Yankees: Ranking the dumbest unwritten rules in baseball

1. Don’t showboat your home runs

This Unwritten Rules trend is going away, but people still whine about it.

RIP to Jose Fernandez, but the former Marlins ace embodied this issue as best he could in modern day baseball. The Atlanta Braves tried to silence the Marlins ace (and Bryce Harper earlier that season) when he hit his first career home run off starter Mike Minor and admired the shot for a moment after tossing his bat.

That didn’t fly with third baseman Chris Johnson or catcher Brian McCann, both of whom exchanged words with Fernandez before the benches cleared. What were they saying? “Hey man, please be respectful, our friend Mike feels very badly about having to deal with a very rudimentary aspect of his job! He’s got feelings too!”

But that was seven years ago. Now we’re seeing bat flips galore, though Tim Anderson drew criticism last year for his (what some deemed excessive) bat throw against the Royals after hitting a two-run blast in the fourth inning of a game in April. Perhaps we can call that “a bit much” but are we really going to head hunt after that? Can your ego not handle getting shown up for 30 seconds?

Why baseball has promoted being emotionless for this long is beyond us. The game to the average viewer is already boring enough, so stripping it of any animation seems almost like … the sport doesn’t want to grow its overall fan base? Do you think young kids are going to be enamored by someone hitting a walk-off homer only to calmly trot the bases after gently placing his bat in the appropriate spot so the other team doesn’t feel “as bad” about what they’ve done?

No. Throw bats. Punt bats. Do whatever. We’ll know when to draw the line when it gets too excessive. Every other sport celebrates and showboats and there aren’t brawls that immediately ensue. Celebrations and emotional reactions directly relate to people. This will help grow the game.

And I think we all have Jose Bautista to thank because that bat flip in the 2015 ALDS pretty much started the trend of everybody not giving a crap.

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