DETROIT — To try to assess blame for the insanity that transpired Thursday afternoon at Comerica Park represents a fool’s errand. This involved too much history, too much “He said, he said” and enough incompetent umpiring to fill a time zone’s worth of Little Leagues.
Determining the big loser from this orgy of bench-clearing incidents, though? That’s a piece of cake.
“It happens. It doesn’t happen often in baseball, but it happens in baseball,” Tigers manager Brad Ausmus said. “The hope is, on both sides [no one gets hurt].
“But truthfully, the Yankees are in the hunt. They don’t want someone to get hurt in that type of melee.”
The Yankees are in the playoff hunt, and the Tigers are not. So the Yankees lose, on a day they suffered an actual loss, 10-6 to the Tigers.
Gary Sanchez will be suspended, probably in the neighborhood of five games, for his cheap-shot punch of Miguel Cabrera in the day’s first and most serious skirmish and then taking a swing at Nick Castellanos. Austin Romine is a likely candidate for an unpaid vacation, too, given that he got some punches in on Cabrera. The future Hall of Fame member Cabrera also should expect some uncompensated downtime … except for him, it doesn’t matter, because the Tigers are playing out the string. Tommy Kahnle, who threw behind Cabrera in the sixth inning, figures to get tagged with either a light suspension or a fine.
And let’s wait until guys show up for work Friday at Yankee Stadium before we can assert no one sustained any sort of injury from the three bench-clearing events, four hit batters and eight ejections.
“I’m sure there’s going to be suspensions on both sides,” Yankees manager Joe Girardi said. “That’s upsetting to me too, because we’re fighting for something.”
As the Tigers freely admitted, what happened here Thursday didn’t occur in a vacuum. Hard feelings carried over from their July 31 game at Yankee Stadium when Mikie Mahtook got hit twice, the second time in the head. The Tigers’ starting pitcher that night, former Mets prospect Michael Fulmer, responded by drilling Jacoby Ellsbury in the backside. Ausmus added Thursday that Cabrera had gotten thrown up and into in that game.
That night served as subtext for everything that went down in this far more explosive sequel. So on the same day the Yankees acquired Sonny Gray from Oakland, solidifying their aggressive stance for a championship, they lit the fuse for a mess that could really hurt them.
Sanchez wears the biggest goat horns. He’s arguably the Yankees’ most important player right now; his fourth-inning homer off Fulmer gave him a .344/.408/.852 slash line with 10 homers in his last 16 games. While he had every right to suspect Fulmer hit him intentionally in the fifth inning, one inning after he went deep against the right-hander, he had to serve as a peacemaker when Romine and Cabrera went at it in the bottom of the sixth.
“I was in the dugout and I saw Romine rolling on the [ground] with the other guys,” Sanchez said through an interpreter. “At that moment, just instincts take over, because you want to defend your teammate. That’s your family out there.”
Sanchez hurt his family more than he helped it. And as Cabrera said of Sanchez, “He can do whatever he wants to. But if he wants to punch me, let it be face-to-face.”
Kahnle’s pitch to Cabrera, which got him an ejection, didn’t offend the Tigers’ sensibilities, and there’s value in letting a star like Sanchez know he’ll be protected. However, the young right-hander got himself ejected with his action, and that set in motion the Romine-Cabrera heavyweight battle.
Romine? Cabrera threw both the first shove and the first punch after Romine stood up and removed his mask. What led to that moment, however, is in dispute, as Cabrera said he tried to calm down Romine, who was upset over Kahnle’s ejection, and Romine responded profanely.
If home-plate ump Carlos Torres had been in position to keep Romine and Cabrera apart, maybe the nonsense would have ended there. That didn’t happen, though, and now the Yankees will face the consequences. If you’re a Yankees fan, you had best hope your lingering memories of July 31, 2017, won’t be the game they played that night instead of the trade they made that day.