DownSwinging.com

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.