox relief pitcher, looking made for wraparound sunglasses thanks to being endowed with wraparound eyes, working the top of the ninth, shaking a leadoff single off to strike Yankee veterans D.J. LeMahieu and Brett Gardner out swinging on four pitches each.

Then there was Hendricks at 2-1 to Aaron Judge. He threw Judge a high fastball and watched it sail far enough into the right field corn. Following which Hendricks wrestled Joey Gallo—the former Ranger whose stock in trade is either home run feast or strikeout famine, but who has the odd discipline of working walks (he averages 94 per 162 games lifetime)—into a walk after starting him 1-1 without throwing another strike.

Up to the plate stepped Giancarlo Stanton, a former National League Most Valuable Player and one of the game’s more formidable bombardiers until injuries began to grind away at him in earnest. Stanton hit Hendricks’s first service into the left field corn.

Even the somewhat partisan, small audience—savouring a game on the field built adjacent to the famous Field of Dreams farmhouse field, many paying through the nose secondarily for tickets with face values of $375 or $425, Iowa fans and White Sox season ticket-holders, the latter by special lottery—roared when that fabled Yankee power detonated in the top of the ninth.

It was nothing compared to what happened in the bottom, when Yankee reliever Zack Britton, himself having been in the top tier of his particular profession before injuries began shaving him down, too, took the role normally assigned to the injured Aroldis Chapman. He opened by luring White Sox pinch hitter Danny Mendick into a ground out to first but walking White Sox catcher Seby Zavala—who’d hit one into the corn himself in the bottom of the fourth.

Up stepped Tim Anderson, the lively White Sox shortstop. Britton pumped and pitched, a fastball right down the pipe. It was too fat a pitch to resist. If the White Sox have a classic kangaroo court in their clubhouse, Anderson would have been fined for malfeasance.

It didn’t win a pennant. It was more out of The Natural than Field of Dreams, whose co-protagonist by default Shoeless Joe Jackson had only one known walk-off hit in his entire career. (For the White Sox, against the Yankees, in July 1919.) But when Anderson hit it out, it won a ball game keeping the Yankees from gaining on the second place Red Sox in the American League East and fattening the White Sox’s AL Central lead to eleven and a half. Slamming an exclamation point down for baseball itself.

What began with Field of Dreams star Kevin Costner escorting the Yankees and the White Sox through the corn and down across the field ended with an African-American man from Alabama, who wouldn’t have been admitted to the 1910-1919 Show because of his race, channeling his inner Roy Hobbs, The Natural‘s psychically-buffeted protagonist.

Hobbs in the film version was down 0-2 and struggling mightily with an ancient bullet lodged in his insides, causing him to bleed through his lower stomach, when he hit the pennant-winning bomb that also shot the ballpark lights out. Anderson had no such encumbrance when he sent Britton’s canteloupe into the left field corn.

Until that ninth inning viewers at home and the fans who’d paid into the field saw a very reasonably played game. They saw White Sox first baseman Jose Abreu hit the first major league home run ever hit in Iowa in the bottom of the first. They saw Judge become the first Yankee to go long in Iowa when he hit a three-run homer in the top of the third.

Wearing 1910s style uniforms, the White Sox and the Yankees entered the Field of Dreams Game through the corn Thursday evening.

They saw White Sox starter Lance Lynn nail the first major league strikeout in Iowa when he froze Gardner on a high called strike, on a night when plate umpire Pat Hoberg was as generous with the strike zone ceiling as he was skinflint about proper strikes on the sidewalls of the zone.

They saw the early 3-1 Yankee lead disappear in a four-run White Sox third, when Anderson doubled center fielder Adam Engel home with one out, and recently-restored-from the-injured-list designated hitter Eloy Jimenez cracked a three-run homer into the right field corn.

They saw Gardner put a number on Lynn’s pitching evening when he hit the second pitch of the top of the sixth not too far from where Jimenez’s bomb landed. They saw Yankee infielder Tyler Wade, one of a host of spare parts coming into regular service thanks to the Yankees’ ongoing shuttle back and forth from the injured list, drop one of the only bunts that should be allowed in a game.

With one out, nobody on, and the non-shifting White Sox infield playing deep enough to prompt calls for sending a search party out to find them, the lefthanded Wade saw enough delicious open real estate to push a bunt to the left side, just enough to the middle to keep third baseman Yoan Moncada from doing anything more than grabbing the ball on the run in.

No wasted out. Nothing but a versatile enough utility infielder, who inclines toward hitting line drives (he has four doubles out of 24 hits this season), not feeling he was going to get something to hit on a line, seeing a free gift and pouncing on it before the supply expired.

Then, Wade stole second while LeMahieu occupied himself with working his way into a walk. Then, a ground out pushing second and third and Judge accepting a walk from White Sox speed reliever Michael Kopech after opening with strike one but seeing four straight balls, including a ball four which should have been called strike two.

No matter, far as the White Sox were concerned. Up stepped Gallo, flashing his usual all-or-nothing style at the plate, swinging mightily enough but whacking a pitch a little up out to shortstop to force Judge for the side.

From the moment Lynn started the game with ball one to LeMahieu and LeMahieu nailed the first major league base hit in Iowa baseball history, to the moment Anderson sent everyone home with his corn ball, the game told the hype to take a shower. Even if the live Fox Sports telecast referenced Field of Dreams to a fare-thee-well.

“I knew it wasn’t over,” Anderson said post-game. “The game’s never over. And once Britton walked (Zavala), I knew there was a chance to start something real dope.” So he finished something real dope with something as dope as it gets. In the immortal words of Hall of Fame baseball writer Jayson Stark, “Because . . . baseball!“

A changeup is gonna come . . .

Posted on May 30, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

Tim Anderson takes a spin after having his helmet knocked off his head Wednesday.

“Revenge,” Don Vito Corleone advised his in-training son Michael, “is a dish that tastes best when served cold.” Tim Anderson isn’t in training to take over an organised crime family, but he did provide evidence to support the concept Wednesday.

Knock Anderson’s helmet off his head in the bottom of the second? Might not clear both dugouts and bullpens, but he’ll knock what proves the game winning run home for your trouble anyway. And leave you looking like fools without so much as a hint of a bat flip.

For the moment, forget what the pitch actually was that Royals starter Glenn Sparkman threw up and in that hit the bill of Anderson’s batting helmet and blew it clean off the White Sox shortstop’s head. Even a changeup traveling at 86 miles per hour looks frightening when its trajectory takes dead aim at a human face.

Home plate umpire Mark Carlson took all of about two seconds to pounce out in front of the plate as Anderson spun after the helmet took its flying leap and ejected Sparkman no questions asked. If that outraged the Royals’ broadcast crew (Whaaaaaat? one of them asked) and anyone else watching, keep in mind that last month Anderson took one in the rump roast from a Royal arm the next time up after hitting one out and performing one of his signature bat flips.

Royals catcher Martin Maldonado pounced out likewise to protest the ejection, prompting his manager Ned Yost to hustle out there to keep him from an early night off. “As far as we’re concerned,” Yost pleaded to reporters after the game, “coming into this series we had no animosity toward that young man. None. To think that we’re going to hit him is ludicrous . . . We’re not like that.”

Apparently, Yost forgot that his pitcher Brad Keller drilled Anderson to clear the benches 17 April. He may or may not have been aware that Carlson and his fellow umps came into the game well aware of that incident. Hence Carlson taking no chances. And, perhaps, hence why the White Sox, though obviously alarmed over what just happened to their man, didn’t even think about pouring out of their dugout, after Anderson righted himself from his unexpected spinout.

“[T]o think that we’re gonna hit him on purpose is ludicrous, one,” Yost continued. “Two, it was a changeup. It was forgotten. He’d done his part, we’d done our part. It was done. It was over. It was nothing. There was no ill feeling, no ill will, no nothing. It would be totally ignorant on our part to hit him again, for what? We don’t play that game. We’re not like that. It was done, it was forgotten. He got under a changeup and hit him in the helmet. You saw what happened from there.”

It may also be totally ignorant to deny the optics of a pitch sailing up into a batter’s face the first time he hits in the next set during which you face him after he took one in the tail the last time around.

“It could have went either way,” said Anderson himself of the pitch that knocked the helmet off his block. “A ton of things could have happened. Good thing it didn’t do any damage. I was able to stay in the game and keep my composure.”

It ended up damaging the Royals more than anyone else in the yard, and not just because their starting pitcher got himself an early night off for his trouble. After Royals second baseman Nicky Lopez tied the game at seven with a two-run single in the top of the eighth, Anderson stepped in against Royals reliever Ian Kennedy—who’d surrendered Anderson’s first major league double back in the days when Kennedy was still a starting pitcher.

With White Sox catcher James McCann aboard on a one-out double, Anderson looked at a cutter for a strike, then pulled a Kennedy knuckle curve down the third base line, right under a diving Hunter Dozier, for the RBI double that ultimately meant the game when the Royals mustered nothing more than a one-out single against Alex Colome in the top of the ninth.

The two teams hook up again come July. Don’t think for one moment that eyes won’t be upon every trip to the plate Anderson makes against Royals pitching. And this may not quite be the most ridiculous feud in baseball this year. That honour may yet end up going to Pirates broadcaster John Wehner, who thinks about as highly of Reds bombardier Derek Dietrich as a cobra thinks of a mongoose.

Dietrich has come from the Marlins’ scrap heap to become a prize Cincinnati find and a particular Pittsburgh headache, hitting seven home runs in nine games between the two teams, including three on Tuesday night alone. Wehner is not amused, not just because Dietrich has made the Pirates a particularly favourite victim but because Dietrich, like Anderson is not shy about savouring every blast he delivers.

Wehner obviously doesn’t want the kid to have fun. Especially not after Tuesday, especially not after Dietrich hit three two-run bombs in Great American Ballpark, helping his Reds to an 11-6 win. And Wehner takes it even more personally than Pirate pitchers who surrender the launches do.

Wehner can’t start a bench clearing brawl as did Chris Archer on 7 April, after Dietrich hit the first of a pair that sailed into the Allegheny River, Archer greeted the outfielder his next time up with a ball behind his bottom, and five players were ejected before order was restored. But Wehner can and does lament that Dietrich’s grandfather, one-time Pirates coach Steve Demeter, is “rolling in his grave every time this guy hits a home run. He’s embarrassed of his grandson.

“It’s just being arrogant,” Wehner continued, on a radio program. “I don’t get it. I don’t get why you do that. It doesn’t make any sense to me.” He didn’t get the memo, either, that throwing at a batter for no reason better than that your ego was turned into a splash hit makes even less sense than a batter feeling it when he can and does hit one for that kind of distance.

“I think everyone should play the way they play,” Dietrich says. “I’ve got no problems with it . . . I’m just coming to play ball and hit the ball hard. We’re having fun and trying to win. This is baseball.” Having fun and trying to win. The horror.

Do you remember what Dietrich did in that 7 April game the next time he batted after his can felt the breeze from Archer? He hit another home run. Into the Allegheny River. Again. The only thing more foolish than awakening any sleeping giant is thinking you have to awaken him when he’s already wide awake.

Depends on whose kids play, I guess

Posted on April 18, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

Tim Anderson, a milli-second from making breakfast out of Brad Keller’s full-count grapefruit . . .

It’s beginning to look a little more like letting the kids play, which baseball wishes to push as its watchword, is going to have more exceptions as the season ambles forward. And, it isn’t just from those players still wedded till death do they part to the Sacred Unwritten Rules.

Apparently, baseball’s most notorious umpire wants to have his say about it, too. Apparently, too, there are teams who don’t mind their own kids playing but are ready to rumble if their opponents play.

Come Wednesday baseball’s incumbent hottest hitter, Tim Anderson, learned the hard way about what happens when you’re one of the kids who wants to play but Joe West decides in the moment that he’s your daddy, and Daddy needs to send you to your room for objecting vociferously though not violently over being hit by a pitch your next time up after hitting one out.

Oh, yes, Tim. You came to play, and—with Eloy Jimenez on second and two out—Royals’ starter Brad Keller threw you a full count grapefruit. And just like any major league hitter who happens to be heated up well enough, you saw that grapefruit and knew it meant one thing—breakfast. And oh, did you feast on it. You drove it so far into the left field seats there should have been coffee served with it.

And, considering you’d just had such a yummy breakfast courtesy of a pitcher against whom you’d been (read carefully) 0-for-13 with five strikeouts and not a base on balls on the ledger otherwise, there shouldn’t be a jury on earth that would consider you out of line for striding moderately out of the batter’s box watching it fly, then throwing your bat toward your own dugout as if momentarily in the javelin event at the Olympics before running out the breakfast bomb.

Neither you nor Keller have any clue, probably, that Cy Young’s unrelated namesake is still the only American man to win Olympic gold in the javelin throw, or that Babe Didrikson was the first American woman to win Olympic gold in it. All you know, Tim, is that you’re not staring Keller down, you don’t look into his team’s dugout, you don’t do anything in any way to show the Royals up, unless the Royals suddenly believe firing your bat toward your own dugout shows them up.

You probably care, Tim, only that your next time up Keller throws the first pitch of the plate appearance into your can, and that he probably wishes it was a shot put, not a baseball. And it’s very possible that Keller cares deeply about the little fact that you’ve hit eight home runs off Royals pitching in your career, two more than you’ve hit against any other team.

So right after you got canned, you take a step or two toward the mound and Royals catcher Martin Maldonado—who has the job because Salvador Perez, the catcher who thinks you have no right to have fun until or unless you’ve won a World Series ring, is out for the season with an injury—slithers into your presumed path.

You talk to Maldonado while then giving Keller a well-earned glare. You’re not thinking about charging Keller, like a bull or anything else. You even give Maldonado two pats on the shoulder as you both stride up the first base line, and it looks as though it’s going to be no big deal. Looks aren’t everything, alas.

. . . then, flinging his bat like a javelin toward (underline this, gang) his own dugout . . .

Because Jose Abreu leads your teammates out of the dugout and the Royals come pouring out of theirs. It’s going to take about seven or eight minutes and a couple of scrums between a couple of coaches and managers, yours and theirs, to get the whole thing settled, even as—rather intriguingly—the mob ended up not around the mound or the plate but near first base.

And all the while, Tim, you’re doing something rather remarkable with a little help from your friends, much as Keller is. You’re both staying away from the rhubarb.

The Royals may be chirping like canaries toward you, and a few of your mates might be chirping likewise toward Keller, but you two aren’t even near the crowd. Even if your coach Joe McEwing has his arms around you from behind just in case, but you sure don’t look like you’re ready for a piece of anyone in Royals fatigues.

Your manager Rick Renteria may be barking at Royals manager Ned Yost to get his kids off the field unless they’re playing in its positions, and Yost may be barking back that there’s no way he’s going to let your boss or anyone bark at his boys. But you and Keller, with a little help from at least a couple of your friends, are actually behaving yourselves during this little danse d’absurdio.

Far as you know, Tim, Keller should be the only one who gets a ho-heave, and maybe your mates should get at least one chance to send the Royals a message in return. Maybe. You’re all about having fun while you play. You know that word “play.” Even if you’re not aware of Hall of Famer Willie Stargell’s wisdom: “The umpire doesn’t say, ‘Work ball’.” Even if you’ve never seen Bull Durham and heard Crash Davis remind his teammates, “This game’s fun, okay?”

Yet you may forget one small detail, Tim. You may forget that Joe West, one of the base umpires for the game, doesn’t forget.

. . . then, getting drilled his next time up by the pitcher off whom he’d never hit one out until his previous time up.

Last year, you asked him about whether he or anyone else saw you get touched when Javier Baez of the Cubs slid rather hard into you trying to break up a double play in the making. And Country Joe sent you and your skipper to the showers. And you said, quote, “I don’t have much to say about him. Everybody knows he’s terrible. But I didn’t say much. He threw me out. It’s OK.”

Well, it turns out not to have been OK. Because once things settle down Wednesday, Country Joe rounds up the umpires and decides Keller, Renteria, Royals coach Dale Sveum, and . . . you should be sent to your rooms.

You get Keller. You get your skipper. You get Sveum. But you? The original victim? This is like a father learning the neighbourhood bully beat the hell out of his son for no reason and deciding his son needed to be spanked for it.

And you, the son, are diplomatic enough not to reference Daddy’s previous unwarranted punishment over the Baez slide debate, such as it was, when Mother asks what the hell you are doing in time out with a sore bottom for the rest of the day. (You may wish to wonder whether Mother reminded Daddy that, thanks to these punishments he’s now number three on the all-time umpires’ ejections survey thanks to passing Hank O’Day.)

And when the White Sox send someone from their media relations department to ask what Daddy and his fellow umps thought when Daddy laid down the law, all they say in reply is, “Because of the language that was used on the field, the umpires declined comment.”

Somewhere in the middle of the scrum, Tim, Country Joe Daddy actually put his hands on your manager trying to usher him the hell out of it. Now, if you wonder, Tim, where the hell West gets off with that kind of contact—when you and every other fool knows there’d be hell to pay if it had been your manager putting hands on Country Joe Daddy or any other umpire in like circumstances—you’re hardly alone, I’m sure.

Even diplomatic you, Tim, can’t be blamed if your spontaneous thought about that and your ultimate day’s punishment is, “You’ve gotta be joking.” What’s not a joke is that of course the Royals deny any intent on Keller’s part to teach you a lesson about play. Of course Keller himself says he wasn’t trying to put a hole into your left butt.

And of course you and me and everyone else watching that game knows it was about as not-trying as the day Hunter Strickland nailed Bryce Harper on the first pitch of an at-bat, over a pair of home runs almost three years old.

We also know the Royals are a little on the hypocritical side when it comes to these things. They have no problem with one of their own remembering the umpire doesn’t say, “Work ball.” (That one of their own last year, Alcides Escobar, is now in the minor league system of . . . the White Sox. Just sayin’.) They just don’t like it when one of the opposition remembers.

Go back out and have fun today, Tim. Your manager has your back, too. As he says, wisely, about home runs like yours and spontaneous celebrations like yours, “You want him not to do that? Get him out.” What a concept.

And as for you, Brad Keller, I have this: Instead of throwing at the guy who ate your grapefruit for breakfast the next time he faces you, get him out . . . and have a little celebration of your own.

Strike him out. Make your hand into a pistol and fire it (just like Hall of Famer Dennis Eckersley used to do), or fan it. (Just like the late Joaquin Andujar used to do.) Or, make like you’re firing an old fashioned tommy gun. Or, drop to a knee and fire an imaginary bazooka toward him as he slinks back to the dugout. If hitters can have fun, why can’t pitchers?

Or, if the next time up the circumstance allows you to lure him into a double play grounder, make sure your infielders are ready to mime a juggling act. If hitters and pitchers can have fun, why can’t the fielders?

“Remember when you were a kid and you’d skip supper to play ball?” should-be Hall of Famer Dick Allen, near the end of his career, once reminded pressing young Hall of Famer-to-be Mike Schmidt. “You were having fun. Baseball’s supposed to be fun. Enjoy it. Be a kid again.”

Sound counsel for both Tim Anderson and Brad Keller, the latter of whom happens to be two years younger than the former, but who chose instead to behave like a scolding old get-off-my-lawn fart. And, for Joe West, who’s old enough to know better, still young enough to enjoy it, but may think he was born a scolding old get-off-my-lawn fart.

Throneberry Fields Forever

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