Ortiz: Vast majority of baseball brawls involve differing ethnicities
From Jorge Ortiz at USA Today on September 30, 2015:
A scene from the Texas Rangers’ clubhouse at Oakland’s Coliseum last week neatly captured the blending of cultures that’s so prevalent in baseball.
As Shin-Soo Choo highlights flashed on a TV screen, a group of seven Latin players sitting around a table – some born in the U.S., others abroad – howled in delight while the Korean outfielder yelled “take that’’ in Spanish at the sight of every line drive.
Baseball teams regularly bring together people from diverse backgrounds striving for a common cause, which in the best of circumstances results in the quintessential melting pot. But when the dynamic changes and the bonding element is replaced by the fire of competition, a different kind of brew arises and sometimes boils over.
A USA TODAY Sports study of 67 bench-clearing incidents in Major League Baseball over the past five seasons found the main antagonists hailed from different ethnic backgrounds in 87% of the cases.
Read the full article here: http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2015/09/30/mlb-bench-clearing-brawls-unwritten-rules-ethnic-backgrounds/73066892/
- Related link: Read Mark Armour and Dan Levitt’s groundbreaking study on “Baseball Demographics, 1947-2012”
Originally published: September 30, 2015. Last Updated: September 30, 2015.