CHICAGO -- Andrew Romine's nickname for Players Weekend came out of a game the Tigers film for their scoreboard to show between innings. Players look at a combination of letters and emojis and try to guess the name it spells out. There's no emoji for a mine, so when Romine's name came up one day, the phrase was Ro, followed by the cartoon bomb emoji. Teammates got a kick out of it, and the nickname "Robomb" was born.

Before Players Weekend, though, Romine had to help defuse the combustible situation between the Tigers and Yankees. One of the players at the center of it all was his younger brother, Austin.

"Everybody's trying to tell the other team, 'All right, calm down.' Everybody's trying to talk to other players," Andrew Romine said. "It just so happened that one of the other players was a family member to me."

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They fought each other plenty of times growing up -- many worse than Thursday, Andrew Romine said -- but because they're a few years apart in age, they were never in a fight on the diamond together, as teammates or opponents. Still, when fists begin to fly, the family ties naturally begin to pull, even as players want to defend teammates.

It was a difficult balance to strike amidst the chaos that ensued when Austin Romine and Jose Cabrera began trading punches and both benches cleared.

"You know, in the spur of the moment, it's almost every man for himself," Andrew Romine said. "He's a big boy, and he picks his fights and chooses how he wants to handle them."

Andrew Romine initially charged out looking to stop anybody, family or not, and quiet down the fight before it got out of control. He didn't -- he wound up on the bottom of a pile and ended up with scars, bumps and bruises for his trouble.

Once he got out of it, he looked around and saw his brother.

"He looked agitated still, and Miggy and him were still kind of jawing at each other," Andrew Romine said. "I wanted to calm him down. It didn't look like anyone was really trying to hold him back that much, so I figured if anybody could, it would probably be me. So I went over.

"The only thing that I said when I went over to talk to him was, 'Calm down.' And after I got his eye contact, I said, 'Are you OK? All right, calm down.' I walked over to my side, my team, and moved on."

They did not get a chance to talk further after the game, but Andrew Romine said he heard from family.

"They were just happy that everyone's OK," he said.

Eventually, they'll talk more -- maybe later in the season, maybe when they get together for offseason workouts. For now, though, they're going their separate ways.

"I don't think anybody ever wants to go through a fight," Romine said. "I don't think that's anybody's idea of what's going to happen when you start a baseball game. It was unfortunate on both sides."