The 2015 American League Division Series between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Texas Rangers was as exciting as they come.
Texas won the first two games of the best-of-five series, but Toronto came back and rallied past the Rangers to take the matchup 3-2, with three consecutive wins.
The last one gave us Jose Bautista’s iconic bat flip, an occurrence that started some bad blood between the two teams.
Enter the 2016 MLB regular season.
On May 15, after a hard slide at second base, Rangers’ second baseman Rougned Odor and Bautista went at it in one of the most epic on-field melees in recent memory.
Here is the video:
OTD in 2016, a brawl breaks out in Arlington after Rougned Odor punched Jose Bautista pic.twitter.com/9JGcIxIs7n
— FOX Sports: MLB (@MLBONFOX) May 15, 2023
As stated, the situation between the two squads wasn’t good since the previous postseason.
Odor and Bautista had to be separated by teammates, but not before Odor hit the latter with a huge right that almost knocked him out.
To this day, fans from both teams and baseball in general still talk about that brawl as if it happened yesterday.
Both teams were contenders around those days.
The Blue Jays even made it to the Championship Series both in 2015 and 2016, losing to the Kansas City Royals and the Cleveland Guardians, respectively.
Odor, still active, had a couple of 30-homer seasons after that but struggled to be an above-average offensive player; while Bautista retired in 2018 after hitting 344 career long balls.
That confrontation represented one of the specific moments people remember the most about the 2016 MLB season.
It’s incredible that six years have already passed from that brawl.
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