“It wasn’t a good moment to do anything like that,” Bautista said in 2018. “I realized at the moment they had good reason to take offense.”
The tape of the home run shows Bautista exchanging words with Braves catcher Kurt Suzuki as he crossed home plate, and the benches emptying after that. But Bautista said the words he said to Suzuki weren’t angry ones.
“I took the time to let them know I didn’t mean anything by it,” he said.
That makes sense. Bautista obviously didn’t want a fight. As the benches were emptying—the players in the dugout had no way to know Bautista had already apologized—Bautista headed to the Blue Jays dugout.
His apology either never reached or didn’t satisfy Braves pitcher Eric O’Flaherty, who allowed the home run.
“That’s something that’s making the game tough to watch lately,” O’Flaherty told reporters after the game. “It’s just turned into look-at-me stuff; it’s not even about winning anymore. Guy wants to hit a home run in a five-run game, pimp it, throw the bat around—I mean, I don’t know. It’s frustrating as a pitcher. I didn’t see it at the time, but I saw the video—he looked at me, tried to make eye contact. It’s just tired. We’ve seen it from him, though.”
O’Flaherty couldn’t resist a parting shot.
“I’m surprised he’s ready to fight again after last year [with Odor],” he said.
This time, though, there would be no punch to the jaw.
7. Here’s Some Flipping History
JOSE BAUTISTA DIDN’T INVENT THE BAT FLIP. Neither did Yasiel Puig or Odubel Herrera or anyone else who was still playing Major League Baseball in 2018. That much we know.
We also know Bobby Thomson didn’t flip his bat on the “Shot Heard ’Round the World” in 1951, and that Mickey Mantle didn’t flip when he walked off the Cardinals in the 1964 World Series (well before anyone called it a walkoff). We know Kirk Gibson didn’t flip when he homered off Rich Gossage in the 1984 World Series, or when he homered off Dennis Eckersley four Octobers later.
But Tom Lawless did.
Yeah, Tom Lawless, a guy who played eight years in the big leagues and hit two regular season home runs. Tom Lawless.
He homered off Frank Viola in Game 4 of the 1987 World Series, and after 10 steps down the first-base line, he flipped his bat. Flipped it good, too, high in the air.
“Look at this!” Tim McCarver said on TV as ABC showed the replay.
“I didn’t remember flipping it,” Lawless told reporters after the game. “I’ve never been in a position like this before.”
“When he hit it and stood there, I thought it must be in the upper deck,” Cardinals manager Whitey Herzog said. “It was about a foot out. I asked him about it later and he said he hit it as good as he could hit a ball. I said you better run.”
When Lawless appeared as a guest during a 2017 Cardinals telecast, Dan McLaughlin asked him, “So are you the original bat flip guy?”
“Nooo,” Lawless said. “Reggie Jackson had to do it before I did.”
“Not like that,” McLaughlin said.
“No,” Lawless agreed. “Not like that. I don’t have any idea why I did it. It just happened.”
Reggie did flip his bat at times, but not like that. His flips, even on the biggest home runs, would hardly be seen as flips today. Even when he homered three times in a World Series game, he tossed the bat aside instead of really flipping it. It didn’t go over his shoulder. It went past his feet.
The Lawless one, without doubt, was a flip.
Whether or not it started a trend, the fact is flipping would eventually become more widespread and unwritten rules about it would need to be established. How opponents would react to a flip might vary from pitcher to pitcher and team to team, but it would also depend on the flipper and the situation he flipped in. Do it in a World Series, as Lawless did, and you had a better chance of getting away without a fastball to the ribs the next time up. Do it when you’re an established star, a big slugger like Barry Bonds, and you’ve got a good chance of getting away with it.
Do it in the middle of May when you’re a rookie and you risk a reaction like Jimmy Rollins got in 2001. Rollins hit a home run off Steve Kline. He may or may not have really flipped. His manager, Larry Bowa, said, “he dropped it from his waist. Jimmy didn’t do anything wrong that you don’t see on SportsCenter every night.”
What matters most, though, is the guy you might be showing up. Kline felt shown up and didn’t appreciate it.
“You don’t do that,” he told reporters. “That’s Little League stuff. I’ll flip his helmet the next time. If Scott Rolen or Barry Bonds do it, it’s no big deal. But not a first-year player.”
Soon enough, though, bat flips were being celebrated.
By 2003, the Mariners did a television ad showing Bret Boone flipping his bat, and then flipping a rake while working in his yard, a spoon while eating, his toothbrush after brushing, and a phone after hanging up. YouTube came into being two years later, and before long flips could be shared around the world. Bat flip aficionados began watching their favorite flips from Korean baseball.
Is it any wonder more and more kids came to the big leagues as flippers?
Not all of them, though.
Aaron Judge doesn’t flip. He didn’t even do it when he hit his 49th and 50th home runs of the 2017 season, tying and eclipsing Mark McGwire’s record for a major-league rookie. Judge calmly put the bat down and quickly began his trip around the bases.
Kris Bryant doesn’t flip, either.
The Cubs star, who was the National League’s Most Valuable Player in 2016, said he doesn’t want to be the guy who flips his bat and then realizes it wasn’t a home run after all. Bryant feels a long home run is enough of an embarrassment for the pitcher who serves it up, so there’s no need for him to add to it.
Beyond that, though, Bryant said it’s just not in his personality to add the extra flair of a bat flip to his game.
“I’ve never been that way, and I’m not going to be someone I’m not,” Bryant said. “It’s my personality. I get it, big situations, big home runs, far home runs, it’s nice to sit there and admire what you just did. I’ve always thought that the insult is you’ve already hit the home run off the pitcher. That’s plenty enough, for me. That’s just who I’ve been my whole life.”
Maybe Tom Lawless is always going to be that guy who flipped his bat in the 1987 World Series. But for the record, Frank Viola never did retaliate for Lawless’ flip. He faced Lawless again two years later, when Lawless was playing for the Blue Jays, and Lawless struck out and grounded out in two at-bats.
8. If Baseball Is “Tired,” Shouldn’t It Be Okay to Show Some Emotion?
IN THE SPRING OF 2016, WASHINGTON NATIONALS star Bryce Harper did an interview with Tim Keown of ESPN The Magazine.
This was the interview where Harper called baseball “a tired sport.” Plenty of people focused on that, and many who don’t like Harper saw it as confirmation of their beliefs. In truth, Harper loves the game and its history. He wants the game to become more popular, especially among people in his age group. (Harper was 23 years old when the story came out.)
“I’m not saying baseball is, you know, boring or anything like that,” Harper told Keown. But he also listed players who he considered fun: Matt Harvey, Jacob deGrom, Manny Machado, Joc Pederson, Andrew McCutchen, Yasiel Puig, and Jose Fernandez.
He singled out Fernandez, the Miami Marlins pitcher who would die in a boating accident late in the 2016 season.
“Jose Fernandez is a great example,” Harper said. “Jose Fernandez will strike you out and stare you down into the dugout and pump his fist. And if you hit a homer and pimp it? He doesn’t care. Because you got him. That’s part of the game. It’s not the old feeling—hoorah… if you pimp a homer, I’m going to hit you right in the teeth. No. If a guy pimps a homer for a
game-winning shot… I mean—sorry.”
Mike Matheny is 22 years older than Harper, enough that he’s from a different generation of players. Matheny had been retired as a player for 10 years and was managing the St. Louis Cardinals when the Harper interview came out.
“Wow, times have changed since Bob Gibson, right?” Matheny said. “But if that’s what they believe and that’s what they’re good with, I want to make sure I don’t get stuck in what I think is right. I want to represent the team and what they think.”
When Matheny took over as the Cardinals manager in 2012, he said he saw things from opponents that would have bothered him if he were behind the plate catching. As a catcher, he paid special attention to what the other team’s hitters did, in part because he felt the need to defend his own pitcher. He wanted to defuse the situation before it got to the point where his pitcher might do something that got him in trouble.
As a manager, though, Matheny would see something that concerned him, then look down the dugout and see that his own players weren’t offended by it.
“I mean there’s stuff guys are doing now that players have just become okay with,” Matheny said in 2017. “To me, it was my job as a catcher to defend a pitcher who might be getting shown up by a celebration. If I had to take over, that was something I’d been taught, so I was always hypersensitive to what was going on.
“But in my conversations with guys [as a manager], I’ll ask, ‘Does that bother you?’ I get a lot of ‘No, not really.’”
Eventually, Matheny’s old-school attitudes may have helped lead to his downfall as a manager. Just before the All-Star break in 2018, the Cardinals fired Matheny, with president of baseball operations John Mozeliak saying the team wanted to “change the way we look at things.”
The Cardinals were just 47–46 at the time of the move, and their 7½-game deficit in the National League Central no doubt had more to do with Matheny losing his job. But there was no question Matheny was also uncomfortable with some of the things he was seeing in baseball, and not just at the major-league level.
“I’m watching kids in youth baseball flip their bat and do cartwheels,” he said.
Matheny hit 67 home runs in his big-league career and never flipped his bat.
“I never did anything worth flipping,” he said.
Nice line, but in today’s game you’ll see players flip a bat after a single or even after a walk. The bigger point is that most of those flips don’t offend the pitcher or anyone on the opposing team.
In the end, it’s the players who decide what celebrations are acceptable and which ones aren’t. In this era, it may not be true that anything goes, but it’s close to that.
It’s also true that you’d better be careful about taking offense at what a guy on the other team does, because there’s a good chance someone on your team could do the exact same thing later on.
“You just have to look the other way,” said Juan Samuel, a longtime major-league player who spent time as a coach and manager after he retired. “This is how it is today. You look down at the dugout and nobody’s reacting to anything, so why am I going to?”
9. You Can Earn the Right to Celebrate
NOT ALL CELEBRATIONS ARE CREATED EQUAL.
If it’s a big enough moment, a guy can flip his bat high in the air. He can dance around the bases the way Kirk Gibson did in the 1988 World Series.
Everyone understood, including the pitcher who gave up one of the most famous home runs in World Series history.
“That’s the ultimate time to have emotion,” Dennis Eckersley told Gibson, in a joint interview they did on the Red Sox’s NESN cable network in June 2018. “You’re so glad and I’m so sad.”
The moment matters. So does the guy doing the celebrating.
Eckersley got away with plenty of dramatic celebrations himself, when he was the best closer in the game. He would pump his fist after a strikeout. He would point.
As long as he kept it about himself and his own emotions, opponents mostly accepted it as just who Eck was and what he did. Even he could sometimes go too far, as he did in the 1992 playoffs when he stared into the Toronto Blue Jays dugout after a big strikeout.
“Little League,” Jack Morris called it that day. And when the Jays tied the game on Roberto Alomar’s ninth-inning home run off Eckersley and went on to win it, taking a three games to one lead in the series, they let Eckersley know what they thought.
“Old Eck stuck it in our face and gave us reason to be happy as hell when we came back,” Morris said. “You let sleeping giants lie. The poor guy wouldn’t look over [after Alomar’s homer] like he did when he struck the guy out.”
“They got the payback, right?” Eckersley responded. “They can gloat in that, while I eat crow.”
He was willing to eat crow, and he was also willing to accept it when a hitter like Gibson celebrated a huge moment. Big moments by big hitters make a little more drama acceptable.
David Ortiz could stand and stare when he hit a big home run. So could Barry Bonds or Ken Griffey Jr.
It’s the guy who hits five home runs a year and wants to flip a bat. That’s what gets to pitchers. It’s the guy who flips his bat after a single.
“I don’t think Aaron Judge is going to stand there and watch, which is ultimately why I love him,” Astros pitcher Gerrit Cole said. “But one of the most iconic [scenes] is Manny [Ramirez] standing there with his hands over his head. There are guys that have been around for a long time. When you have 600 home runs and you want to stop and look at it, I sure as hell am not going to tell you otherwise. That’s your own deal.
“But there are only a few guys who have that many home runs, and you might not know that by watching [the games].”
Cole is right about Judge, who hit a major-league rookie record 52 home runs in 2017 with the Yankees. He didn’t flip his bat after any of them, and didn’t take his time running around the bases, either.
Judge told Kevin Kernan of the New York Post that he’ll never stop and watch, because one time when he was a senior in high school, he stood and watched a ball that hit the top of the fence.
“I didn’t even make it to second base,” Judge said. “After that moment I said it would be the last time I don’t hustle.”
Plenty of players come to the major leagues without learning the same lesson. When Jose Ramirez was a young player with the Indians in 2015, the Twins got upset when he took too long to round the bases after a home run against them—taking nearly eight seconds just to get to first base. And that was after he flipped his bat. The Twins let him know they didn’t approve, and even Ramirez’s own manager said something.
“Good swing, poor judgment,” Terry Francona told reporters that day. “He’ll learn. Hopefully not the hard way, but he’ll learn.”
It seems he did. In the years since 2015, Ramirez has become one of baseball’s big stars, the type of guy who might get away with admiring his home runs. But of the 29 homers he hit in the 2017 season, he never took even 24 seconds to circle the bases.
Even in 2015, Ramirez was fortunate. There was a time when the Twins’ disapproval would have resulted in a fastball to the ribs. They never did throw at Ramirez.
Carlos Gomez wasn’t so fortunate. Gomez hit a walkoff home run against the Twins in April 2018. He flipped his bat. He threw his arms in the air. He wagged his tongue. And he took his time rounding the bases. Statcast timed his trot at 28.85 seconds, incredibly slow for a guy who is fast.
“I was not trying to disrespect anybody,” Gomez told the Tampa Bay Times the next day.
But when the Rays went to Minnesota three months later, Twins pitcher Jose Berrios greeted Gomez with a 90.9 mph fastball on the hip.
Gomez won’t get anywhere close to 600 home runs in his career (he had 142 in 12 seasons through 2018), but he won’t make any apologies for playing the game with some flair.
/> “It’s something I know a lot of people are talking good about this, that baseball needs more of that,” Gomez told the Times. “And some people say it’s not good. If enjoying and having fun in baseball is bad, I’m guilty.”
David Ortiz didn’t hit 600 home runs, but he did hit 541 in his 20-year career. And after many of them, he took his time rounding the bases. From 2010 to ’16, a guy named Larry Granillo timed home run trots and posted them at a website he called tatertrottracker.com. In 2013, by Granillo’s calculations, Ortiz had seven of the 10 slowest trots. Twelve times in the seven seasons Granillo timed the trots, Ortiz took more than 30 seconds to get around the bases.
No one minded. It was David Ortiz.
Now MLB.com’s Statcast is able to time every trot electronically. Nelson Cruz had the longest one of 2017, at 33.37 seconds, not counting trots interrupted by injury or ones where the batter had to wait to see if a ball would be called fair or foul. But there were four other guys who had at least one trot of at least 31 seconds in 2017 (Anthony Rizzo, Yasiel Puig, Hanley Ramirez, and Manny Machado).
Puig needed 32.1 seconds to make it around the bases after a home run against the Mets that June.
Mets players Yoenis Cespedes and Jose Reyes let him know between innings that he might not want to do it again. Puig is not normally a slow guy, but his trot that day was one of the slowest of the entire season.
“[Cespedes] told me, ‘Try to run a little faster,’” Puig told reporters after the game.
In today’s game, some pitchers will tell you they don’t mind what a hitter does. But if gaining respect from everyone matters to you, you don’t take 32.1 seconds to circle the bases and you don’t pimp a single in the middle of a nothing game in August.
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