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Tuesday, the Kansas City Star’s Lee Judge wrote that Washington Nationals’ outfielder Bryce Harper deserved to be choked by a teammate, effectively advocating for the dugout assault that came at the hands of closer Jonathan Papelbon. The original language, which says “he certainly seems like a young man who needs choking,” went somewhat viral, with various outlets and readers panning the paper for such harsh language.

Then, they changed their tune. The post was republished with new language.

Then, the public editor of the KC Star, Derek Donovan, reached out to Judge, to ask him about the insinuation of violence and the backlash. He stuck to his remarks and the editor effectively blamed Twitter for the reaction altogether.

“In today’s column I said that if Jonathan Papelbon wanted to choke Bryce Harper, he should have done it in private. Ballplayers have scuffles and arguments more often than fans know, but those scuffles and arguments are supposed to take place out of the public eye. Whether fans like it or not, baseball players throw at each other, do takeout slides on each other and sometimes fight with each other. When they do those things, there’s a right way to do it and that’s what today’s column was about,” Judge said to Donovan, who is also director of research and information at the KC Star.

Afterward, the sports editor of the paper, Jeff Rosen, started tweeting replies to readers.

Not to be outdone, Judge himself wrote a reply column to those who took exception to his wording, by basically blaming the editing process for any changes at all. “On Tuesday, I wrote about the Jonathan Papelbon-Bryce Harper scuffle and what I said got a lot of attention. Almost all it it was negative,” he wrote Wednesday. “We’re in a bold, new age of journalism, which is a nice way of saying we sometimes put stuff on the web site and if an editor has time, he might proofread your work after it’s been posted.”

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He then doubled down on the concept of violence in the workplace being no big deal, in the context of sports. “If every NFL player who got in a scuffle with a teammate was charged with assault, you couldn’t field a team. And if you’re thinking football is a contact sport and baseball isn’t, you probably haven’t played much baseball,” Judge wrote. “If Papelbon putting his hands around Harper’s throat was assault — and I’ve seen a third-grader’s birthday party with more actual violence — then what do you call hitting an opponent with a hard object thrown at 97 mph?

In an ultimate dismissal of all who found his initial column offensive, Judge offered this: “right now I just want to take the opportunity to say something to all the people I offended and I say it with complete sincerity: Thanks for the page views.”

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