It’s the 20th anniversary of Armando Benitez inciting a Yankees-Orioles brawl, so let’s talk about how stupid baseball fights are

It’s the 20th anniversary of Armando Benitez inciting a Yankees-Orioles brawl, so let’s talk about how much fun it was. If you’ve never watched it, please watch it:

It checks all of the baseball-brawl boxes. There are ballplayers bumping into each other around like they’re koi in an overstuffed pond. There are announcers who use a concerned tone and say things like, “This is really ugly, folks” when a punch is thrown, and those punches are often hilariously uncoordinated. (Graeme Lloyd is Australian, so you’d think that he’d been in a piffer of a gollytag before. Yet suddenly he’s swiping at Benitez like an angry tabby.)

Almost every baseball fight shares these traits if they escalate beyond “quasi-ironic mosh pit at a Sugar Ray show” and include real punches. But you remember the Benitez fight for the quirks that give it a unique fingerprint, the details that belong only to this fight. There’s both teams taking it into the dugout, and there’s Lloyd unable to restrain himself. There’s Scott Brosius with a hat-mullet, trying to take Harold Baines down at the knees, while Baines looks like he’s mumbling, “C’mon, Scott. C’mon, man. Seriously.”

There’s Derek Jeter seemingly enjoying it all ...

... and my favorite detail, which is Jeff Reboulet and Chuck Knoblauch holding onto each other like a pair of sack racers at a company picnic.

They did this for several minutes, and when one would pull away, the other would tighten his grip, holding the stalemate. It was a system of mutually assured jersey-grabbing, and it ensured the safety of everyone around them. If one of them would have broken free, it would have led to two more people milling about, trying to find which four or five players out of the 50 were actually interested in fighting. We couldn’t have that.

It’s these quirks that make this fight endlessly watchable. I’m fascinated by Elrod Hendricks and Joe Girardi looking like they’re going over choreography for the scene where the high school dance turns into a mambo war.

And I want to know more about the existential crisis of David Cone.

Every time I’ve watched this fight over the last 20 years, I pick up something new. It is one of the very best baseball fights, and I love it so.

And yet ...

Here’s what I can’t stop thinking about:

I have zaprudered the hell out of this punch. Trust me.

My conclusion: just missed. Like a pitch that’s fouled back straight to the screen, this was swing with home run power, but it wasn’t to be. And the more I watch this fight, the more I see Strawberry foul this pitch back to the screen, the more I’m thinking of another video:

That was a brawl that was remembered for decades because it almost killed a man. Rudy Tomjanovich had spinal fluid leaking down the back of his throat after that punch, and he needed surgery to repair his skull. He was never the same player after the incident.

Kermit Washington didn’t miss the same way that Strawberry did. He wishes he had. And that fight will always be a powerful reminder that we’re all idiots. These are exceptionally large, strong men throwing these punches, and the potential for serious injury or even death is very, very, very real. We’ve seen careers end because of baseball fights, from Jason LaRue to Michael Morse, and that’s just within the last decade. But we haven’t seen a Tomjanovich, something where the violence is inescapable and makes us realize how risky and stupid these brawls are.

When they happen, if nobody is carted off on a stretcher, we all have our fun! Here’s me making jokes about the Harper-Strickland fight. Here’s me absolutely fascinated with Matt Williams and Mark McGwire starring in Expendables 3. Here’s a Vine of the Rougned Odor-Jose Bautista fight that still makes me giggle.

Here’s Paul Wilson looking at Kyle Farnsworth and thinking, yeah, I can definitely go toe-to-toe with this stable and normal person. Here’s the Braves and the Padres from 1984, which is a video with 322,294 views. At least 222,000 of those views came from people who weren’t me, too.

All of these fights are memorable and have their own quirks and Strawberrys. Will Clark taking on two Cardinals at second base was one of the most formative baseball experiences of my youth. I can talk about all of these fights at length, and there will be a gleam in my eye when I do it.

It’s the Strawberry punch that does the most to advance my thesis that we’re all gonna pay for this guilty pleasure one day. Farnsworth’s punch was violent, and Odor’s was solid, but Strawberry’s was a different creature. There was premeditation and room to maneuver. There was a windup, an advance, and a full-force punch. It just missed, but the intent was unmistakable, and everyone from Benitez to Strawberry to Joe Torre is grateful that it all worked out. Eventually, everything was forgotten.

It won’t always work out, and it won’t always be forgotten. While writing an ode to all the quirky things about this Orioles-Yankees fight, I snapped. In a lot of ways, I danced around this idea after the Odor-Bautista fight, but I erred on the side of fun. Still, the words used are still entirely true:

We’re all watching the video over and over and making this a bigger story than the typical scrum would have been. How can we not? And yet we’re just making it easier to have the Tomjanovich moment in the future. There’s nothing we can do, other than draconian suspensions for baseball fights, which aren’t going to happen.

No, we’ll get to enjoy this -- what a right hook! -- with the compound interest accumulating until someone’s career and/or life is eventually ruined.

It’s a progressive jackpot, and it’s coming. When it gets here, it will ruin the baseball fight for us. It will ruin the lives of at least two others. It won’t be so funny when the bullpens come rushing in, and there will probably be oppressive new rules and penalties to penalize players coming off the bench, just like there are in basketball.

Until then, we’re safe to watch a pile of baseball players tumble into the dugout as fans toss water bottles and pound on the roof. It was just a Good Baseball Fight™, and once you watch one on YouTube, you can surf the wave of recommended videos for hours. But you might just spend more time on this one. Why was Norm Charlton’s jersey ripped? Did Strawberry realize what he was about to do at the last second and pull his punch? Was Jeff Nelson rocked by Benitez’s punch about 1:55 in, or did he just lose his footing in the scrum? I have so, so many questions, still, and I’ll keep watching the video, along with two million of my closest friends.

Just know that there’s a reckoning coming, and the idea of the basebrawl is living on borrowed time. We won’t have teases like this ...

... leading to an officially sanctioned MLB playlist. The players are too strong and too big to keep these fights funny.

But if you’re going to yuk it up, man, wasn’t this Benitez fight great?