Umpires Lack Feel, Abner Uribe Lacks Maturity in Ugly Brewers-Rays Fracas

I have to lead with a disclaimer: I think the fights in which baseball players engage are childish and stupid. Only fairly massive, high-stakes personal conflicts ever need to be resolved with fists or grappling, and there's perhaps one conflict of that magnitude that plays out on a big-league diamond every five years. All the other instances of two (or 20) grown men squaring up and swinging at one another are unseemly, unintentionally hilarious displays of empty machismo. When they manage to contain real violence, rather than clumsy facsimiles of it, they only become more irresponsible and senseless.

That's important to say, because I also have to say this: I love what happens to a baseball game once the tension between two teams gets pitched upward, the way it did when the frustrated, sub-.500 Rays fell behind 6-1 Tuesday night and then watched Freddy Peralta plunk Jose Siri with a 3-0 pitch. Siri had begun the ramp-up a few innings earlier, when he peacocked a bit on a home run, but there was little in that. There was nothing at all in Peralta hitting him; that was plainly unintentional.

Because the Rays are playing lousy baseball, though, and because the Brewers were on a losing streak and had had beef with the umpires in two consecutive games before Tuesday's, those innocuous happenings stirred a bit of distemper. Then, the umpires foolishly blew the situation out of proportion, ejecting Peralta (and then manager Pat Murphy) based on a wildly inaccurate surmise about the Brewers ace's mindset. That put every person in each dugout on edge, in what could otherwise have been an easygoing, lopsided, slightly boring game.

Once that happens, baseball gets rearranged in our brains a little bit. It unfolds, and we see some of the pressure points that easily hide from us most of the time. The field itself takes on a different character. I always find myself noticing and attending more closely to the (relatively few) spaces where players from opposing teams interact in close quarters, like the batter's box (the batter and the catcher), the bases (especially on double play turns and coverage by the pitcher at first), and the basepaths. Routine plays hum with a little bit of drama. I don't want to see that bubble over, but I like that it's there.

Alas, Abner Uribe let the drama bubble over in a big way. Needlessly and childishly, he tried to bump and shrug past Siri after retiring him on a grounder to first, and then when Siri invited a confrontation, Uribe waded right into the quagmire. It was terrible baseball; the act of a goon. The Brewers, with their thin and innings-light rotation, had Peralta unfairly knocked out early by the dreadful judgment of Chris Guccione, and Uribe had been called upon to help cover the innings needed to finish off an easy win. It was selfish of him to let some vague desire to intimidate the unintentional instigator of the earlier trouble override his own judgment.

Because he took the first swing (again, unintentionally hilarious: he was trying to deliver what looked like a three-quarters-hearted open-handed slap, whiffed, and ended up getting punched in the neck in the ensuing brouhaha) and then scrabbled with Siri pretty hard afterward, Uribe is almost certain to get suspended for those actions when the league reviews this mess this week. Guccione should have to serve a game's suspension for each one levied against the combatants, here, but that's not the main point. The main point is, with even a modicum of moderation, Uribe could have avoided putting extra pressure on his teammates, in the present and the future. He's been a disappointment on the mound so far this year, and this was the biggest letdown yet.

Still, the team did finish off the Rays and recapture first place in the NL Central. They remain a good team with a lot going for them, especially in light of Tyler Black's encouraging debut. It's just been a weird and thorny three days, and after the manager righteously got thrown out in the sixth on Tuesday, the team cracked in a somewhat regrettable way. Hopefully, the actual unpleasantness is behind us, but the Brewers will have to suffer a couple more negative consequences because of this cycle of bad decisions made by both themselves and the umpiring crews who should be keeping things on the tracks.