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“We all support Yermín,” said the Sox ace Lucas Giolito. What made this particular case so unusual is that La Russa’s own players stuck up for their “clueless” teammate and fought back. So far, this is all pretty standard big-league macho posturing. The Twins are led by MLB’s youngest manager, 39-year-old Rocco Baldelli after the game, Baldelli told reporters he was “surprised” that Mercedes swung at a very slow pitch right down the middle of the plate, and he hinted that his team would “deal with it.” The next night, the Twins starter Tyler Duffey threw behind Mercedes in his first plate appearance, earning suspensions for both Baldelli and Duffey, meaning that the Twins lost an actual pitcher for two games because they were so butt hurt over someone hitting a home run off their fake pitcher. Thank God La Russa wasn’t in the dugout, or he would’ve ruined this season’s most delightful strikeout.īaseball purists grumble about respect for the game on a daily basis, and in fairness to La Russa, he wasn’t the only one insulted by his hitter doing his job. In fact, a similar scenario had presented itself just a few weeks earlier, when the Chicago Cubs’ All-Star first baseman Anthony Rizzo cleaned up a blowout and got to face the Atlanta Braves’ All-Star first baseman Freddie Freeman, who just so happens to be a good friend of Rizzo’s. Few things in baseball are more fun than a position player lobbing an eephus so slow that it deserves a third E and outright daring a big-league hitter to swing and miss. From a pure entertainment perspective, it’s a sure thing. The fans paid good money to be here we’re getting paid good money to be here. It means: This game’s over-let’s save our bullpen and have a laugh. Respect for the game should begin with the root acknowledgment that baseball is a game, and that you show respect for games by having fun while you play them.įor what it’s worth, another of baseball’s unwritten rules is that bringing in a position player to pitch is an act of unconditional surrender, akin to saying, Screw it.
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If a gazelle stops for a snack 60 feet, six inches away from a lion, you can’t give the lion the take sign.
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And all he did was crush a 46-mph pitch 420 feet, which is actually really hard to do at that velocity. In other words, Yermín Mercedes had committed baseball’s greatest sin: He’d failed to show proper respect for the game.
#Mlb the show 17 target series#
And accordingly, La Russa, who is 76, a three-time World Series champion, and one of the game’s undisputed geniuses, gave Mercedes the take sign, which Mercedes, a 28-year-old power hitter who’d toiled for a decade in the minor leagues before finally making it to the show, ignored and swung through. This is because, according to the unwritten rule book, fun should be to baseball what dancing is to Footloose. If you’re feeling a bit clueless right now about what exactly Mercedes did that was so outrageous, let’s pause here for a brief reading from baseball’s unwritten rule book: Thou shalt not show up thy opponent by swinging on 3– 0 in the ninth inning of a blowout. “The fact that he’s a rookie, and excited, helps explain why he just was clueless. “Big mistake,” Mercedes’s own manager, Tony La Russa, said after the game, all but apologizing to the Twins. He got the first two without incident, and then, after throwing three straight balls to the White Sox slugger Yermín Mercedes, he lobbed a 46-mph beach ball right over the plate, which Mercedes blasted over the center-field fence. “La Tortuga,” to spare the Twins’ bullpen and get the game’s final three outs. Trailing the Chicago White Sox 15–4 in the ninth inning, the Minnesota Twins waved the surrender flag by bringing in a position player, the catcher Willians Astudillo, a.k.a. It divided clubhouses, spawned a wrenching national conversation, resulted in fines and suspensions, and pitted a Hall of Fame manager against his own rookie outfielder, who had been one of the feel-good stories of this young MLB season-until that fateful night. O n the night of May 17, at Target Field in Minneapolis, something terrible happened.
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He is the author of So Many Ways To Lose: The Amazin’ True Story of the New York Mets-The Best Worst Team in Sports. About the author: Devin Gordon is a writer based in Brookline, Massachusetts.