By Mark Schiffman, M.S.
For those New York Mets fans out there, the name Chase Utley will not engender any sort of positive thoughts or emotions. This past Saturday, Utley made an illegal slide into Mets Shortstop Ruben Tejada, breaking his leg. The play also essentially was the turning point in the game, leading to a Los Angeles Dodgers victory in Game 2 of the National League Division Series. The New York Post reported that Mets pitcher, Matt Harvey, stated that he would stand up for his teammates and pitch inside to Utley for retaliation, if the situation presented itself in Game 3. This threat of hitting Utley with a fastball was made into a caption on the back cover of Monday’s New York Daily News, “Payback is a Pitch.” During Game 3, the crowd of 44,276 fans chanted in unison- “We want Ut-ley! We want Ut-ley!” with the hope that he would come into the game and get hit by a pitch.
As this was unfolding, I started thinking, what would REBT have to say about this whole situation? If I was the Mets starting pitcher for Game 3, my ABC’s of REBT would probably look something like this:
A (Activating Event) – Chase Utley slid illegally into my teammate. It was a dirty play.
B (Irrational Belief) – He absolutely should not have done that. He is a “punk” (as the Daily News called him) and deserves to be punished for what he did.
C (Consequence) – I am angry at him and will retaliate by throwing a fastball at him.
If I was therapizing myself, perhaps I could dispute the Demand and the Other-Downing. Is it true that he absolutely must not have done what he had done? Does this one act really make him into a total and complete punk? While this approach might work, my guess is that the functional dispute may be the most effective in this situation. In A Practitioners Guide to REBT (2014), DiGiuseppe, Doyle, Dryden and Backx define clinical dysfunctional anger as an “emotion that interferes with goal-directed behavior” (p. 150). I would have to weigh my desire for revenge with an honest analysis of what my goals are. Is my main goal revenge or is my main goal to win the ball game? If my main goal is to win the ball game, will throwing a ball at Chase Utley help my team win the game? Probably not. If anything, it might make it harder to win the game because I am putting an opposing runner on base.
Chase Utley ended up not playing in the game and Met’s Manager, Terry Collins, told Harvey not to retaliate against any other player either because the stakes were too high. The Mets ended up winning the game 13-7 and if they could win the series, they would end up exacting their revenge against Utley and the Dodgers in a more functional, less confrontational and more rewarding fashion.
