In an unfathomably unfair decision, Major League Baseball has suspended Roger Clemens five games and Joe Torre one game for hitting Alex/Alexis Rios in the back with a pitch Tuesday night. These suspensions expose how backwards and twisted baseball's current warning/ejections/suspension system is, as related to HBPs.
Let's look at the chain of events:
1) Alex Rodriguez yells "Ha!" while rounding the bases, causing a pop-up to drop harmlessly in the infield. Hilarity ensues.
2) Blue Jays pitcher Jesse Litsch throws a hard object approximately 90 mph behind ARod.
3) Josh Towers, apparently in some sort of delusional rage at Tony Pena, drills ARod in the leg, causing injury.
4) Having had enough, and sticking up for his teammates, Clemens drills Rios in the back.
Now who escalated the situation here? Clemens gets punished for doing the exact thing the Blue Jays attempted to do twice, yet the Jays make off like bandits despite bringing a gun to a knife-fight.
This decision is startling in its hypocrisy, astonishing in its wrongness.
Hey...did Jays manager John Gibbons ever get suspended for trying to start fistfights in his own clubhouse?
