A Brief History of the Bat Flip

Texas Rangers reliever Sam Dyson didn't take kindly to Jose Bautista's ostentatious bat flip on Wednesday. "He's doing stuff that kids do in whiffle ball games and backyard baseball," Dyson said. "It shouldn't be done."

To hear some baseball players and curmudgeonly columnists tell it, bat flips are a plague on our national pastime that must be squashed with retaliatory fastballs and post-game rants. The (terrible) conversation inevitably strays in the direction of unwritten rules, respecting the game, and setting an example for the children, which all raises the question: If society hasn't crumpled yet under the whiffled air of flying bats, then how long have bat flips been a problem?

Although the increase in bat flipping is commonly attributed to Asian and Latin American players, the first bat-flipping controversies involved born and bred Americans. After searching Google Books, Google Scholar, Lexis Nexis, the New York Times archives, and a few other sources, I believe I have found Patient Zero of the Bat Flip Outrage, the first pitcher to really lose his shit over a bat flip. Of course, it had to be a St. Louis Cardinal.

The year was 2001. On a lazy May day, Jimmy Rollins, then a rookie for the Philadelphia Phillies, hit a two-run homer off reliever Steve Kline during an eighth-inning rally. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, "Rollins flipped his bat after he hit the homer, and Kline, who thought the rookie was showboating, yelled at him as he circled the bases." According to the book The Baseball Codes, Kline had some choice words for Rollins. "'That's fucking Little League shit,' said Kline after the game. 'If you're going to flip the bat, I'm going to flip your helmet next time. You're a rookie, you respect this game for a while…there's a code. He should know better than that.'"

The Phillies' manager, Larry Bowa, predictably downplayed the bat flip. "So what? They do that on TV every night." Even Cardinals manager Tony La Russa didn't support Kline's outburst, according the Post-Dispatch. "His comment in the paper, that's not allowed…it's inappropriate, bad."

The anger surrounding bat flipping may be a relatively new phenomenon, but pitchers have been pissed off at batters for all kinds of things throughout baseball's history, including swinging too hard and being black. It should come as no surprise that bat flipping isn't about bat flipping at all; as Kline's reaction demonstrates, bat flipping falls under the "showboating" genus of the unwritten rule violations, along with admiring a spanked baseball and the slow home run trot.

Although Rollins was the O.G. Flipper, he wasn't the first player to truly develop a bat-flipping reputation. That honor, as best as I can tell, goes to Bret Boone, of the Seattle Mariners, who, the following year, was beaned in the head by Rockies reliever Todd Jones for flipping his bat a few innings prior. "Tell Jones I don't care what he likes and I don't care if he wants to hit me, hit me," Boone cawed after the game. "I'll flip it farther if he hits me again, I'll go to first and if I hit another one, I'll flip it farther. So don't give me this Todd Jones, Mr. Tough Guy act. How about that?"

The irony here, of course, is Boone can hardly be accused of ignorance regarding baseball's unwritten rules or a lack of respect for the game. He was a third-generation baseball player, son of Bob Boone and the grandson of Ray Boone. Boone's bat flipping became so prominent that the Mariners ran a delightful commercial in which he flips all kinds of shit.

It's unclear when, exactly, Boone picked up the habit, but the bat left his hand with a non-zero amount of angular velocity his entire career. "It's something I started doing and I've kept doing it," Boone told the AP in a 2003 article with the headline "Veteran Second Baseman Likes to Flip His Bat." "I really don't mean anything by it. I just flip it and then I run."

Pitchers can afford to be angry about whatever they want because they hold the power in the pitcher-batter dynamic. Hitting a player with a 95-mile-per-hour fastball is seen as part of the game; batters retaliating against pitchers with physical harm is not. This allows pitchers, as Boone pointed out many times during his career, to showboat all they want after striking out a player: with a fist-pump, a celebratory shout, pointing to the sky, or literally falling over with excitement. Meanwhile, batters risk getting hit in the head with a fast object if they so much as smile. I can't wait to see what pitchers get angry about next decade.