Jose Ureña was too much of a coward to challenge Ronald Acuña Jr. on Wednesday night, so instead he hit him with a 97-mph fastball.

Isn’t it time we started calling pitchers who do what Ureña did – bury a baseball into a hitter because the hitter had the audacity to be great – exactly what they are? Coward works. So does chicken. Or yellow. Anything to stigmatize the stupidity of this act, which is so old, so tired, so beyond stupid and so contrary to the objective of the game: be better than your opponent.

Call him a weakling, and compound that with the sort of significant suspension Major League Baseball should have been handing out for years, and just watch. This will not disappear, not entirely, but players will think much longer and much harder about just how satisfying something can be when it brings side-by-side attacks on their manliness and bank account.

The particulars of Wednesday’s incident made it that much more ridiculous. Baseball’s unwritten rules are like Bible translations: There are 50 different versions of the same general tenet, which, in this case, was that the repercussion for ____________ is to hit a guy. Any number of grievances can fill in that particular blank. Acuña’s was that he had hit a leadoff home run in three straight games and homered in five straight altogether, both unprecedented for a 20-year-old.

View photos Jose Ureña was too much of a coward to challenge Ronald Acuña Jr. on Wednesday night, so instead he hit him with a 97-mph fastball. (AP) More

Another unwritten rule is that if you’re going to enforce an unwritten rule, do so with a measure of subterfuge. Ureña, the hard-throwing Miami Marlins right-hander, must’ve skipped that page. He chose the first pitch to drill Acuña, the Atlanta Braves rookie phenom whose left elbow was clipped as he tried to squirm out of the way. The benches cleared. Umpires ejected Ureña. Acuña stayed in the game before exiting the next inning because of the plunking’s after-effects.

Never mind the most obvious point here, which is that Major League Baseball is demonstrably worse when great players do not play. When they do not play because of invisible and illogical conventions that rooted themselves decades ago and are begging for a Costco-sized tub of Roundup, it only exacerbates the embarrassment of it. Between that and the notion that this might have been Acuña’s comeuppance for the itty-bitty bat flip he unleashed after his leadoff home run Tuesday, it’s almost like baseball players want to police themselves into irrelevance.

Those ideas are fairly clear and agreed upon by the masses. Two more important – and more contested – ones warrant greater inspection.

First, let’s address the view that hitting a batter with a pitch is some kind of a power move. It is not. Hitters often interpret it as a sign of weakness, an implicit admission that the pitcher is not good enough. The counter to this argument is some version of: “Well, that’s what Bob Gibson did when real men played real baseball.” And that would be all well and good were it factual. Which, of course, it isn’t.

In the 3,884 1/3 regular-season innings Gibson pitched over 17 years, he hit 102 batters. CC Sabathia has thrown 3,436 1/3 innings and hit 118 batters. Johnny Cueto isn’t even at 2,000 innings and has more HBP than Gibson. Charlie Morton is one shy of Gibson in 1,177 career innings. Gibson’s reputation as someone who would blow up a hitter is baseball’s version of a game of telephone.

What is true is that Gibson would throw inside, and that is where Ureña failed. SNY color analyst Keith Hernandez alluded to this when he tried to rationalize what Ureña did and stepped all over his mustache in the process. “They’re killing you, you’ve lost three games, he’s hit three home runs,” Hernandez said. “You’ve got to hit him. I’m sorry. People are not gonna like that. You’ve got to hit him, knock him down. I mean, seriously knock him down if you don’t hit him.”

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