The runner is making a split-second decision while the catcher is doing the same. There’s a way you can protect your catcher by just not blocking the plate anymore and try a swipe a tag. If I were a manager, I would tell my catcher that protecting himself is more important than a single run.

But you open up another problem when players begin pulling up to go in soft and avoid contact, which can lead to injuries as well. It’s a fast, tough game and injuries will happen. I think if you listen to what former ML catchers have been saying all week is they would not change the rule one bit.

Cousins was tagging up so had full view of the play. As he ran down the line he had changed direction about ten-fifteen feet from the plate to plow into the catcher. In other words, Cousins stopped running towards the plate in order to collide with a fielder not in the base path who did not have the ball.

The hit was against MLB rules for all these reasons, but the rules are not enforced at the plate as they are at other bases.

Manly men, apparently, think blindside spearing of prone, stationary players who cannot affect the play is good for, or a necessary part of, the game.

Manly men ought to stop watching baseball (where the “pussy” Giants are World Champions) and watch the manly NFL. I mean, you guys love man-on-man contact so much, just devote yourselves to the sport where that’s the point. Position yourselves with hands tucked up into the crotch of your center. Then feel the gratifying tingle of a violent collision. That your fat self is watching on TV.

Except, one problem: In the NFL, hits of this type have been outlawed since Jack Tatum paralyzed Darryl Stingley (who also did not have the ball). It’s a penalty, and if the damage is severe you’re fined and/or suspended for a hit like that in the manly NFL.

Adjust your brains. When a catcher has the ball and sets up in the basepath, blocking the plate (as Eli Whiteside did last night against Prince Fielder), ok, you may get a collision — although, just as is true at the other bases, a hook, fade, or even the dread head-first slide is more likely to score. And tossing an elbow at the fielder’s face a few feet in front of the base, as Fielder did, is still illegal (but, again, never called at home).

Meanwhile, crashing at full force into a fielder on his knees outside the basepath and facing away from both the runner and the base is both dirty and against MLB rules, regardless of whether those rules are enforced at the plate and despite the brain-dead “it’s always been this way” arguments. Calling it a “clean play” is a desperately technical dodge.

It’s a stupid play that adds nothing to the game.

By now you’ve read all the crazy Jose Bautista stats. Your eyes can pop no further, Jose Bautista has suspended your disbelief in a way you didn’t think possible. He is putting on a show many of us have never seen and will never see again, the ride……