Jeff Weaver, the Detroit pitcher, was asked by the Royals' Mike Sweeney to move the resin bag out of Sweeney's line of sight.  I don't know what Weaver shouted in reply, but it caused Sweeney to charge the mound and start a bench-clearing melee.

Weaver has a history of doing this kind of thing.  He started another fight earlier this year, and he's prone to criticizing his teammates in public.  Weaver is a good young pitcher, the best the Tigers have, but he acts like a spoiled child a lot of the time.

So, is Jeff Weaver a jerk, or merely one of a long line of nasty Detroit starting pitchers?

Twenty years ago, the Tigers had Jack Morris.  He never wanted to come out of a game, and he used to slam the ball down in Sparky Anderson's hand when Anderson came out to make a pitching change, so hard that Sparky's hand would be black and blue afterwards.  Morris won 254 major league games, more than a lot of Hall of Fame pitchers, but he was so unpopular with the writers that he may never get inducted.

Forty years ago, the Tigers had Jim Bunning.  He's in the Hall of Fame, and he's now a U. S. Senator from Kentucky, but he was a mean competitor as well.  I remember when Bunning spent two years as manager of the Toledo Mud Hens and alienated all the Toledo sports writers (both of them).

Fifty years ago, the Tigers had Fred Hutchinson.  Hutch would get so mad after a loss that he would smash all the light bulbs in the tunnel from the dugout to the clubhouse.

Seventy years ago, the Tigers had Earl Whitehill, who once was so mad about being taken out of a game that he threw the ball over the grandstand rather than hand it to the manager.

Ninety years ago, the Tigers had George Mullin, who in 1911 announced that he had found a way to stop the hot-hitting Cleveland rookie Shoeless Joe Jackson.  Mullin's suggestion: throw at the rookie's head and he'd "run away from the plate and never come back."

So, maybe there's hope for Jeff Weaver.  He's not a jerk.  He's the latest in a long and hallowed Detroit tradition.