MLB handed down a suspension to Yordano Ventura:
Kansas City pitcher Yordano Ventura was suspended nine games and Baltimore third baseman Manny Machado was penalized four games Thursday after their brawl earlier this week.
Major League Baseball also fined each player an undisclosed amount. USA Today, which first reported the Machado penalty, said the Orioles star must pay $2,500.
Each player has appealed, the league said. Machado was in the lineup for the Orioles on Thursday night against Toronto, batting third.
“It’s just kind of tough when you have to play short because of something that someone else kind of got going,” Orioles manager Buck Showalter said before the game.
Nine games is way too short for Ventura’s attack on Machado. Players can be suspended 80 games for domestic violence, but attempt to injure an opponent with a baseball, and you miss one start.
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No, no it is not enough. Nine games equals one missed start. That’s nothing. That’s a twinge and a precautionary sit-down. That’s a timeout for somebody whose tantrums are dangerous to the people he plays against. Given Ventura’s past history, MLB needed to make the strongest possible point of saying that it won’t tolerate anybody throwing high-90s heat with intent at people on the field.
I say that while acknowledging that I’ve been one of the more patient people with Ventura’s anger-management issues, writing about it after his run-in with Adam Eaton back in the big Royals-White Sox rumble of April 2015, and now this latest bit of mound mayhem. And I do still hope we get to see a Yordano Ventura who gets his act together, harnesses his league-beating heat, and gives the Royals — or somebody — the quality starting pitcher so many folks think he can be.
But remember, after the Eaton fracas Ventura received a seven-game suspension — and he didn’t even hit Eaton with a pitch. Dialing up the suspension-o-meter to nine isn’t just incremental, it lacks a sense of proportion. If you’re in the business of meting out punishments and you’re going to prosecute players for on-field violence, you dial it up way past nine games, because you’re operating from the belief that what Ventura did put another player’s health and career at risk.
It’s time to put an end to retaliation with pitches.
In your Machado post another user, “rbj”, suggested that starting pitchers should miss starts, not games. That’s a great idea.
Yes, this. I don’t want to defend charging the mound, but if MLB is at most going to give token slaps on the wrists to players who intentionally throw fast balls at other players, what is the batter suppose to do?
That ball can seriously injure or kill… so it should be treated as such.