Well, the 2026 major league baseball season is underway. And there already has been plenty of exciting action on the diamond, some of which even involved baseball plays.
In a recently televised game, a brawl broke out, which perpetuates another age-old baseball tradition: First, there is the seventh-inning stretch, then there is the eighth-inning brawl.
In this particular brawl, a batter charged the pitcher, swung, and missed. The pitcher then swung and missed the batter.
Next, ten more players piled onto the field, all swinging and missing. So, twelve swings and misses, sort of reminiscent of a typical game in Jose Conseco’s batting career.
As during past seasons, I am still baffled by certain aspects of the game. For example, I don’t understand the concept of the “hit-and-run.”
How can that be a type of special strategy? Isn’t that the basic goal of all batters – hit the ball and then run?
If the batter doesn’t hit the ball, it results in either a strikeout or a walk. If every batter performs only one of those two options, the television viewer may as well switch to a more action-packed program such as the cooking channel’s “Woks Gone Wild!”
Obviously if a player does hit the ball and doesn’t run, he could be tagged out by even as inept a player as my fifth-grade teammate Eugene Snodgrass who we all made fun of due to the fact that he had an inhaler attached to his catcher’s mask.
I guess a third possibility for the batter is to get hit by a pitch. If that does happen, why doesn’t the batter then get to hit the pitcher once with the bat? Seems fair to me.
That’s just one example of how dangerous baseball can be. Perhaps you saw the televised game in which the home plate umpire was hit in the head by the barrel of a broken bat. He claimed to be all right, but I wasn’t so sure.
For the remainder of the game, he called balls and strikes with his back to the pitcher, insisted on singing the National Anthem after each strikeout, and called for a rain delay due to excessive spitting by the players.
