THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

They keep referring to it as an accident in the article, but from the sound of it, the runner deliberately ran into him. I wonder if the runner was criminally charged. In a rec league, just because a catcher is blocking the plate, that doesn’t mean you’re justified in assaulting him.

If you read the comments to the article, it sounds like Steve Kelley was trying to put together something non-confrontational and non-divisive so as to maximize the contributions to his fundraiser without, say, ticking off the runner’s teammates who might have otherwise been willing to pony up.  There were a number of other comments by people who were ticked that this wasn’t done at the level of investigative journalism, but I personally think this was the right way to go.  What is served by turning this into more of a fight than it might already be?  (This all happened half a mile from my house, by the way; I’ve played on those fields before any of these folks.)