San Francisco Giants: Social Media Round-Up Brawl Edition

The only part of Monday’s Memorial Day match-up between the San Francisco Giants and the Washington Nationals that was very exciting was the 8th inning, in which pitcher Hunter Strickland drilled Bryce Harper with a fastball. Social media exploded, and we’ve got some of the hottest of the hot takes and reactions captured below.

In what was a boring game with good pitching and/or bad offense (depending on which team you root for), things certainly heated up in the 8th inning as Bryce Harper took offense to San Francisco Giants pitcher Hunter Strickland hitting him square on the hip with a 98-mile-per-hour fastball. Before we get into the details, make sure you check out the video of the incident so you know just how big of a deal this was.

Getting into it, this was the closest thing to an actual fight that there has been in the MLB since last year’s prizefight between Jose Bautista and Rougned Odor. Harper and Strickland both landed some light blows, and the benches overflowed into more than just jawing.

As we dig through social media, the two biggest topics of the fight seemed to be Harper’s awful batting helmet toss (which most likely probably just slipped out of his hand) and the fact that Strickland waited over two years to get revenge on Harper-for crushing homers (twice) off of a pair of horrible Strickland pitches in the 2014 NLDS.

As for the social media, let’s just say there was plenty of material to go off of.

First off, people were quick to capitalize on the opportunity for the #ShootingStars meme to fit in nicely here:

The Harper throw jokes continued, as poor 50 Cent even got dragged into this:

Lest you think this is some sort of biased Bay Area website named after the icon of the Bay Area, here is a pretty-accurate tweet mocking Strickland:

Bad photoshops can be funny too:

All while this was going on, Harper’s wife was going on vacation, so she made to let people know that she was quite-aware of her husband’s actions:

We even saw other athletes, like Olympian and Stanford Cardinal Katie Ledecky chime in:

Overall, we see that Bryce Harper was the bigger story here just because he’s an MLB superstar, and because he initiated the actual fight. Strickland, while less popular for jokes on social media, was ripped by many former players and big-name writers for being petty and holding a pretty weak grudge for so long. Somehow even Buster Posey got blamed for not intervening in a pretty obviously personal beef between two less-than-mature players.

Next: Giants 3 Up, 3 Down: Win vs. Atlanta

Both need to be suspended if you ask Twitter, and both surely will be if the MLB has any sanity. Strickland and Harper were both in the wrong, but Strickland certainly seems to have more to lose from this than Harper. What kind of suspension should each player receive? Let us know in the comments below!