A baseball brawl almost always originates in something sinful—pride, jealousy, mishandled anger. The brawl itself, too, typically showcases some characteristics that Major League Baseball would rather not promote. Still, there is usually something good here: heroes around the story of the brawl, if not in the story of the brawl, as ESPN’s Sam Miller put it at Baseball Prospectus in 2016. Sunday’s Reds-Pirates throwdown was no different.
This list isn’t exclusively made up of heroic moments; some, in fact, were closer to the opposite. However, each was notable—by one definition of the word or another—and so here, then, is an analysis of baseball’s best brawl of the season so far:
Derek Dietrich’s Stare of Admiration
We elevate the bat flip as baseball’s best celebratory technique.