The COVID-19 pandemic has sent countless ripples into every conceivable facet of our cultural experience. Hugs are gone. Elderly loved ones are locked inside, frozen in fear and unable to wrench themselves away from a TV fueling a uniquely evil paranoia. Being outside feels like stealing. But for an increasingly high number of Americans, stealing feels like the only way to survive.

This framework, then, throws into laughable context how stupid it is to care about anything baseball related. Yet, here we both are. Me hammering away at my computer on a sunny Tuesday evening, and you peering over these words. You’d probably prefer I get to the point, I suppose.

With Major League Baseball poised to commence a 60-game sprint in fanless stadiums, those who play and consume this sport have been robbed twice over from seeing the Houston Astros meet justice for cheating the game in a way no one has been caught cheating in a century. They dodged that justice last winter, when an equal parts bumbling and impotent commissioner’s office failed in any meaningful way until the winds of bad publicity necessitated it. That action–a fine, loss of draft picks, and suspension of two members of management–failed to extract any meaningful punishment on the players who enacted and benefitted from an elaborate scheme designed to fundamentally tilt the heart of the game: the pitcher/batter confrontation.

The stage was then set for baseball’s fans to enact their own justice on Houston during the 2020 season. Every trip to a visiting stadium loomed as its own separate theater, a national, traveling tour of the airing of grievances. That the very first instances of this behavior resulted in fans being ejected from stadiums showed that, at the very least, the Astros could hear them. 

But then, snap, a pandemic unlike anything seen in three generations has robbed fans of the opportunity to look the Astros in the eye and express the visceral, biting, and vitally necessary shame that face-to-face hooting and hollering can provide. If we have seen anything in the past nine months, it is that a collective, physical, overwhelming response can accomplish in days what bureaucracy cannot in decades. The Astros collective posture should have been slowly bowed over the exhausting, six-month tour of spleen-venting this season would have provided; they should have been wincing during warm ups by the time the calendar hit September. There is only one recourse left, and it is the beanball.

Baseball’s long tradition of unwritten rules, particularly as it concerns throwing at players and on-field fights, has fallen on hard times. The idea that men would risk each other’s health by throwing a hard ball at rocket speed at each other in response to something like enjoying a home run feels like (and probably is) a perversion of the spirit of the game. 

(Here’s where I take a big sip of wine, swallow, and take a large breath.)

Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut the rules have changed. The Astros clearly feel shame and remorse for their actions only so far as it fits into a press release or pull quote on social media. Their players think that their actions will be forgotten through winning, or that they can cast off their actions as common. That this is merely one, on-field symptom of an organization clearly rotted from the head down should not be forgotten. The Astros are not sorry, have never been sorry, and will probably never be sorry. 

And so, in light of a game whose manifold systems to curb cheating, provide continuity, and uphold the rule of law have proven as inert and ineffective as the country in which it was born, I say this: Drill ‘em. 

Drill ‘em right in the ass. Do it on Opening Day (they will). 

Do it the series after that. And after that. Break the record for HBP. Shatter it. Do to the HBP records what Barry Bonds did to offensive records. Make it a statistical outlier generations will laugh at, and know it was of another time, and that it will never be approached again.

The Astros will hate this. They will complain. It will be hilarious. The goal is not to injure someone, but it may very well happen, and if it does, concerned trolls will attempt to tie you into knots. People who tell you that protesters are as at fault as police will tell you that all the players should just be nice to each other. They should not and you should not buy it. 

In his seminal essay on baseball as metaphor, my friend and colleague Patrick Dubuque wrote the following:

“In an atmosphere where shared experience grows endangered, that mutual meaning we pour into baseball–not even a collective rooting interest, just the bare rendering of objective results–provides a starting point in greater, more difficult conversations.”

We live in an age starving for justice. We are living in a time when the failure to provide it for generations has shown that unmet justice does not disappear, but grows silently. It swells over the years until it cannot be contained, and it breaks, and washes down over everything. If baseball is a metaphor, the Astros are our chance to do better. And we can start by throwing baseballs very hard, directly at their ass.

Yesterday the Royals began it. Friday, Marco Gonzales should carry it on. Drill ‘em, Marco. Drill ‘em for all of us stuck at home.