Major League Baseball has spent the past couple years trying to reinvent itself to be appealing to the average fan. With the NFL reigning supreme and the explosion of the NBA, they've had to try to become more of an interactive league on social media. They were oh so close the other day when White Sox shortstop Tim Anderson had a mammoth of a bat-flip, causing Royals pitcher Brad Keller to take so much offense to that gesture that he felt he needed to throw at Anderson the next at-bat. This sparked a benches clearing pissing contest between the two teams where there were some ludicrous ejections by umpire Joe West, but that's neither here nor there.
The point I'm trying to make here is that the MLB was eating every second of this bat-flip up. It caught fire on twitter and was the lead story on just about all the sports talk-shows that night and the next morning.
There was more coverage on one bat-flip than MLB had all year long and it was finally looking like the league would start to embrace this kind of behavior and quite possibly captivate the attention of the average fan.
Then the MLB comes out today with a one game suspension for Anderson and five for Keller.
A mere ~48~ hours after embracing the competitiveness of Anderson and allowing him to be himself, all while engaging people who probably haven't even watched a game yet this year, they do a complete 180 and hand out punishments. For a league that was pushing to "let the kids play", this is complete hypocrisy.
Taunting and flashiness is what this league needs. We need more Tim Anderson and Javy Baez's and less Randal Grichuk's.
The average fan tunes into a game to be entertained with passionate players, not guys who are just "trying to act like they have been there before". MLB had a chance to truly embrace this revolution and they blew it with these suspensions. Take a lesson from the NHL and encourage rivalries and trash talk. The game grows with the increased coverage from these bench clearing shoving matches and outrageous bat-flips, not from Joe Shmoe keeping his head down and running out a ground ball hard. It's going to take some ruffling of feathers and some progressiveness for the MLB to grow like the other sports leagues and they sure as hell are not going to accomplish it by punishing players for having big personalities in a game that already restricts it.