LITTLE ROCK — The NFL, having seen the damage and heard the evidence and been hit with a flurry of lawsuits, is studying various methods to address concussions and their aftereffects.
The NHL, equally aware of the hazards and bracing for similar lawsuits, is at least attempting to deal with the issue.
Such buzz about making sports safer represents a new evolution, yet the age of enlightenment has not yet penetrated the recalcitrant customs of Major League Baseball.
Our national pastime tends to resist change, no matter how sensible it might be. Baseball folks cling to their “unwritten” rule book, treating it like a sacred constitution, as if without it the game would lose its appeal, along with its order and structure.
Some of these rules may exist for legitimate reasons, but at least one - throwing at a batter, under any circumstance - is complete and utter nonsense. And, according to everything we’ve learned, unsafe.
Consider: It’s a punishable offense for a football coach to offer a “bonus” to his linebacker for knocking the opposing quarterback to the sideline, but it’s OK for a baseball manager to have his pitcher purposely hit an opposing batter, which could result in injury.
Tell me again, which game is promoting violence?
The retaliatory pitch is accepted by the game’s power elite, expected by batters coming to the plate and embraced by just about everyone in uniform. It’s as if participating in this custom merits some invisible badge of manhood.
“I think it’ll be in baseball forever,” Giants Manager Bruce Bochy said. “At the same time, it has gotten out of hand a little bit. Some of these guys that get hit, they’re not on purpose. And a team retaliates because it thinks it has to.”
Bochy is among the many intelligent baseball men who abide by these archaic rules, largely because it’s all they know - and because it would require incredible character to take a stand against tradition. This is what they were taught through the game’s various levels, so it’s what they teach.
This was baseball in 1920, when a pitch cracked the skull of Ray Chapman, who died hours later. This was baseball in 1967, when a pitch shattered the cheekbone of Tony Conigliaro, tragically shortening the career - and perhaps the life - of a budding prospect.
We’ve seen enough victimized batters, with their gruesome and sometimes career-altering injuries, to know being hit by a pitch can haunt a man for the rest of his life.
Yet nobody blinked last season, when Cubs outfielder Marlon Byrd took a pitch to the face and missed six weeks. Nobody thought twice last week, when White Sox slugger Paul Konerko took a pitch to the face and needed four days off.
Sometime this weekend or next week or whenever there is another collision between a batter and a baseball traveling upward of 90 mph, no one will cock an eyebrow.
Why? Because it’s baseball, the way the game is played.
Some of these cases - and there are many more - were purely accidental. Sometimes, pitches really do “get away.”
Does that make them less powerful as reminders of the damage a pitched ball can do?
Do we really want to end another baseball career, perhaps ruining a pitcher’s life, by insisting on eye for-an-eye brutality as other sports acknowledge a need for safety measures?
NFL legend John Madden, speaking during his KCBS radio show, recently conceded maybe it’s time baseball reconsider its Russian roulette routine.
“I understand protecting the inside of the plate and making them honor that and all those types of things,” he said. “There are certain times you have to throw at a guy, and I know they say they don’t throw at the head. But doggone it, the head is pretty darn close to the shoulders.”
That may have been what Mets Manager Terry Collins was thinking last week. After New York pitcher D.J. Carrasco hit Milwaukee slugger and reigning National League MVP Ryan Braun, Collins expected retaliation. Figuring the Brewers would target his best player, David Wright, Collins removed Wright from the game.
Wright, prepared to be subjected to the retaliation mandated by baseball code, was livid. Collins had no regret.
“You want to know why I took him out of the game?” the manager said afterward. “He wasn’t getting hurt. ... I don’t blame the other team for any perception they had. But I’ve got news for you: In this game, there are unwritten rules and one of the unwritten rules is, ‘You hit my guy, I’m hitting your guy.’ They were not hitting my guy tonight.”
Asked what he thought of the incident, Bochy paused for a few seconds.
“Ahh, I understand it,” he finally said. “He figured his guy was going to get hit.
“But that’s going to happen. And eventually the [Brewers] will do that. I know David wasn’t too happy. My answer to that is [Collins is] just prolonging the action.”
There’s no hiding from the unwritten rule book, and no willingness to rewrite what’s not written.
So baseball clings to its caveman mentality, never mind the calendar insisting we’re in the 21st century. Or that sports have learned so much, advanced so far and vastly improved their capacity for responsible behavior.
Nope, the book says baseball must be played as it always has been, even if it means foolishly inviting disaster and putting lives at risk. Any surrender based on education and evolution is left to other sports.
Sports, Pages 18 on 05/28/2012