It didn't take long for tempers to flare again between the San Diego Padres and Atlanta Braves on Thursday. In the first inning of their afternoon game — 11 pitches in, in fact — Matt Kemp was hit by a high-and-tight Julio Teheran pitch. Kemp began to take his base, but was none too pleased.
His slow walk to first base took a detour toward Teheran and, this being baseball, the benches cleared quickly. There was a lot of standing around, maybe a little pushing, but like most baseball "brawls," there was no actual fighting.
The seeds of anger between these two teams goes back to what many Padres fans are calling a dirty slide by Andrelton Simmons into catcher Derek Norris on Tuesday night. The two teams exchanged HBPs on Wednesday and now this.
The highlight of the quasi-fracas was when home-plate umpire Jordan Baker was trying to calm down Kemp. Kemp seemed to relax, but then lunged to the right, hoping to make an end-around toward Teheran. That didn't quite work, as Baker took Kemp to the ground (with some help from Kemp's momentum).
Hey, that's more exciting than the usual baseball brouhaha!
As you can see, Kemp obviously slipped as he tried to evade Baker, helping matters. The anti-Kemp crowd might argue that he's fragile, but he even if so, we expect a 6-foot-4 outfielder with a $160 million contract to be able to hold his own against an umpire.
Then again, Baker stands 6-foot-7 and looks like he might have been on the football field practicing pancake blocks at some point in his life.
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