Baseball Still Punishes Players for Celebrating Too Much, and It’s Getting Ridiculous

In August 2020, Fernando Tatis Jr. hit a grand slam off a 3-0 pitch while his team led by seven runs. He wasn’t supposed to swing on that count with that big a lead. His own manager hadn’t called for it. The next batter, Manny Machado, got a fastball thrown behind his head as payback for something Tatis did, not Machado.

That’s baseball’s unwritten rules in a single sequence. A young star does something exciting and clearly allowed under the actual rulebook, and the sport’s informal code decides someone needs to get hurt over it.

What the code actually punishes

Baseball’s list of unofficial taboos runs long. Don’t flip your bat after a home run. Don’t admire a long ball before running the bases. Don’t steal a base when you’re comfortably ahead. Don’t bunt to break up a no-hitter, even in the ninth inning of a meaningless late-season game. Don’t swing hard at a 3-0 pitch if your team is already winning big.

Break any of these, and pitchers have historically felt entitled to retaliate by throwing a fastball directly at an opposing hitter, sometimes at their head, sometimes for something that happened not that game but weeks or years earlier. Pitcher Bob Gibson reportedly once hit a batter for a slight from 15 years prior. Another pitcher, Stan Williams, apparently kept a written list inside his cap of players he intended to retaliate against.

The generational fight over what the game should look like

Jose Bautista’s furious bat flip in the decisive game of the 2015 American League Division Series became a flashpoint that split baseball down generational lines. Traditionalists called it disrespectful showboating. A growing number of younger players and fans saw raw, honest emotion, exactly the kind of moment that makes any sport worth watching.

MLB itself eventually sided with the newer view, at least publicly, running a 2018 postseason ad campaign explicitly denouncing “anti-bat flip” attitudes under the slogan “let the kids play,” featuring Giancarlo Stanton admiring home runs and Yasiel Puig celebrating slides. That corporate embrace hasn’t stopped players from policing each other the old way regardless. When Tim Anderson flipped his bat after a home run against the Royals in 2019, it triggered a genuine benches-clearing confrontation the following season.

Whose comfort is actually being protected here

Strip away the language about respecting the game, and a lot of these rules boil down to protecting pitchers from feeling shown up, even when the batter did nothing against the actual rules. A hitter admiring his own home run isn’t cheating. He’s reacting honestly to something genuinely hard to do at the highest level of professional sport. Punishing that with a 95-mile-an-hour fastball aimed at another player’s body is a wildly disproportionate response dressed up as tradition.

Latin American players, who make up a huge share of MLB’s talent pool and often play with more visible flair as part of their own baseball culture, have borne a disproportionate share of criticism under this code, adding an uncomfortable cultural dimension to a debate that traditionalists usually frame as purely about sportsmanship.

Baseball’s unwritten rules aren’t going away entirely anytime soon. But the sport’s own marketing department clearly recognizes what a lot of players already know: the celebrations fans actually want to see are exactly the ones the old code was built to suppress.

Should sports with strong “unwritten rule” cultures like baseball formalize those norms into actual written rules, or does keeping them unofficial serve a purpose the rulebook can’t?