On Baseball Ejections

A brief overview of bad behavior and consequences on the diamond.

Major league baseball officially began in 1876, and for the first twelve years, players seem to have been remarkably well-behaved, as no one was ejected. In reality, the earliest umpires had no authority to eject anyone — players, managers, even spectators — from baseball games. Their only stick was the authority to levy fines on behalf of the league, but this was a delayed punishment which sometimes failed to land in the moment, like when a parent grounds a badly-behaving child for a week and is forced to keep adding days when the offender is too upset to back down: “Make it TWO weeks, why don’t you?!”

Sometimes what the kid really needs is a time out.

Before the 1889 season, baseball’s rulemakers finally untied the umpires’ hands. In that first year, officials sent 11 naughty people to their room to cool off, a group made up of two managers and eight players, one of whom, Buck Ewing, was ejected twice.

Then and now, ejections are the last resource for umpires as they try and set things back on an orderly course. But–as anyone who has done (or tried to do) home repair knows–tools can just as easily make things worse, particularly when you are angry when you use them.