Tom Hamilton Deserves A Suspension

Monday, as we all know, Aroldis Chapman threw a pitch to the backstop while Indians’s OF Nick Swisher was at bat. The next pitch from Chapman was a bit too close for comfort. The pitch didn’t hit Swisher, and Chapman was not intentionally trying to hit him either, there was no reason to, Chapman has no hate towards the Indians or towards Nick Swisher. However, Tom Hamilton, the radio voice of the Cleveland Indians, made some rude comments regarding Chapman’s pitch.

“What you’d love to see Swisher do here is knock it right off the temple of Chapman and see how much fun it is to have a ball coming at your head,” Hamilton said. “That is bush league.”

Sports Media, it’s supposed to be politically correct, for the most part. Knocking it off the temple of a pitcher, that’s a little messed up.

It’s simply not okay for an announcer, journalist, anybody, to say something like that. You may think I’m only saying this because I write for a Cincinnati sports website, but if Marty Brennaman, Thom Brennaman, Jim Kelch, or any other Reds’ announcer said something like that, I would be writing an article about them, too.

I can understand why Hamilton would be mad, he is obviously a big Indians fan- which is good, that’s what you want out of your radio announcer, and he is obviously a very passionate man, but being mad is one thing, but suggesting something like that to happen, that’s too far.

Tom Hamilton was very unprofessional about the whole situation, he could have handled it much better. He should have said “That pitch nearly hit Nick Swisher, perhaps intentional, perhaps not. 2-0 the count”. That’s all he had to say. The job of a play-by-play announcer is to, well, do play-by-play, not throw in opinions and suggest violent things like attempting murder.

The past is the past, and this issue, at least for the players, is over with, but for Tom Hamilton, I’m sure he has been getting a lot of hate from both Reds and Indians fans.