The Indians Have a New Postgame Celebration - Will the Foot Tap Stick in 2020?

Teams around baseball are going to have to find ways to celebrate like never before as they are not allowed to do the traditional high fives after a win. The Indians have adopted a new celebration that likely will catch on and maybe stick for the 2020 season, that being a foot tap.

Teams around Major League Baseball are looking for safe alternatives to try and celebrate accomplishments as well as when teams win games.

For years the Cleveland Indians would do like any normal team, lining up round the pitcher’s mound and do high fives as a team.

Now though they can’t do that, as part of the new rules to try and limit contact means that when the team wins games or a player hits a homer, they cannot high five.

So far in the “summer camp” we’ve seen players do a “phantom” high five when they come around to cross home plate, or even in the dugout we have seen players give a high five, but stop short to not actually make contact.

Now the Indians seemed to have come up with a “safe” alternative for making contact after a win, and it debuted on Saturday night after the team defeated the Pittsburgh Pirates 5-3 at PNC Park.

That new celebration doesn’t really have a name yet, but it looks a little like “Riverdance” or a celebratory toe tap.

The Indians may have gotten the idea from Chicago Cubs pitcher Craig Kimbrel, who on July 8th said that teams might have to come up with using their feet to celebrate.

"Maybe we'll do something with our feet," Kimbrel said via NBC Sports.

"I don't think there's anything about hitting each other's feet, so we're not doing high fives, maybe we're doing foot taps or something."

The elimination of using high fives is going to open up a whole new box of gimmicks to try and celebrate, and if there’s one thing we know about pro athletes is that they love to be creative in how they celebrate.

As the season goes on, it should be fun to see how teams combat not doing celebrations like they have been doing in little league, and it should also be entertaining to see what teams come up with.