The Red Sox and Orioles benches cleared Friday night at Camden Yards after a hard slide into second base, and the two clubs get to look at each other again Saturday evening. That is the part that matters. Baseball is the only sport that makes you sleep on it and then hands you the same nine guys twenty-two hours later.
Here is the sequence as it came down. Luis Robert Jr. grounded into a double play to end the eighth. Blaze Alexander went into the bag hard trying to keep the back end alive, the middle infielder did not love it, words got said, and both dugouts emptied the way dugouts do in September when everybody has been sharing a division for five months. I do not have the full ejection list in front of me yet, and I am not going to guess at one.
What I will say is that this is exactly the play the sport has spent a decade legislating and still cannot fully settle. checked the almanac: the bona fide slide rule, 6.01(j), landed before the 2016 season, written in the wreckage of Chase Utley's takeout of Ruben Tejada in the 2015 NLDS, a slide that broke Tejada's leg and broke everybody's patience with the old etiquette at the same time. Ten years on, the rule tells you where the hands and the feet have to be. It has never once told a shortstop how to feel about a runner arriving with intent.
That is the honest tension. A middle infielder's job is to stand in a place other men are running toward, and the runner's job is to make him think about it. Most nights that negotiation stays civil. Friday it did not.
What comes next is the interesting part. Both clubs are back on the field Saturday night in Baltimore, first pitch at 7:06 ET, and everybody in both dugouts will remember. Watch the first inside fastball. Watch how the second baseman sets up on the next double play ball. Nobody forgets a slide.