Entertaining Or Crossing The Line?

You gotta love a good rivalry in sports these days. The one between the San Diego Padres and Los Angeles Dodgers is starting to really heat up. It's really turning into must watch baseball just to see what's going to happen next between these two clubs. A lot of that is now stemming from what happened over the weekend between Fernando Tatis Jr and Trevor Bauer.

Tatis took Bauer deep twice on Sunday. The 2nd home run Tatis was celebrating it rounding the bases and even gave Bauer a little bit of a look Bauer took it all very well. In the post game press conference, Bauer was asked about it and he responded by saying: “I like it. I think that pitchers who have that done to them and react by throwing at people or you know getting upset and hitting people or whatever, I think it’s pretty soft. If you give up a homer, a guy should celebrate it. It’s hard to hit in the big leagues. I’m all for it and I think it’s important that the game moves in that direction and we stop throwing at people because they celebrated having some success on the field.”

Can't believe I'm actually saying this but I agree with Trevor Bauer, at least on this. Its called having fun which is something that the game of baseball really needs. As long as it's not really over the top or crossing the line trash talking (which there has been in the past) there's nothing wrong with celebrating hitting a home run. It's not really hurting anybody. Only thing getting hurt maybe a pitchers feelings if he's really that sensitive about it.

This was taken to a whole new level after the game when video surfaced about Tatis peeking back at Will Smith relaying the signs to Bauer. The next pitch was Tatis's second homer of the game. That was set Bauer off sending a few tweets back and forth between the two players later in the evening That's only adding more fuel to the fire going down the road this season. They meet twelve more times this season: June 21-23 in San Diego, August 24-26 in San Diego, September 10-12 in Los Angeles and finally September 28-30 in Los Angeles. This is going to be far from over between not only the teams but Tatis and Bauer as well. They are now tied (as of this writing) with the best record in the NL West  at 16-9.

This is only going to get better and better as the season goes on and make for more compelling TV down the stretch with the race for the West heating up.