Good 'ol Dirty Baseball

One of the things I hate about baseball is the fact that anytime a guy goes in hard into home plate or into second base that someone will inevitably defend it as a good hard play.

But I would like to clarify that I still accept that as baseball the way the rules have been written.  That being said, Holliday's tackle of Scutaro in the first inning was not good hard baseball.  That play was idiotic, has no place in this game and is deserving of a suspension by major league baseball.  

If there's any consolation I can take from it, it was that Scutaro stayed in the game, Holliday did absolutely nothing at the plate, and when Scutaro got the biggest hit of the game, Holliday booted the ball.  The baseball gods were just.

But back to the slide/tackle.  This is the rule for whether a slide into 2nd is dirty or just "good hard baseball": If you start your slide before the bag, and have at least some chance of touching the bag then it's just good hard baseball.  Although Holliday could tag the base from his slide, he did not start sliding until well past the bag.  He was clearly not going for the bag and going straight for Scutaro's leg.  

On top of that he reaches his arms out to grab Scutaro's left leg and nearly hyper extended his knee or messed up his ankle or in this case tweaked something in his hip.

Later, there was some confusion as to whether Pagan had saluted the Cardinals' dugout after his leadoff home run and the usually composed Mike Krukow just lost it:

"If they're upset about Pagan saluting the Cardinals' bench then DEAL WITH IT.  HOLLIDAY TRIED TO KNOCK SCUTARO'S KNEE IN THE BLEACHERS WITH A BUSH SLIDE!" 

Couldn't have said it better myself Kruk.

Laws of the Day

Oh!  By the way the Giants won the game 7-1 and tied up the series 1-1 going into St. Louis.