Don't Fuck With The Royals

This is pretty scary, but one of the beautiful things about baseball is that it polices itself. Karma can be a bitch, or sometimes a Zach Greinke fastball to the grill.

A couple weeks back, Torii Hunter mouthed off about the exploding numbers of players wearing Jackie Robinson’s No. 42. He implied that whites, Asians and Latinos should not do so, and that only a select few African American players—those who, in his eyes, are carrying out Jackie’s legacy—were worthy of donning the number.

That’s bullshit, and the complaint made me respect Torii Hunter less.

Then, Hunter made headlines again. He apparently violated some dumb old rule that you can’t bribe another team with worthless gifts, something that probably happened back in the Black Sox days. To wit, Hunter had promised the lowly KC Royals champagne if they pulled a Forty-Niner and helped the Twins win the division in ’06. Last week Hunter made good on his word and baseball went ape shit.

This was treated as a novelty story, kind of like when someone unearths old miscegenation and sodomy laws. It left me with one impression, that Torii Hunter is a major league dick. The Kansas City Royals are professional baseball players. The champagne promise was based on an assumption that the lowly Royals didn’t have a prayer of beating the Tigers last season, and Hunter was grandstanding based on this premise. In baseball, in the old days, if you stood around admiring your home run, or if you took a little too long in your trot, next time up you got smoked.

Torii Hunter tried to treat the Royals like little kids, and he got drilled in the face. That’s a comeuppance.