Pittsburgh Pirates’ Sean Rodriguez Tried To Go 12 Rounds With A Gatorade Cooler

Bogey Wells10 years ago

Hot heads are a rarity in professional baseball. The vast majority of major league players abide by the “I’m just here to collect a check” approach to their athletic careers. This approach involves treating life as a repetitive, nine-inning cycle. This results in a very monotonous season-long experience. Thankfully for the internet, Sean Rodriguez had a mental lapse yesterday, and provided us with a display of anger depressingly absent from most MLB dugouts.

Playoff baseball provides a special type of emotional instability. One walk, one home run, one ejection, and 162 games are all for naught. The atmosphere of the Cubs-Pirates’ Wild Card game last night became real testy once it became obvious the Pirates forgot to bring their bats to the stadium, eventually dropping the game — and their World Series dreams — to baseball’s premier losing franchise.

With the game almost certainly over, and the season’s inevitable end just a few outs away, those oft-monotonous players began to take a much different mindset. Three innings left? Why not beam the shit out of the opposing pitcher?

Of course the benches cleared and the bullpens pretended to care, but that wasn’t the most interesting moment of last night’s embarrassment. Bench clearing, screaming matches are all too common in professional baseball, and Sean Rodriguez couldn’t let internet headlines be dominated with yet another bloodless baseball slapfight.

In a fight not so reminiscent of the internet-breaking Mayweather v. Pacquiao battle, the Pirates’ Sean Rodriguez spent a few quality seconds assaulting a defenseless Gatorade cooler before KO-ing the 5-gallon featherweight after a brief single round.

This is pure anger-fueled entertainment. It encompasses that peculiar, yet overt sense of superiority every male enjoys when besting an innocent, inanimate object as evidenced by the Swiss cheese fraternity house walls dotting the nation. I’m admittedly not a boxing expert, nor have I ever been in a brawl that involved legitimate fighting techniques. However, Rodriguez’s form appears to be somewhat impressive to my amateur, talking-out-of-my-ass eyes. Hell, had he not lost his balance, that cooler may have stood a chance for round two. The key word is “may,” but the Cubs are playing October baseball, which means 2015 is the year of the impossible.

The decision was unanimous in favor of Rodriguez, but like all great fights, the internet erupted into a slurry of Photoshop creations and asinine commentary.

That wasn’t the end of Rodriguez’s day, though. He continued to grace television cameras with a very clear “I’m going to fucking kill you” glare.

Of course he eventually found himself ejected from the game and escaped to the locker room for a few more rounds against stationary stadium equipment — the only thing any Pirate had a shot of hitting last night..

Image via Vine