YOU TALKIN' TO ME? Via Matt Yglesias, we see a study reported in
the Washington Post showing that Major League pitchers from the
South are dishing out the chin music. "I found that pitchers
from the South are not more likely in general to hit batters,”
said the study's author, Thomas Timmerman, “but they are much
more likely to hit batters after giving up a home run, or after
a teammate has gotten hit the previous half-inning.”  Timmerman
speculates that the South's "honor culture" is to blame. At the
risk of convincing yet more people that I have something against
our brothers and sisters from Dixie - or more accurately, just
our brothers - I refer you to this study from 1996. It involves
some rather interesting experiments. From the abstract:
Participants were University of Michigan students who grew up in
the North or South. In 3 experiments, they were insulted by a
confederate who bumped into the participant and called him an
"asshole." Compared with northerners--who were relatively
unaffected by the ins