Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Bye-Bye, Mr. Shaving Cream Pie

This is not a picture of the shaving cream pie that landed reigning NL Rookie of the Year Chris Coghlan on the disabled list, but if you've seen one guy with white goo all over his face, you've seen them all.

The baseball season is somewhere around the 100-game mark right now, and Coghlan is the second guy this season to grievously injure himself celebrating a win. The problem with that is that the entire season is 162 games long.

Translation: we're only just now getting to the games that will decide anything. Game 51 of 162 is pretty meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but that was the one in which Kendry Morales broke his leg.

Now, we're at the trade deadline, and the Angels have been searching high and low to find a bat to replace Morales. Unfortunately, the prices for Prince Fielder and Adam Dunn have been way too expensive, so they had to try to improve the pitching staff instead by getting Dan Haren.

Not coincidentally, the Halos now trail Texas by 7 1/2 games, and have even fallen percentage points behind Oakland.

Is it unfair to blame Morales for the Angels' current difficulties? Nope.

It's a game in May. You just hit a walk-off granny. Bully for you. Now, just round the bases, STEP on home plate, not STOMP on home plate, and all of your teammates need to act like you've been there before. Get over yourselves.

I'm all for guys having fun, celebrating, et cetera. But dogpiles at the plate are asinine unless you just pulled a win that aids your playoff hopes in September...


...or means you get to hoist that.

As annoying as dogpiles can be, shaving cream pies may be even worse. They're now apparently done after every game, and when they're done to a cagey veteran like Wes Helms, they can easily go awry.

Helms was prepared, he ducked, Coghlan had to swing the pie again, and there went his knee.

Manager Edwin Rodriguez has banned the custom now, and there's about 29 other fellows who need to follow suit. Teams lose enough important players to legitimate in-game injuries, they shouldn't be terribly keen on the idea of losing them to acting like complete idiots, celebrating a meaningless game with months left to go in the season.

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