Even if you don’t fancy yourself a baseball fan, it was almost impossible not to get chills from Jose Bautista’s famed bat flip in Game 5 of the ALDS against the Rangers.
Of course not everyone got a kick out of it, though–namely just people with sticks up their asses and oh ya, Texas Rangers players. Rangers pitcher Sam Dyson told a reporter that “Jose needs to calm that down, respect the game a little more.” Blah, blah, yawn, yawn.
Jose has reflected on the post-moon shot bat flip in an extensive piece for Derek Jeter’s brain child, The Players’ Tribune:
I wish you could have heard my thoughts in that moment. It’s the closest I have ever felt to being a superhero. I felt like I was Batman, and the villain had the girl dangling off the edge of the building. My adrenaline wasn’t 10-out-of-10. It was ten-million-out-of-10.
Jose continued to explain how the flip wasn’t out of contempt for the pitcher or an act of defiance in spite of the unwritten rules of the game. He simply was jacked the fuck up. Like you or I or any human who just sent 50,000 people into hysterics.
He goes on to describe the difference between the American baseball culture and that of his native Dominican Republic.
Come down to the Dominican Republic and experience it yourself. We’re loud. We’re emotional. We’re always singing and dancing. We love to laugh and have a good time. It’s ingrained in our DNA. And it doesn’t change when we’re playing baseball. To us, baseball isn’t a country club game. It’s our national pastime, and it comes packed with emotion.
When you get a hit, people in the crowd will start playing trumpets and horns and the cheerleaders will jump up on top of the dugout and start dancing. The fans stand up from the first inning to the ninth inning, and half the time they’re dancing, too. That’s part of the experience. When you hit a homerun in this atmosphere, you might flip your bat. You might pump your fist running around the bases. You might even point to the sky when you step on the plate (I see you, Big Papi). For the most part, pitchers don’t have a problem with it. They know they’re entitled to enjoy the moment when the script is flipped.
He finishes with an eloquently written piece that perfectly encapsulates most of our thoughts on the situation.
I flipped my bat. I’m human. The emotion got to me. It’s in my DNA. If you think that makes me a jerk, that’s fine. But let’s call it what it is. Let’s not have these loaded conversations about “character” and the integrity of the game every time certain players show emotion in a big moment. That kind of thinking is not just old school. It’s just ignorant.
And it is slowly becoming extinct.
[h/t The Players’ Tribune]
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