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NEW YORK -- So what's the big deal now? The one-and-done executed by Jose Reyes on Wednesday afternoon has been nominated for baseball felony of the year. It's running against Scott Cousins' wholly honorable slide into Buster Posey. The rub is this: Reyes took it sitting down. And now he's being accused of being something other than a stand-up guy, as being amoral and unprincipled. His championsh football bowl games ip, the first ever by a member of the Mets, is being characterized as cheap or synthetic.Holy overreaction, batsman.Raised eyebrows are one thing. I understand them. All OPS evidence to the contrary, we hold the batting championship close to our hearts. Honest to Cobb, we do. It is a prominent component of baseball's legacy. Until the Babe altered our sense of appreciation with his might, batting football bowl games average was the most significant figure in a player's statistical resum-.And still, any time a close batting race develops, we invoke the image of Ted Williams' 6-for-8 surge on the final day of his .406 1941 season, embrace its grandeur and his virtue and gallantry. Not everyone is Mr. Theodore Ballgame.I enjoy and understand the passion that fuels the outrage that Reyes prompted by excusing hims football bowl games elf after one at-bat and one bunt single. In what other sport can abstinence cause such rancor? But I am taken aback by the levels of rancor and expressed nastiness. Reyes, a prominent thief, stole nothing. He took his chance, put a bunt on the Citi Field lawn, ran and quite legitimately raised his average to .337.Then he walked off, leaving the rest to Ryan Braun. It wasn't much of a chance that football bowl games Reyes took in exiting early. Braun wasn't likely to produce hits in his first three at-bats or three in his first four.Good for Reyes. He accomplished what no other Met accomplished in the first 50 years of the franchise. Among Mets of the past, only Cleon Jones (.340 in 1969) and John Olerud (.354 in 1998) produced higher averages. Reyes had eight hits in 14 at-bats before he bunted. So he batte football bowl games d .600 in his final 15. He certainly didn't back into his title. But he's being characterized as if he allowed Michael Strahan to pad his sack total or as if he were one of two New York Giants falling to the ground with mysterious and simultaneous maladies earlier this month.What did Reyes do other than reinforce the challenge awaiting Braun? He didn't cheat. A bunt base hit affects batting averag football bowl games e every bit as much as a 500-foot home run. Perhaps I should be more upset, and perhaps all the steroids stuff drained my outrage reservoir and it hasn't been refilled. Perhaps my sense of propriety has been warped by A-Rod's slap at the ball in '04 or Jeter's feigned hit-by-pitch last year. I won't even compare Reyes' perceived indiscretion to those incidents.But Reyes' opting out after one at-ba football bowl games t should be compared with how George Brett secured his third batting title in 1990, and what Bernie Willams did to secure his only championship eight years later. Yet their departures were not so widely questioned.Had Reyes taken a seat after hits in two at-bats, would his championship now be more authentic?He had the audacity to win the National League batting championship by eliminating his chan football bowl games ces to fail. Hardly a criminal act. But the overriding question now seems to be, "How dare he try to win a batting title by withdrawing from the competition for it? How can this be tolerated? Shouldn't he been penalized at least 10 points?" I think not.I love the game, most of its people and most of its trappings. We who write about it move forward, some of us unhappily, into new areas identified football bowl games by acronyms -- WAR and VORP -- but we don't let go of the past. And despite how some of us now embrace OPS and other, more fangled measurements of performance, we can't let go of batting average, the simple three-digit figure that we hold as close to our hearts as the game itself.These days, some of the forward thinkers ignore and discredit batting average. I don't hold it in particularly high reg football bowl games ard. Provide a batter's slugging average and on-base percentage -- not combined, please -- and I'll have a better idea of his offensive value. I've submitted stories in which I purposely omitted batting average because I found it irrelevant for what I was writing. People with the final say have inserted it.But I am annually amused when a sub-.300 average is used as ammunition against a player's Ha football bowl games ll of Fame candidacy by the very folks who find the figure irrelevant in other areas. But .300 hitters always have been recognized as special. And batting championships are to be cherished. Jose Reyes ought to treasure his and disregard the rancor that his one-and-done has created.I'm rather pleased that the dazzling TV-remote tripleheader of Wednesday night has obscured what happened at Citi Fiel football bowl games d in the afternoon. And I hope the charges against the 2011 National League batting champion will be dropped and the issue forgotten. football bowl games
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