Kyle Freeland is the only thing shameful about Rockies-Rafael Devers dust-up

Baseball has changed a whole heck of a lot over the years, but somehow, in the year of our lord 2025, we're still getting drawn into debates about what does and does not fit within the game's Unwritten Rules™️. The latest round of discourse struck up on Tuesday night, when the currently scorching-hot Rafael Devers launched another homer against the Colorado Rockies — and drew the ire of Rockies lefty Kyle Freeland.

Watching live, it was tough to tell exactly what had happened: You could see Devers linger in the batter's box for a split second, but that's hardly uncommon for him. Once the broadcast cut back from watching the ball sail into the seats, Devers and Freeland were at each other's throats.

Soon enough, several San Francisco Giants were coming to Devers' defense, most notably established veterans like Matt Chapman and Willy Adames. From there, both benches cleared, and the umpiring crew was lucky to defuse the situation without some real punches being thrown. By the time the dust settled, Freeland, Chapman and Adames had all been ejected from the game, which the Giants would go on to win for their ninth victory in their last 10 games.

So, just what was the deal? Freeland told reporters after the game that he took issue with the way Devers admired his home run: "It was pure disrespect of a first-inning home run," he told the San Francisco Chronicle's Susan Slusser. "It felt like it took 15 seconds for him to get to first base."

15 seconds? That does, indeed, seem like a pretty long time. Who knows: Maybe Devers really did go way out of his way to show up the opposing pitcher. Let's go back to the video tape.

[wheels out giant Family Feud buzzer] I'm so sorry, that's not on the board. At first, it seems like Devers is just standing there trying to figure out whether the ball's going to drift foul or whether it's going to make it over the right-field fence. It takes him three seconds to start walking up the first-base line, and exactly six seconds to calmly drop his bat and turn that walk into a jog. In other words, it's a completely normal celebration, and in roughly the 40th percentile for Devers specifically.

Freeland can try to cloak himself in the sanctity of the game and its unwritten rules all he wants, but a cursory review of the evidence reveals what really happened here. A pitcher in the midst of another miserable year (his season-long ERA has now ballooned to 5.41, fourth-worst among all qualified starters) was frustrated that he hung a breaking ball on the inner third and got it sent a mile. And rather than processing that emotion in some other way, he decided to make it Devers' problem.

It's the sort of thing we've seen for years now, and it's high time we put an end to it.

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Kyle Freeland, not Rafael Devers, is what's wrong with baseball culture

It's one thing to object to being publicly disrespected. If a batter stares you down, or says something, or goes above and beyond to show up you specifically, by all means let him know about it. But for far too long pitchers have gotten away with being coddled in the name of upholding tradition. The reality is that players have always talked trash and show-boated and expressed themselves on the field, no matter what Freeland or the 2,598 identical avatars in people's replies on X might insist to the contrary.

Baseball should encourage that expression, so long as it doesn't tip over into something uglier or more violent. The irony here is that Freeland clearly thinks of himself as the stoic one, the rugged enforcer, the one policing any sort of flamboyance in violation of the spirit of the game. When, in reality, it's his feelings that are tipping over in unproductive ways, and his feelings that are ruining a sport that is at heart supposed to be joyful. If we want kids to be able to see themselves on a baseball diamond, we need to rid the Majors and every other level of this kind of stuff, of a certain kind of masculinity that projects its insecurities and weaknesses outward whenever it feels the slightest bit threatened.

None of which is to completely exonerate Devers as a player, a different topic for a different time. But it's an amazing feeling to square a ball up like that, and he deserved a little moment to admire it. We all did.