Major League Baseball handed out its punishments for the White Sox-Royals kerfuffle, but as you might have already heard, it didn't close the case.
Brad Keller received the standard five-game suspension for pitchers for intentionally throwing at a batter. He's appealing it, at least until an off day allows the Royals to reshuffle their rotation so he doesn't miss a start. Rick Renteria received one game, which I figured would come since he might've been the most physically involved of any participant.
Tim Anderson -- the guy who was hit by Keller's fastball -- received one game, and the league was reluctant to reveal the details. In its official release, the league cited Anderson's "conduct." ESPN's Jeff Passan said Anderson was suspended for language used, which opened the floor for racist or homophobic slurs. Once Passan clarified with "racially charged" language, it became increasingly likely that he didn't cross the reddest lines.
Then, Passan finally got to the bottom of it, and indeed, Anderson avoided the worst of it:
Although I'll probably link "weak-ass" to Keller the rest of his career the way I still associate Ozzie Guillen's "Triple-A [bleep]" tag for Rich Hill, it's more frustrating and tangled than funny.
Anderson didn't want to get any deeper into it. When the media found him before this evening's game in Detroit, he issued mostly boilerplate responses:
He didn't appeal his suspension, and while he might've had a case, it's something he sounded like he didn't want to draw more attention to:
Which makes sense. Back in September of 2016, Adam Jones called baseball a "white man's sport," based on the dwindling representation of African Americans on the field, in the dugout and in front offices. Indeed, Anderson is the only black player on the White Sox, a role he talked about on Jackie Robinson Day earlier this week. His culture is not the prevailing one, and if he has to pick battles, this one involves trying to explain who can and can't use that word to a league that doesn't want to think about codifying who can and can't say it. I can't imagine it would lead anywhere productive.
It doesn't strike me as something to report to begin with, but somebody reported it. Stepping back, the problem might not be that Anderson was suspended at all, but that he might end up missing one more game than the guy who assaulted him, which led to the heated situation in which Anderson called Keller what he called him. If Anderson was suspended one game and Keller forced to miss 10 -- even if only five are unpaid -- that seems much more proportional. As we see with Lucas Giolito's DL stint, a 10-day absence requires a team to sacrifice something.
At any rate, Anderson will get the day off, and he appears to have the support of his teammates...
