There was a time when Manny Machado might have reacted differently to the incidents that placed him at the center of the tense, two-day confrontation between his Baltimore Orioles and the visiting Boston Red Sox this weekend at Oriole Park at Camden Yards.
When he first took out Red Sox second baseman Dustin Pedroia with a hard, aggressive slide on Friday night, the initial reaction was to place the incident in the context of Machado’s other notable confrontations, such as the time he threw his bat towards third base in anger against Oakland in 2014 and the time last year he charged the mound against Kansas City’s Yordano Ventura, both of which resulted in suspensions.
“I’m the villain. It’s always me,” Machado said later, seemingly resigned to his reputation. “Manny always does something wrong.”
But to lump these affairs together would have been unfair, because if anything, Machado, the Orioles’ 24-year-old superstar, handled the situations with more maturity than anybody on either side. His immediate reaction to the slide into Pedroia was not one of escalation, but of de-escalation. He immediately went to check on Pedroia, and reached out to him via text message again after the game. When Pedroia himself absolved Machado of blame – the injury that forced Pedroia out of the game being wholly unintentional – that should have been the end of it.
“There was zero intention of him trying to hurt me,” Pedroia told reporters on Sunday. “He just made a bad slide. I’m not mad at him. I love Manny Machado.”
But that wasn’t the end of it, because Red Sox Manager John Farrell and some of his players made it clear they weren’t satisfied by the Pedroia-Machado peace pact, and in the eighth inning on Sunday, Red Sox reliever Matt Barnes took it upon himself to play the enforcer and throw a pitch at Machado’s head, saying afterwards – as most headhunters do – that the pitch simply got away. Barnes was suspended for four games by the commissioner’s office, announced on Monday.
Machado managed to duck out of the way of it in time, with the ball striking his bat and ultimately being ruled a foul ball, but that shouldn’t matter when it comes to the inevitable suspension for Barnes. A purpose pitch aimed at a batter’s head is an act of violence.
Once again, it was Machado who de-escalated the situation, staying put as the umpires sorted out the situation, and it was Pedroia providing the voice of reason, shouting from the Red Sox’s dugout towards Machado – in an exchange caught by television cameras – “It wasn’t me,” essentially condemning Barnes, his teammate, as a lone-wolf vigilante. As if to underscore that, Pedroia told reporters after Sunday’s game that he had texted Machado to apologize, then called out Barnes publicly, saying, “It’s definitely a mishandled situation.”
There was a clear villain this weekend in Baltimore, but it wasn’t Machado. Yes, the slide was aggressive and late, but reasonable people on both sides understood it was not meant to hurt Pedroia. In the aftermath of the slide into Pedroia on Friday night, three subsequent Red Sox pitchers faced Machado and never threw at him. Only Barnes, two days later, felt the need to enforce baseball’s increasingly antiquated unwritten rules by trying to injure the Orioles’ best player.
So now, just three weeks into the season, there is already plenty of bad blood between the Orioles and Red Sox, division rivals with playoff aspirations. Just a week earlier, Orioles Manager Buck Showalter took a gratuitous jab at the Red Sox, seemingly mocking them for revealing several players had come down with the flu at the same time. “Nobody else has it?” Showalter said. “No, everybody in the whole league has got it. It seems to get broadcast more here.”
Is the standoff over? Will the Orioles strike back? We won’t have to wait long to find out. The teams play 14 more times in the regular season, beginning with a four-game series at Fenway Park next week.