There’s a part of me that recognises sports like rugby are now operating in the professional era, and the fact that full-scale brawls have been mostly eradicated is a good thing.

There’s also a part of me that likes to watch people lose their marbles and swing at each other, and I’m sure I’m not alone on that front.

Now if you let Eben Etzebeth throw haymakers somebody would end up in hospital, but these Major League Baseball brawlers can’t seem to land a knockout blow.

Last night the match between the ironically named San Diego Padres and the Colorado Rockies turned into a bench-clearing bust-up, so let’s watch that first:

Benches clear, punches thrown in Padres-Rockies game with Nolan Arenado and Luis Perdomo in the center of it. pic.twitter.com/6cItcDc8Td

— MLB (@MLB) April 11, 2018

There’s some history to this one, as Stuff reports:

The tension between these two National League West teams started boiling a night earlier at Coors Field when Padres outfielder Manuel Margot got hit in the ribs by a pitch, putting him on the disabled list. The problems festered early on in the series finale, with Colorado’s Trevor Story being plunked in the first and San Diego’s Hunter Renfroe in the second.

That set the stage for Arenado, who didn’t take kindly to a pitch that nearly grazed his back. He immediately stormed after Perdomo, who threw his glove in self-defense. Arenado kept trying to punch the pitcher as the benches cleared and the relievers sprinted in from the bullpen.

Whatever – you just came to watch fists fly, didn’t you?

If you’re thinking isolated incident, chill out, then you might want to see what happened between longstanding rivals the Yankees and the Red Sox.

Again, this happened last night:

Brawl in Fenway Park #Rivalry #Yankees #RedSox #MLB #MGLD pic.twitter.com/slqvovVgj5

— MeGustanLosDeportes (@MGustanDeportes) April 12, 2018

Not quite as dramatic as that first fight, but a few decent face-offs.

Some background on what led to this one:

The game between the longtime rivals included two bench-clearing incidents, the second of which, in the seventh inning, turned into an on-field brawl after Red Sox reliever Joe Kelly hit the Yankees’ Tyler Austin with a pitch in the back.

That pitch appeared to be in retaliation for Austin’s hard slide in the third inning when his lead foot clipped the foot of Red Sox shortstop Brock Holt during a force out. The benches cleared then as well but there was no further incident.

If you’re trying your utmost to avoid being at all productive today, and your lust for bloodshed has not been satiated, then you can compare those two scraps above to the greatest MLB fights of all time:

[source:stuff]