So are baseball post-game celebrations good or bad? Some just can't make up their mind

Saw this article online from Pittsburgh Post-Gazette writer Gene Collier who was complaining about excessive celebrating in baseball.


To put it nicely, Collier is way too incoherent in his argument.

Amongst the highlights:

Seems like somebody wins the World Series every night nowadays, at least on the TV highlights shows, where no manner of walk-off hit fails to spark the kind of 25-man running, jumping, tumbling, laughing celebration once traditionally reserved for once-in-a-lifetime moments in October.

It is July, right?



A bit of an exaggeration on the extent of celebrations. It's like oh no, a team is happy that they won a game. Isn't that a good thing? I'd rather have that than 25 guys who could care less whether or not they win the game.

Also, while it may only be July, there are more teams than not that still have legitimate post-season hopes. As a result, the difference between being on the winning and losing end of these close games is a big deal to the teams and their fans. Another thing, these aforementioned celebrations are in smaller scope and less narcissistic than other sports ....cough...NFL....cough.........

First of all, these celebrations are happening as a TEAM. Second, you don't have an Ocho Cinco/TO types planning over the top elaborate celebrations. In other words, the celebrations are pretty low on the excessive scale.

But oh no, someone could get hurt.

The Chicago Cubs placed starting pitcher Ryan Dempster on the disabled list Tuesday with a pulled celebration.

Scrambling to join teammates celebrating a titanic victory Sunday against Milwaukee (it pulled the Cubs within two games of first place with only 82 games left to play), Dempster tripped over the dugout rail and broke his big toe.

Nice piece of cherry-picking there. Out of this whole "pandemic" of players being happy about scoring more runs than the other time....he picks out one time where it adversely affected a player and uses that as one of the man backbones of his "argument"......

And then he changes his stance mid-article:

To be perfectly unclear, I'm not sure how I feel about demonstrations of joyfulness in baseball because they are probably too few. It's better to have people pounding each about the head, neck, ears and back than slinking into the dugout to calculate the game's impact on their various incentive clauses.

But I thought this guy was disgusted by the rash of post-game celebrations. He makes it pretty clear he doesn't like these celebrations and that there's too many.....and then he goes around to argue the exact opposite. So is baseball joy getting out of hand? Or is it ok? Or is it simultaneously acceptable and unacceptable?

Well to sum up the rest of the article Collier goes back and forth incoherently about whether these post-game celebrations are good or bad.....I would give more highlights about this but honestly...... watching the Brewers give up 6 runs in the top of the 10th has made me too disgusted to think clearly. (On an "unrelated" note I REALLY, REALLY hope Carlos Villaneuva is either pitching in Nashville or looking for work by the time I wake up tomorrow......I really don't want to see him (or anyone) single-handedly pitch the Brewers out of contention)