It's really not until you reach the collegiate level. Most young players now are more interested in talking crap and gloating over their opponent when they get upset, so they're more focused on winning the next at bat so they can do some celebration like in that video. I only ever plunked a dude once but that was because we needed to intentionally walk a kid and my coach was pacing the dugout to avoid saying anything else, which would have gotten him tossed. He was in his own world and couldn't hear me so I took matters into my own hands.
Hitting dudes doesn't really come into play frequently until college. At that point, the D1 players are playing at such a high level, they're willing to hit someone because they're too validated to need to gloat. And the juco guys are mostly playing under some steroid rage or just snorted a line of pre-workout in the bullpen, so they'll happily plug a dude.
Edit: There was a game my junior year of HS that we were traveling to go play the first or second best team in the state. Most of the time when we would go to play a team like that, we would come out with determination like A&M did against Bama and at least give them a run for their money or steal a win. This trip though, we all knew we were gonna just get murdered for some reason. Our starting pitcher didn't take things seriously, and he had just made it out of basketball like 2 weeks before that. He was throwing high 80s on the fastball. He joked about just drilling the first batter in the ribs, taking 2 steps towards their dugout and saying, "Bring me more." Thankfully he didn't do it, but that was about the closest I saw to it in a HS game,
Hitting dudes doesn't really come into play frequently until college. At that point, the D1 players are playing at such a high level, they're willing to hit someone because they're too validated to need to gloat. And the juco guys are mostly playing under some steroid rage or just snorted a line of pre-workout in the bullpen, so they'll happily plug a dude.
Edit: There was a game my junior year of HS that we were traveling to go play the first or second best team in the state. Most of the time when we would go to play a team like that, we would come out with determination like A&M did against Bama and at least give them a run for their money or steal a win. This trip though, we all knew we were gonna just get murdered for some reason. Our starting pitcher didn't take things seriously, and he had just made it out of basketball like 2 weeks before that. He was throwing high 80s on the fastball. He joked about just drilling the first batter in the ribs, taking 2 steps towards their dugout and saying, "Bring me more." Thankfully he didn't do it, but that was about the closest I saw to it in a HS game,
