Whatever happened to the simplistic decision making of a fist-fight? Two men taking swings at each other, usually in a drunken state, trying to decide such important issues as whose favorite baseball team is better. Now we live in a “sophisticated” society that deems such brutish behavior wrong, instead pushing us towards the courts system to settle differences.

Such is the case with Barry Bonds’ 700th homerun ball: two guys, one ball and now one judge, who has to decide if Steve Williams or Timothy Murphy is the rightful owner.

It’s a pretty simple case by the medieval rule of strength. Williams came away from the scrum with the ball, ergo, he is the winner, and by virtue of his strength and determination the rightful owner of the ball.

Murphy, who apparently fell on the ball first after taking it off the chin, is pleading for the ball because he was obviously the weaker of the two men on this occasion. He hired his lawyer who has used terms such as “possession, dominion and control” when referring to what his client did in the middle of the melee that took place in the left-center field bleacher section in Pac Bell … err … SBC Park. After being unable to flat out catch the ball, pick it up off the ground or wrestle it away from the other would-be ball hawks in his section, Murphy turned to his lawyer to do the heavy hitting for him.

Perhaps the worst weasel in this whole case is Alex Patino who came out right before the initial hearing was to take place and claimed that he too was robbed of the homerun ball by the thuggish Williams.

The thing about this case that casts our judicial system in the worst possible light is the fact that there is actually precedent for the judge to look at when deciding the case.

Again it was Barry Bonds who was the cause of the problem, when he hit his 73rd homerun of the year in 2001. Again a small brawl broke out and more than one person laid claim to the ball.

The two men, Alex Popov and Patrick Hayashi, each ended up with a share of the proceeds from the sale of the ball. The figure amounted to around $450,000 each, or about what they paid their attorneys to file these ridiculous cases.

In that case the judge said it was hard to determine what constituted as possession as video replays showed the ball hit Popov’s glove before falling to the ground where Hayashi came away from the pile with the prize.

Not everything that ends up in the stands is wanted by the fans. In fact, for one Florida Marlins fan, the T-shirt that was fired into the stands was both unwanted and dangerous. According to his complaint against the ball club, he sustained permanent eye injuries from the T-shirt that the team mascot had shot into the stands from a compressed air gun. While on the look-out for foul balls, this fan felt that he shouldn’t have been expected to be paying attention to flying shirts.

Ridiculous lawsuits aren’t just for the major leagues though; far from it. In fact the younger the players get, the more outrageous the lawsuits.

They say being a manager of a baseball team is stressful, but what if losing could cost you money. Say like $2,000 a game.

For one youth baseball coach that was the dilemma he faced. One parent thought his son’s chances at the postseason were so hampered by the coach, that he sued the coach. I’m sure there were plenty of incentive clauses tied to the 12-year-old’s contract about making the post season.

Fortunately, a wise purveyor of the law dismissed the case. In an article in The Intelligencer of Wheeling, W.V., the judge stated, “What youth players should know is this: In life, as in sports, you will try and you will sometimes fail . . . The fact your team lost does not mean it was your coach’s fault.”

This coach was not alone though. One coach was sued for hitting ground balls to his players during practice, when one of the balls took a bad hop and knocked a kid’s teeth out. I say tough break, this kid’s parents say must be a malicious coach. This coach wasn’t so lucky as he ended up paying an undisclosed amount to the injured child’s family.

The frivolity of all of these lawsuits threatens sports as we know them today. Who wants to coach a youth team if they might get sued because the team didn’t play well, or worse yet, because a kid got hurt playing the game? Injuries and losses are part of the game; taking legal action because of them shouldn’t become part of the game as well.

It seems that common sense takes a leave of absence when sports get involved. Debating who stole a ball from who, or worse yet, blaming a coach for a little league team’s demise just seems to run up to the line of reason and leap over it. But when lawyers are involved, reason usually takes a back seat anyway.