Zikten posted...
Baseball always seemed like a civilized sport to me. But in recent years I keep hearing about baseball fights like this incident. Turns out many baseball players get pretty violent
The history of baseball is full of violence. The deadball era was full of violent thugs whose antics sometimes compromised the profitability of teams, as fans would threaten boycott if players were too unruly and deemed "disgraces to society." Professional baseball was widely seen as "disreputable" for several decades because of instances of violence, drunken carousing, and gambling scandals. Ironically, it was America's obsession with the exploits of Babe Ruth that relaxed national attitudes about the game. Among other issues, Ruth was notoriously hot tempered (including multiple ejections for fighting, with perhaps the most famous incident being when he punched an umpire; his replacement subsequently threw 9 innings of no-hit baseball), but he was so personally charismatic and prodigiously talented that the general public gave him a pass and eventually, the seedier aspects of the baseball lifestyle (drunkenness, womanizing, violence in public and domestically) became considerably less scrutinized. For every Christy Mathewson or Lou Gehrig (college educated men who, were respectively known for Christian and familial piety) that were hailed as en exemplars of professional and personal conduct, there were 20 Babe Ruths (a latchkey kid from the slums who grew up on the streets and in a reformatory) or Honus Wagners** (grew up in extreme poverty, working from a very early age to support the family; many of these players were discovered playing for company teams) where violence was a fact of life in their worlds, yet there eventually came to be a tolerance of these "hard men" so long as they weren't explicitly breaking the law.
**Wagner was by all accounts a very respectable player in terms of personal and professional conduct. His was just the first name that came to mind regarding secondary examples of deadball superstars that came from difficult circumstances.