What If Baseball Had a Penalty Box?
I don’t watch a lot of hockey, but when I do, my favorite part of the game is when grown men sit in timeout. They have an angry little fracas and then are asked to cool down. In-game punishment is a tricky business: too light a touch, and violating rules risks becomes acceptable, too worth it. But go too strong, and the game becomes about the penalty; it’s not just an ump show but worse, a slog.
That’s part of the genius of the penalty box, the Sin Bin: removing one player from the ice spurs action. Your favorite team might score a goal. Perhaps you’ll be gifted a defensive highlight, made all the more impressive for playing down a man. But the true insight of the penalty box is a more basic one: we only ever stay really mad at things for a few minutes at a time.
There are exceptions, of course. Grudge holders, deviants. Last spring, we learned that Hunter Strickland carried his rage toward Bryce Harper through three years and a World Series parade. Some guys are just grumps. But most aren’t. Think about being a kid and playing in the yard with your cousin. Your cousin throws mud at you. Startled and angry, you throw grass back. You’re separated and sent to your corners to think about what you’ve done, but once you do, you’re ready to play again. How big a deal is mud anyway? You were dirty anyhow. Perhaps you should go eat worms together.
In the aftermath of the Strickland-Harper brawl, Sam Miller speculated on Effectively Wild that perhaps Harper would have better served by taking off his shoe and throwing it rather than chucking his batting helmet. He might have looked like less of a doofus, but the moment Harper bent down to undo his laces, it would have been over. The fight doesn’t happen. Reason returns. “Wait, what am I doing?” Bryce stops being entirely mad and starts being partially embarrassed. He remembers he’s a homeowner. He just needed a little timeout to change the whole afternoon.