Columnist Dean Juipe: MLB should move to curb brawls, fights

THE TIME has come for baseball to do something about brawls and players leaving the dugout to participate in what have become increasingly regular displays of stupidity.

Fights at the Major League level have become absolutely commonplace this year and, more than anything, it reflects a sport suffering a severe lack of leadership. There is no baseball commissioner and there is no rule about leaving the dugout to initiate, join in or extend a dispute that may be brewing or already under way on the field.

No other sport has this unsavory problem.

But you no longer see football players rushing onto the field to fight and you no longer see players jumping over the boards to join a hockey fight or players leaving the bench to take part in a basketball fight.

At the NFL, NHL and NBA levels, the rules are ironclad. Once the greatest offenders, hockey players have been restrained by a rule that not only penalizes a player for leaving a bench but takes the head coach down with him; as a result, any fight that may take place on the ice is limited to those players who were there when it broke out. Likewise, the NBA is very stringent and if a player off the bench even takes a step toward joining a fracas he's looking at an automatic suspension.

The rules work and they should be adopted by MLB. Leave the bench and you're gone for at least five games without pay.

And don't buy this nonsense that baseball players espouse about the necessity of leaving the dugout -- or even the bullpen -- when there's a skirmish taking place. Sure, if there's a beanball war going on it's nine vs. one on the field, but if the rules prohibited players from charging out of the dugout it would bring an end to this silliness.

This year's baseball brawls have reached the stage where there's a one-upmanship quality to them, as if today's carnage has to exceed yesterday's in order to maintain the fight's position as the lead on ESPN's SportsCenter. As a result, Tuesday's Kansas City vs. Anaheim game had not one but two melees and concluded with 12 players being ejected; it took that kind of firepower to exceed the previous brawl, May 19, when New York and Baltimore duked it out in a marathon session of fisticuffs that led to five players receiving relatively harmless suspensions.

MLB is so behind the times it trails the minor leagues when it comes to punishing would-be pugilists and their ready, willing and able defenders. In 1994 the minors adopted a policy that specifies three- and five-game suspensions for leaving the bench and it's said brawls are down by 80 percent.

Like all sports, baseball has always had its fights. Yet there was a time when beanballs were accepted without sparking a need for retaliation, as John McGraw and the New York Giants demonstrated in 1903 when the feisty first baseman was hit five times in a single game by Boston's Bill Dinneen. Not only did McGraw not lead his teammates on a charge to the mound, he never was awarded first base as the umpire accused him of failing to dodge the pitches.

When he protested after getting hit the fifth time, it was McGraw who was ejected from the game. His teammates responded not with fists flying but with laughter.

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