Odor to Bautista to suspensions, it's an MBFA triple play

As the GIFs begin to slow down and we move into the commemorative T-shirt phase, the GoFundMe campaign, and ready for the 30 for 30 doc, it is time to pause, draw breath and say thanks to Rougned Odor - for Making Baseball Fun Again.

Because who among us doesn’t love to watch highly-paid baseball hands engage in something they have no idea how to do? Sunday’s ‘melee’ in Arlington was pretty much a case of handbags, as the English would say, touched off by an Odor punch that was preceded by a buildup that went according to the usual conventions of sporting theatre (if a little long in the development, the Rangers leaving it to the very last Jose Bautista at-bat to deliver the plunk touching it off for real).  

The baseball establishment won’t be quite so grateful whenever they get around to passing judgment in the form of suspensions, but so be it. Nobody said this Make Baseball Fun Again stuff was going to be all about, y’know, fun.

“They’ve got a lot to deal with,” Blue Jays manager John Gibbons said glumly Monday, taking some time out between ejections to offer his thoughts. The suspended will form a long line, from Odor and recipient/instigator/beanball victim/bat-flipper Jose Bautista on down through Gibbons and his opposite Jeff Bannister, and anyone else caught loitering with intent, if Major League Baseball police ever finish looking at the replays that’ve been running and mutating across the Internet since late Sunday afternoon.

It’s a familiar story, and in this particular version the penalties will attempt to skirt the line rather than connect the dots between Odor’s straight right through Bautista’s defences and all the way back to seven months ago, and the bat-flip that started it all (and was itself preceded by nearly an hour of seventh-inning madness that, like this entire saga, points to the difficulty of trying to legislate emotion out of these games).  

In Make Baseball Fun Again's creation myth, Bautista’s statuesque admiring of what he had wrought was the big bang. It led to old men yelling at clouds, Bryce Harper’s sloganeering, trucker hats -- and more recently, Harper with a foulmouthed tirade at an umpire last week, thus leaning MBFA in an even more contemporary, Trumpward tack: Nothing like railing against straw-man establishment elites to bolster your brand, with its already well-established allusions to a sepia-toned past that never really was as good as advertised (see the reserve clause, the colour bar, Ty Cobb sharpening his spikes, etc.)

Like ol’ Ty and new-school Harper and Joey Bats, and unlike the MLB arbiters trying to legislate for a safer game by banning first home-plate and now second-base confrontations, Odor was just expressing himself and taking matters into his own hand. It’ll cost him 10 games or so, but I suspect he’s fine with it: been there, done that, and by now, probably even bought the T-shirt.