Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Zack Greinke threw a baseball and it hit San Diego Padres slugger Carlos Quentin on the left arm.
Quentin, after a moment's hesitation, decided to charge Greinke, inciting a bench-clearing brawl.
The incident ultimately resulted in Greinke breaking his collarbone, four players getting ejected, and an actual "meet you in the parking lot" skirmish, all of which is 99.999999% certain to result in suspension(s).
That's all to say what went down, but in the grand scheme of baseball things, it doesn't do much to reveal who's really to blame for how things unraveled the way they did. Who's really the a-hole in all of this? Is it the pitcher or the hitter? Greinke or Quentin?
Let's start with the guy who threw the pitch, Zack Greinke. Greinke is an introvert who has a tendency to rub people the wrong way, but he's a very good pitcher with good control. In facing 6,273 batters over the course of his career, Greinke has plunked only 46. That means for every 136 or so batters he faces, one will get away (or maybe he'll throw at a batter occasionally). That's a pretty good ratio, either way. Before Thursday night, Greinke had only hit four batters spanning the last three seasons (1,736 batters), none of whom were named Carlos Quentin.
Any batter who has ever been hit by a pitch before knows that it is not a fun experience. It's agitating and to be hit by a pitcher that may have a propensity to throw at batters on purpose or just have an unlikable personality in general, can be especially grating. I don't know how hitters feel about Greinke, but striking out to him in one at bat and then getting hit by one of his mid-90s fastballs in the next has to be anguishing. For anybody who gets hit by a lot of pitches season in and season out, I honestly wonder if they expect/want to get hit as often as they do given how they might crowd the plate, or if they're a ticking time bomb, just waiting to charge the next pitcher who so much as makes the wrong facial expression afterward.
Carlos Quentin's a Stanford guy who was, for the most part, lauded when he came up with the White Sox, but injuries have prevented him from sustaining success on the diamond. In addition to beefing up through all the injuries, he may have also added a baseball magnet inside his jersey, because since 2009 nobody has been hit by more pitches than him. 95 times to be exact.
It's important to note that Greinke and Quentin have a history. Albeit a short history. From 2008-2010, the two faced each other 28 times as opponents in the AL Central. At one point, a lot of the few pitches that got away from Greinke were perhaps-not-so-coincidentally getting away against Quentin and the White Sox (9 of Greinke's first 29 HBPs were vs. the White Sox). In 2008, Greinke hit Quentin with a pitch to load the bases. Quentin later homered off Greinke. In 2009, Greinke hit Quentin again in his second at bat of the game after buzzing his tower and striking him out in the first. Quentin took a step toward the mound after getting hit, but was quickly cut off by the home plate umpire.
Quentin obviously thought there was some malicious intent in 2009, supposedly telling Oney Guillen, Ozzie Guillen's son, he was going to charge Greinke the next time Greinke hit him. It's amazing how long an unreasonable grudge like that can last and flare up again under certain circumstances.
Here are the circumstances of Thursday night's game, four years later: Matt Kemp, the Dodgers best hitter, received some chin music in the first inning. Maybe a message pitch, but no harm done. Greinke got Quentin to ground out in the first inning and struck out Quentin swinging to lead off the fourth inning. Quentin was then hit with a 3-2 pitch in the sixth inning of what was a 2-1 game, meaning Quentin would have been the tying run on first with nobody out. Quentin wouldn't make it to first, of course, because he charged the mound, obviously figuring the HBP was intentional — a 3-2 pitch, three at bats and 13 pitches later, in the sixth inning of a 2-1 game with no outs, which just grazed the arm of the most plunked batter in baseball.
Yeah, I'm not buying.
Quentin claims what Greinke said after hitting him was "the final straw." Replays show Greinke mouthing something, but it's uncertain whether it was out of frustration from just putting on the leadoff hitter of a close game or if it was directed at Quentin, who was already on his way to the mound.
Greinke didn't back down and he'll probably learn to never throw his shoulder into a charging 6-foot-2, 235-pounder ever again without first putting on pads, but it's hard to pin any more fault on Greinke than poor tackling and a missed pitch to the wrong loose cannon.
… As for how Matt Kemp and Jerry Hairston acted in all of this? Well, for me, it's hard to get too worked up about them in the aftermath. They just lost their $147 million pitcher to a broken collarbone, or as Hairston put it, "a broken f—— collarbone," because a meat stick from the other team misread a situation based on a four-year-old grudge.
