Photo by Kirby Lee—USA TODAY Sports
Last night, during the Astros-Angels game, some of the olllllld gentlemen's baseball rules came out to play. After Luis Valbuena smoked his 20th homer, the Angels third baseman celebrated with a pristine bat flip. And Astros pitcher Mike Fiers wasn't feeling it.I mean, can you blame Valbuena? Who wouldn't be happy with this? The low contact, the RBIs, the sound—gorgeous:
And here is the beautiful bat flip:
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Bat flips are good, and everyone deserves to at some point in their lives feel the thrill of homering and flipping. For those of us who can't, watching is the next best thing. But, in what has become a sadly predictable act, during Valbuena's next at-bat, Fiers decided to fire one behind Valbuena as a kind of warning shot. Because them's the rules.As if Fiers didn't already look salty enough, Valbuena had not one, but two withering responses. First, immediately after the high heat, he simply looked at Fiers and told him to quiet down.
Then, Valbuena smoked a double off him—adding another mini bat flip just for kicks—helping seal the game at 9-1 Angels. Nothing like adhering to the code of the game, but getting your ass kicked, eh Fiers?Fiers told MLB.com's Brian McTaggart afterwards:
Perhaps the only respectful act Fiers showed last night was having the balls to cop to his bullshit."What he did to me, I took it as disrespect. Obviously, I played with Valbuena and I have no hard feeling towards him, but when you do something like that, as disrespectful as he did, you've got to send some kind of message. I'm not trying to hit him, but something has to be said."