Major League Baseball hasn’t had a banner week, despite managing to open its shortened season three-plus months into a worldwide pandemic. The strategy of trying to play games while covid-19 cases and deaths continue to mount in the United States remains to be fully tested, but a major outbreak among the Miami Marlins forced games to be postponed and schedule shuffled.
The worst case scenario didn’t unfold, yet. There hasn’t been a player or coach to suffer severe illness from covid, and if other teams aren’t affected by the virus spreading, the protocols might even hold.
So while MLB waits for the tests to show if the damage has been contained, they found a way to remind us how much potential they still have to mess things up somehow. Today’s suspensions of Dodgers pitcher Joe Kelly for eight games and manager Dave Roberts for one game took a bad decision and compounded it with a worse one.
To recap, the league found that the Houston Astros cheated throughout their 2017 championship season, which culminated in a World Series victory over the Dodgers. MLB issued harsh punishments to the Astros’ front office and manager, one-year suspensions that essentially could end careers.
But they promised all the players immunity in exchange for revealing the details of the cheating program. So no player received any kind of punishment, and the team kept its title. The Dodgers, among other teams, were decidedly less than thrilled with that outcome.
Cut to the much-delayed 2020 season, in which the Dodgers and Astros were not scheduled to face each other originally but had to under the new regionalized schedule that reduced travel. In Tuesday’s 6th inning, relief pitcher Kelly appeared to struggle with his control and threw several pitches that missed their targets. He threw a few pitches that came close to hitting Astros but didn’t, and he also threw a few that didn’t come close to anything.
Let’s note this is the same Joe Kelly whose April video on Twitter showed him breaking windows in his house because his backyard pitching was so inaccurate. Do we know if he was just wild or if he intended to put a scare into the Astros? No. Did he hit anyone? No. Did he come really close to ending anyone’s career? No again.
So of course MLB slapped him with a suspension for 13% of the season, something totally out of proportion with the alleged crime. A few years ago Kelly was suspended for hitting a player with a pitch and then hitting him again in the ensuing brawl … and for that he received a six-game suspension. Hmmm.
Maybe you’ll recall in 1965 when the Giants’ Juan Marichal hit the Dodgers’ John Roseboro over the head with a bat? Marichal got 10 games for that.
Also, let’s remember once again that no Astro received as much as a single-game suspension for participating in a cheating scandal for at least a season. Does any of this feel appropriate?
Had Kelly actually hit anyone with a pitch or a fist or a piece of equipment, he would have earned a suspension. Maybe even a longer one. Kelly will appeal, the suspension will probably get cut down a few games, but no one will forget that MLB whiffed on this pitch and hit itself in the head in the process.