Baseball is always good for a few comically overwrought controversies per season, and the brouhaha of the moment concerns the Chicago White Sox, and whether or not rookie Yermin Mercedes desecrated the sport—or, perhaps, the entirety of human civilization—when he smacked a home run on a droopy 3-0 pitch from a utility player during a blowout win over the Minnesota Twins.
Reactions to this appear to fall into two categories. The first reaction is, essentially, a shoulder shrug: He’s a hitter. I thought he was supposed to hit. If you don’t want him to hit, throw a better pitch. This was the reaction of some notable Major League ballplayers who supported Mercedes, including some of his White Sox teammates, as well as the 2020 National League Cy Young winner Trevor Bauer of the Dodgers, who tweeted: Dear hitters: If you hit a 3-0 homer off me, I will not consider it a crime.
The counter reaction is: Look, this is about sportsmanship—the White Sox were cruising to victory, let the pitcher try to throw a strike, there’s no need to rub it in by bashing a garbage-time homer. This is, interestingly, the position of the White Sox manager Tony La Russa, who criticized his own player for an unlicensed 3-0 hack, and wasn’t fazed the next night, when a Twins hurler appeared to retaliate by throwing a pitch that sailed behind Mercedes’s back. “I don’t have a problem with how the Twins handled that,” the 76-year-old Chicago skipper said.
(It might not rate well in our conflict-driven economy, but there’s also a third, decaffeinated take somewhere in the middle. It’s possible to think that 3-0 home runs in blowouts are a bit tacky, but also to have been thoroughly amused by Mercedes’s meaningless moonshot versus Minny. Complaining about home runs starts to sound like complaining about pizza.)
As always, a sense of proportion is useful. If baseball players continue to swing at 3-0 pitches in blowouts, I don’t believe we’re going to wake up one morning, and the moon will have replaced the sun, the rivers and oceans will be filled with Mountain Dew and fire, and all the neighborhood dogs will be driving around in cherry red Camaros, cranking Meatloaf.
