Ending collisions at the plate in MLB

No.  I have zero interest in contributing my two cents on MLB changing its rules to end collisions at home plate.  But when I awakened this morning to news of the move to change the rules I realized: here is one of these great Rorshach stories that everybody has an opinion on.  And those opinions do not come down to "for" or "against".  Instead, we can expect every possible permutation and combination of views on the subject… or indeed, tangential subjects.

I do not begin to have the imagination to pretend to predict what all these views might be.  So I looked at the reader responses in one newspaper (just one!) to see what baseball fans are saying.  Here is a (paraphrased) selection:

"What's next?  Outlaw bats?"

"It's part of the game."

"So were batting without a helmet and unpadded outfield walls."

"Pete Rose was the man!"

"Pete Rose is an asshole!"

"If you like fights, watch hockey."

"Baseball and football are for pussies.  I watch hockey!"

"I play co-ed softball and we allow collisions."

"Really?  You're tough because you play co-ed softball?"

"Players get paid too much."  [I think the thread could be about fifteenth century Mesoamerican textiles and somebody would complain that pro athletes are overpaid.]

"Now who will understand Meatloaf's 'Paradise by the Dashboard Light?'"  [Really.  You can't make this up.]

"Nannystate."  [Because Obama and Bloomberg run MLB now, right?]

"I'm sorry Buster Posey had to get hurt for this to happen."

"Buster Posey isn't man enough to play catcher."

This is, as I said, just a selection.  I may have chosen not to comment on the rule change, but that doesn't mean I can't comment on the comments.  I was struck by some of the hockey comments in particular.  If you have watched an NHL game you will know that the "fight" is a stylized piece of performance art in the first period.  Two guys square off, surrounded by refs.  Elsewhere on the ice, players pair up, much like a square dance, holding one another's jerseys.

Now I am a barely competent skater.  I am incredibly impressed with the athleticism and physicality of pro hockey players.  But the "fight" reminds me of a mascot firing t-shirts into the crowd:  an entertainment for the fans, entirely unrelated to the game itself.  Do the people at the arena really not see this?

What I do know is that the NHL is almost exclusively white.  And when a commenter says that NHL players are more "manly" than MLB or NFL players, that is probably what he is referring to, albeit unconsciously.

So who knew that barring collisions at the plate is really about whiteness?