No, it isn’t an early Spring Training battle just yet.
On Monday night in Cuba, one of the craziest baseball fight you’ll ever see broke out:
(hat tips to Ben Badler and Dayn Perry)
As pointed out by Badler, what makes the fight all the more crazy is the fact that the dude with the bat wasn’t even in the game. And the pitcher stood right up to him with nothing more than his glove (which he promptly chucked at the dude with. the. bat.). I don’t even want to think about what would have happened if that full swing of the bat had hit the mark.
I’m not going to say that this kind of fight couldn’t happen in the big leagues (or hasn’t before), but, yeah, that’s some crazy stuff right there. It’s not something you’d expect to see in MLB, and could be pointed to as an example of the differences between baseball in Cuba and in the United States.
Based on things like the emergence of a boisterous young star like Yasiel Puig and the Jorge Soler “bat incident,” fans are likely to hear from time to time about how the game of baseball is a little different in Cuba. It is said that the players who come to the States, then, should be given a little leeway as they adjust not only to an entirely new life away from everything they’ve known, but also to a game that is more staid and more formal than they one they’ve come to know.
While you never want to go too far with categorial descriptions like that, it is fair to say there are some differences between professional baseball in the U.S. and in Cuba. That’s not to say anything is better or worse, or that there aren’t far more similarities than differences (or that taking a bat to another player’s head is somehow OK in Cuba but not OK here). But there are differences.
Whether this is an example of those differences, I don’t know. Probably. But mostly I’m just awed by that pitcher, man.