Nick Castellanos dared to have fun playing baseball and got suspended from playing baseball

Just stop, MLB.

That Major League Baseball is detrimentally humorless does not need to be stated. The sport in general fumbles opportunity after opportunity to market its stars and broaden the game’s appeal to young fans who have a plethora of options of things to care about.

Baseball constantly tamps down individual displays of triumph in honor of some mystical “code.” This same set of unwritten rules, though, allows for pitchers to throw a baseball at somebody as retribution. We’ve talked about the silliness of it all a lot (seriously, take a look at all the relevant links in this post from Ted Berg), and yet we’re not even a week into the new season before needing to address it again.

MLB has suspended Reds outfield Nick Castellanos two games for his “aggressive actions and for instigating a benches-clearing incident” between his team and the Cardinals Saturday afternoon.

Here’s the offensive aggressiveness, in case you need to review:

And this is the heated moment that led to it. For what it’s worth, Cardinals players said this pitch mistakenly got away and was not meant to hit Castellanos:

Castellanos has opted to appeal the suspension, so he won’t serve it until he has made his case.

What’s that discussion even sound like, though? Castellanos celebrated scoring a run, which is the mechanism by which you win baseball games, and happened to be near the guy who’d just beaned him with a 92-mile-per-hour fastball in the ribs. It led to a kerfuffle.

There was some suggestion that Castellanos had been ejected for this incident because it violated MLB COVID-19 protocols that sought to limit players coming near each other for the sake of arguing or fighting. But if that’s the case the game probably should have just been called off after the scrum, no?

Anyway, this all remains weird and counter-productive when you consider it through the lens of “How do we get people to care about baseball?” Allowing players to show the sort of emotion that is typical in competitive moments should be part of that answer! Fans don’t want genteel sportsmanship, they want to see that the players care.

Yeah, that’s pretty much it. This sort of thing happens 25 times per NFL game.

By all means players should respect each other — up to and including not pegging them with a baseball — but celebrating the ticks and tocks of a hard-fought game is fine.

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