The Washington Post discusses a fascinating academic study showing that Southern baseball players are more likely than their Northern colleagues to throw at a batter after giving up a home run or when a teammate has been hit by a pitch in the previous inning. It’s attributed to the South’s “culture of honor,” the clannish ethos thought to have been brought to the South largely by the “Scotch-Irish” (Ulster Scots) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In the words of a motivational poster in the locker of Tennesse native and Baltimore Orioles reliever Jamie Walker, “You [mess] with me, you [mess] with the whole trailer park.”
It’s an interesting look at the way cultural patterns, even (or especially) irrational ones, can persist in unexpected ways.
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