Pitchers Should Have Increased Suspensions
Posted by Seth Walder | Posted in MLB | Posted: August 12, 2009 at 7:55 pm
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Last night Kevin Youkilis charged the mound after Tigers rookie Rick Porcello hit him in the back. You could feel a fight was coming, considering Miguel Cabrera and Youkilis had been hit the night before, Cabrera had been hit again and Porcello had made an attempt to hit Victor Martinez. But Youkilis was hit squarely in the back, and actually made it to the pitcher before they tackled each other and the benches got to them. It’s a part of baseball like Mike wrote earlier today, and I certainly am not blaming Porcello for hitting Youkilis, it’s his job to hit him, and as a young player on the club he wants to build some respect from his teammates. Youkilis and Porcello were ejected and today they were both given five-game suspensions. And that was that.
But are those suspensions equal? It’s easy to quantify the loss of Youkilis, his bat can’t be in the game, and instead the Red Sox will use just another combo of the Lowell/Varitek/V-Mart/Kotchman/Ortiz madness for those games. But nonetheless, the Red Sox lose arguably their best player for five games.
You could argue the same for Porcello. 5 games means he will miss his next start and the Tigers are going to have to find someone else to start that fifth game and then in another five days Porcello will make his next start. But is that what is going to happen? When a pitcher is suspended for five games, the idea is to miss his start given the 5-man rotation. In reality, teams often just push that player’s start back one day, and can almost always put in another starter on full rest in to replace them due to off-days. So it’s just not really fair.
In some ways the 5 and 5 suspension makes sense, because the idea is that a pitcher makes up a much higher percentage of the outcome of a game than a hitter. Maybe five hitter games equals one starting pitcher game, or thereabout. But in order to fully make this work the commissioner’s office should realize they should hand hitters five-game suspensions and pitchers a nine game suspension, to ensure the pitcher misses a full turn of the rotation. It’s only fair.
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This bean ball and head hunting stuff has become a little ridiculous as of late because there is a good possibility someone will eventually get injured.
However, it was a necessary move in retaliation for Miguel Cabrera’s plunking earlier in the game, and I would not have expected anything less from Porcello Having gone to high school with him and actually being semi-decent friends our freshman and sophomore years, I am really glad to see that his ultra competitiveness has not changed one bit, even as the youngest player in baseball trying to establish himself as a major league starter and gain the respect of his teammates.
I can guarantee that one of the first people to call him and approve of his actions was his high school baseball coach, Mike “Shep” Shepard.