To Fight or not to Fight...

Yesterday after church Jimmy and I settled down to watch some baseball games. He likes the Dodgers and I like the Angels so we end up bouncing back and forth between games.

The Angels were playing the Red Sox, so I had some conflicting feelings about who I wanted to win, but I was definitely more interested in this game than the Dodger one. In the 1st inning of the Angels game, a little altercation occurred between the Red Sox pitcher (Josh Beckett) and the Angels batter ( Bobby Abreau). It didn't seem like a huge thing to me, but both benches emptied as well as the bullpens.

In the end 4 Angels players/coaches ended up getting ejected from the game. What seemed really odd to me is the 2 Angels players that got thrown out. One of them was an outfielder ( Tori Hunter), and the other was an Angels relief pitcher ( Justin Spier or something). Neither one had any involvement in the altercation at all. The pitcher and the batter that stared in this little spat both remained in the game.

So I started to wonder, how is it 2 players that weren't even involved in this got thrown out? One of them wasn't even playing at the time for goodness sake. But looking at the sheer rage Tori Hunter and Justin Spier exhibited, you'd think that they themselves had been almost affronted as Bobby Abreau had.

Is their sense of "team" so strong that they felt it necessary to keep running their mouths and get in the middle of things to defend Abreau (a full grown and seemingly large man?) If this is the case surely getting thrown out, therefore leaving your team shorthanded does not seem like the best idea.

I think it's something else. They both seemed like they just wanted to fight. Spier in particular, whew he was really mad! Some people just really look for or even enjoy confrontation.

I know several people like this. Both male and female. It seems like they desperately search to pick fights, it doesn't matter what it's over or who it's with. Seemingly trivial stuff works them up into such a frenzy you'd think it was a life or death situation.

People like this truly amaze me. Probably because I'm at the complete opposite side of the spectrum, a fight to me is the worst possible outcome and therefore the last straw. Not something I'd ever go looking for.

I started thinking about the movie Fight Club. That movie was a little too strange (and too rated R) for me, but the gist of it is these guys start a club where they get together and beat on each other. The idea seems so odd, but maybe a Fight Club would work out well for these types of people. I mean that way they can get out all their anger fighting other people who like to fight just like they do.

But then I guess society would be condoning this behavior, and I'm not sure that's a great idea either.

So in the end I like Rodney King am left wondering, Can't we all just get along?