Yankee Bob Watson

David Wells lost his appeal. For a while, many Sox fans have viewed baseball's discipline office as biased in favor of the Yankees. While circumstantial evidence would seems to point in that direction, I've always assumed that they weren't for one simple reason: baseball is a business. The Sox and the Yankees are the two highest profile teams in the league. The usage of discipline in baseball is image control. MLB wants to appear tough on poorly behaved players, and, presumably, deter future incidents. For this reason, you would think that the most important franchises would receive the same treatment. (Its perfectly plausible that MLB would like its top franchises to appear cleaner than unpopular clubs.)

Which brings us to the question: why was Wells suspended, but the Yankee's best hitter not? Quick recap of both incidents: Wells turned his back on the homeplate umpire; found himself face to face with the 2nd base umpire--who is normally in center field, but came in to pick a fight--and became verbally abusive. The umpires claim that Wells intentionally bumped them and spit on them, but the tapes show otherwise. The Sheffield incident: Sheffield felt that a fan swiped at him while fielding the ball near the wall; Sheffield picked up the ball; punched the fan with the ball in his hand; threw the ball to the infield; turned to have another go at the fan, but stopped when stadium security arrived.

My view is that attacking a fan is clearly worse than swearing at an umpire. For that matter, it is worse than fighting with an umpire. Yet MLB concluded that Sheffield did nothing wrong. I can see three reasons for the inconsistancy. (1) Reject the premise that MLB would like similar clean images for its top franchises. Maybe they want to turn the "lovable idiot" Sox into baseball's Oakland Raiders. (The Sox have certainly brawled enough in recent years). (2) The people making these decisions are just stupid and don't realize they aren't applying the same logic. But I think the most likely case is (3) baseball wants to punish David Wells for his book and his open criticism. Maybe the deterrent factor is towards other players tarnishing the sport's image. Maybe they are saying something along the lines of "if you are sloshed when you throw a perfect game, don't write a book about it."

One quote from the AP article (linked above) backs up my claim:``David Wells has once again created a distraction with a series of ill-informed and ill-conceived comments,'' [baseball executive] Manfred said. ``The appeal process for on-field discipline ... has served the industry well for decades. Mr. Wells' dissatisfaction with his appeal says more about his poor behavior than it does about the quality of the appeal process.''

Then again, Selig and Watson could just be acting on strong bias.