Wednesday marked the one-month anniversary of the infamous melee between the Blue Jays and Rangers. During that melee, Jays outfielder Jose Bautista was intentionally hit by a Matt Bush fastball, then he slid hard into second baseman Rougned Odor in an attempt to break up a double play. Odor then punched Bautista in the face and both teams’ dugouts emptied onto the field. Odor received an eight-game suspension which was reduced to seven games, and Bautista was handed a one-game suspension.
In the month since, both Odor and Bautista have had time to look back on the events that transpired on May 15. Neither side has appeared to show much, if any, contrition. Odor came close to admitting fault, however, in a recent interview with ESPN’s Marly Rivera.
Maybe. After what happened, people who don’t know baseball may have a bad impression of me, but people who know baseball do know that those things are a part of the game. Perhaps he was wrong, and perhaps I was also wrong.
Odor also said “maybe I would have done things differently if I had known that I would be suspended.” He also said of Bautista, “I respect him,” and called him “a tremendous ballplayer.”
Interestingly, Odor thinks the media showing the video of the other fight he was involved in, a similar melee in 2011 when he was playing for Single-A Spokane, was “unfair.”