When Josh Rupe drilled Russell Martin in the back last night and then insisted that it was unintentional, it reminded me of one of my favorite moments covering baseball way back in the day.
Let me preface this by saying that not only don't I believe Rupe, but I don't want to believe him. The way the game was played in the golden age, if you hit a couple of home runs in a row and dug in the batters box in your next at-bat, that bruise on your upper back was simply routine. No ejection. No suspension. That's the way the game was played at one time.
Now, let me get to my point, which was made better than me on June 20, 1980, when I was on an Angels road trip with an LA Times writer who would later become quite well known as a columnist here in Baltimore. His name was Mike Littwin.
We were in Boston with the Angels and 140-pound shortstop Freddie Patek did the unthinkable, hitting three towering home runs over the Green Monster at Fenway Park and coming up for one more at-bat late in a 20-2 Angels victory. Patek, as you'd expect, swung from his rear end in that final at-bat and nearly screwed himself into the ground trying to become the tiniest player to hit four homers in a game.
So, afterward, we were interviewing him and asked him how much he wanted to hit that fourth home run and, amazingly, Patek insisted that he wasn't even trying. Said something about not ever changing your swing, even as Don Baylor chuckled across the clubhouse about the way Patek had almost come out of his cleats in that final at-bat.
Which spawned something I now call the "Mike Littwin Ass**** Theory," and I'll let you fill in the blanks. Mike came back up to the press box and spelled it out.
"You know," he said. "If Freddy was lying to us, then he's an ass****, and if he wasn't trying to hit his fourth home run of the night in that situation, he's an even bigger ass****." I hope you're not offended by the crude language, but the principle kind of applies in this situation, though I don't think Rupe is anything but a decent guy.
In this situation, it has always been acceptable to claim you didn't mean to hit the guy -- even in the old days.
Bonus old guy moment: Here's how much the game has changed in one generation. Later in the 1980s, I attended a disciplinary hearing in New York following a well-publicized beanball incident and asked then-American League president Dr. Bobby Brown why the punishment was relatively light. He didn't hesitate.
"Because it's not a tea party."