David Ortiz Flips His Bat, Pitcher Gets Mad, Everything Is Stupid

Last night David Ortiz blasted a three-run homers off of Tampa Bay Rays pitcher Chris Archer, tossed his bat down on the ground like, Haha, fucking OWNED that baseball! and proceeded to trot around the bases like a man who had no need to hurry, since no one had a chance of fielding that. It was the 38-year-old's 456th home run; one might think that he'd get tired of watching a baseball he had hit diminish into nothingness as it left the park, but nope, he still savored it as if it were his first.

And this was a problem, it turned out, because Archer thought that Ortiz was being a showboating braggert and insulting the game, opening up a new chapter in the feud between the Rays and the Red Sox.

#rays Archer said Ortiz HR trot is "perfect example" of when Price said Ortiz feels he's "bigger than the game."

— RMooneyTBO (@RMooneyTBO) July 27, 2014

#rays Archer said Ortiz "feels the show is all about him."

— RMooneyTBO (@RMooneyTBO) July 27, 2014

It wasn't the month's first example of drama over the unwritten rules of baseball, which is unquestionably the worst, most boring type of drama to get involved in. A weekend before Ortiz's bat toss you had the Battle of the Two Colbys, during which the Toronto Blue Jays' Colby Rasmus took advantage of an infield shift by bunting for an easy base hit and the Texas Rangers' Colby Lewis claimed that it was unsporting and that "he laid down a bunt basically simply for average."

It goes without saying that this sort of stuff is nuts—it treats baseball as something like a Japanese tea ceremony, where every action has a meaning attached to it and every motion must be performed with ritualistic precision or else the meaning of the thing is destroyed. Sometimes, these "unwritten rules"  seem to be grounded in basic sportsmanship, like the prohibition on stealing bases when you're up by a dozen runs. In other cases, the rules make it seem like the people who revere them are living in an entirely different universe, where baseball players are not competing in a spectator sport but going through an unpleasant but necessary task, like war.

In other sports, from football to tennis to soccer, whenever someone does something great he or she is expected to celebrate—by dancing, tearing off his or her shirt, collapsing on the court in a fit of emotion, or that thing NBA players do when they dunk and then stare out into the crowd as if what they just did has made them incredibly angry. All of these are great sports moments—we imagine ourselves doing these things and think, Yes, I would be pumped too if I just did that. 

Home runs are rare things. If you hit 500 of them, they'll literally create a plaque of your face and put it in a place called the Hall of Fame and old sportswriters will write things about how great you are. Hitting one in front of thousands of people has got to be a heady thing, and the expectation that you celebrate like a dentist would after successfully pulling a tooth—head down, no emotion—is simply odd. Thankfully, younger players are getting away from the staid dictates of the self-appointed keepers of the game's traditions and embracing joy after home runs, from Bryce Harper blowing a kiss at a pitcher (which, to be fair, is a little dickish) to Yasiel Puig engaging in some "extravagant" bat flipping.

So maybe the unwritten rules are changing, slowly. Adam Dunn even told ESPN's Tim Kurkjian this year that the old system is pretty much dead. And it's true that pitchers are no longer throwing at batters who flip their wrists the wrong way after jacking a ball 400 feet into the stands. But we still have the notion of the game as something sacred that must be appeased by constantly engaging in acts of false humility and never, ever smiling. Or at least that idea is still with us to an extent that a pitcher can complain of the way a hitter watches his home run leave the building without a member of a press asking, "Well, why did you let him hit that home run then?"

Harry Cheadle has never hit a home run. Follow him on Twitter.