On Tuesday, Jesus Guzman belted an eighth-inning, two-run, pinch-hit homer against Giants reliever Jeremy Affeldt to give the Padres a lead.
This excited him. He watched the blast. He walked down the line. He held his bat. Eleven steps from the plate he spun degrees, still moving toward first, and, with his back to the pitcher, bellowed toward his teammates in the first-base dugout. Clearly, the Giants were not amused. Guzman shouted toward the mound and pointed his bat at Bumgarner, all while taking the slow steps of a man with no intention of trading punches. Bumgarner, however, veritably tore down the mound to establish a closer confrontation, and was restrained by on-deck hitter Yasmani Grandal and plate ump Tony Randazzo.
Although dugouts emptied, each bench was warned and order was quickly restored. Watch it all here. Ultimately, however, it was Guzman who held the retaliatory trump card. Leading off the seventh against Bumgarner in a game, he crushed a home run deep down the left field line. Watch it here. On Wednesday baseball suspended Giants reliever George Kontos for three games, and manager Bruce Bochy for one, following an incident in Pittsburgh on Tuesday in which Kontos hit Andrew McCutchen with a pitch after benches had been warned.
With the Giants down in the eighth inning, Kontos threw a ball behind Starling Marte. It was likely a response to an incident an inning earlier, when Marco Scutaro was knocked from the game and, as was found out later, from the lineup for an extended period by a Tony Watson pitch, and was enough to draw a warning from plate ump Wally Bell. The lack of contact may not have been enough to satisfy the pitcher, who drilled McCutchen in the backside two hitters later.
It was a reasonable response by the umpire. Then again, the pitch in question was a tailing sinker that drifted right, hardly a laser-guided bullet. From MLB. A sinker got away from me a little bit. Also, it was his 28th birthday. They will decry the eye-for-an-eye mentality, the brutal delivery of fastballs and the ugly results of the punch-throwing scrum in the seventh-inning.
