The Hottest ‘Bryce Harper Deserved To Be Choked’ Take Is Here And It’s Already Given You Stage Four Melanoma

CSN

In our utterly insane world of instant and highly opinionated sports commentary, it was downright refreshing to see that most of the takes regarding Jonathan Papelbon choking out Bryce Harper were astoundingly reasonable.

The majority were a variation of, “Hey, the kind of person who would choke his teammate of only two months, who has been playing otherworldly all season, in a game the day after being eliminated from the playoffs is an incomprehensible dick and whatever utterly irrelevant message he was trying to send in no way justifies the action he took.”

You know, because his actions were “choking his teammates of only two months, who has been playing otherworldly all season” for some nebulous reason like “he didn’t move as fast I wanted him to move.”

Also, never choke anyone. That’s a thought.

But, you just knew some people would disagree. There was that stupid CJ Nitkowski article, but at least that had some semblance of ‘reporting.’ What we need is the opinions — and only the opinions — of an old white baseball blogger who writes for a team in the American League and thus has no direct contant with Bryce Harper.

Sup, Lee Judge, of the Kansas City Star?

In an article titled “Should Jonathan Papelbon have choked Bryce Harper?” he comes to the conclusion that no, Papelbon should not have.

Good. Good. Then wait. Why am I writing this?

Oh, because Judge thinks someone else should have choked Harper. Because Bryce Harper needs choking. Here was his initial lede that was then changed.

But the problem with Papelbon is that he wasn’t important enough to deliver the very necessary message a choking from an important person would send.

I don’t know Bryce Harper from Adam, but he certainly seems like a young man who needs an attitude adjustment. Unfortunately he was choked by the wrong guy in the wrong place.

In baseball culture, pitchers — especially relievers — do not get to criticize position players for lack of hustle. Guys like Jonathan Papelbon play every once in a while, guys like Bruce Harper play all the time. So if you spend a fair amount of time sitting in the shade eating popsicles, you don’t get to criticize position players for failing to run out a fly ball.

The second problem was location: if you want to choke Bryce Harper — and I suspect if you played with him, you might — ask him to come up the tunnel and then choke him.

That’s right. You have the shortstop choke the motherfucker in private.

That’s how you play baseball.