If you missed it earlier today, known red-ass Brett Lawrie of the Toronto Blue Jays took it upon himself to try and decaptitate Angels catcher John Hester. In Lawrie's defense, there was going to be a play at the plate and he made a snap decision. However, the decision he made was a decidedly dirty one as you can see in the GIF below:
GIF courtesy of @SAJagfire
This is the real-time shot and even here you can see that Hester is not really blocking the plate. He is in a prone, defenseless position reaching up to catch the ball, which he amazingly does. The plate is there for the taking for Lawrie, but he instead contorts his body so he can throw a forearm shiver directly into Hester's mask. I'm all for hard play, but there is no place for blows to the head. That's how guys get seriously hurt and the slow-mo close-up replay show pretty clearly that Lawrie intentionally went right at Hester's head. Plays don't get any dirtier than that.
Predictably, Lawrie got up and started acting like he had done something special before jawing at the Angel dugout when Mike Butcher took exception. Shockingly, Lawrie didn't end up with a baseball in his earhole when he came up for his next at-bat (although he might come to bat in the ninth inning).
MLB.com doesn't have the video of the play embeddable, but they do have a video up. Check it out here.
