Carlos Quentin vs. Zack Greinke

It seems like after a day or so, the consensus switched to realizing that maybe what happened the other night wasn’t completely Carlos Quentin’s fault. Especially when you really dig into the history, as South Side Sox’s Jim Margalus has:

None of which completely excuses Quentin. But sometimes it’s very good to remember that almost everything that happens in baseball happens within some sort of broader context.

When MLB.com went back and added classic videos early this year, they apparently had some priorities about what went up first. There were milestones and events like 500th homers, first homers, and no-hitters, of course. The Giants wanted every home run that splashed into the bay outside AT&T Park, even if it was hit by Felipe Crespo or Michael Tucker, so those all went up. Someone figured that Expos highlights would be a draw, or at least they didn’t want the youth of today to think the Expos were a Sidd Finch-like hoax.

The other thing they put up with great frequency: bench-clearing brawls. Here’s Pedro Martinez winging his helmet at Mike Williams. Here’s Mike Mussina and Bill Haselman hugging and rolling around on the ground. Here’s a doozy of a brawl between Ray Knight and Eric Davis. Here’s the first brawl I remember as a kid, and I still talk about it 25 years later.

But you don’t have to be thrown at to get pissed off. Sometimes simply getting hit is plenty enough. Zack Greinke has phenomenal control. If he throws a pitch that hits you, there’s a decent chance he meant to come close, at least. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that. But of course the margin for error is fairly slim; if you’re trying to come close and you miss just a little, there’s roughly a 50/50 chance that you won’t miss at all. Not without some fancy footwork by the hitter, anyway.

Which is simply to say that getting upset about a pitch that hits you is a perfectly natural reaction. And perhaps especially if you’ve been hit a lot. Carlos Quentin’s been hit a lot: