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Wild Pitches By Jayson Stark ESPN.com | |||||||||||||||||
| Managerial madness of the week One thing you have to say for Tigers manager Phil Garner: You know the guy's around. Last Friday in Anaheim, he did something you almost never see. He used a pinch-runner for his pinch-runner. On the rare occasions when this sort of thing happens at all, usually one pinch-runner goes into the game to run for the guy on first base and the second pinch-runner comes in if that pinch-runner gets to second or third. But not this time. This time, Garner used a second pinch-runner (Ryan Jackson) to replace a first pinch-runner (Steve Sparks) who had never moved an inch. From now on, an embarrassed Sparks told Booth Newspapers' Danny Knobler, "my alias on the road is going to be D.E. Coy." Here's the entire sequence: Robert Fick, who had a sore hamstring, led off the ninth with a single. So Sparks ran for him. But one out later, with a 3-2 count on Jose Macias and Angels first baseman Wally Joyner playing behind Sparks, Garner wanted a runner who could stay out of (or break up) a double play. So out went Sparks. In came Jackson. "That was just total comedy," Sparks said. "I looked over and said, 'Oh my God.' I'd give anything to have thought fast enough to have limped off the field, to have gotten a few guys to carry me off." So what came of all that maneuvering? Zilch. Macias and Higginson both struck out. And the Tigers lost, 7-5. "On the way back to the hotel, I thought long and hard," Sparks said, "about retiring." Web Gem of the week In the glorious history of baseball's first ballpark-pinball machine, Tampa Bay's funky Tropicana Field, 31 fair balls have collided with one of those pesky, dangling Trop catwalks. But only one of those 31 ever ended up in anybody's glove for an out. The perpetrator of that astonishing deed was -- who else? -- Indians shortstop-magician Omar Vizquel, who added that bizarre putout to his mounting career defensive numbers just last Friday. Greg Vaughn hit a towering fly ball to left-center. Back where center fielder Kenny Lofton and left fielder Ellis Burks were standing. But that's just because they'd made the mistake of assuming that everything that goes up in Tropicana Field also comes down. They stood there on the warning track, looking up in the rafters, waiting for the baseball to descend to earth. Then they got that oh-no-we're-in-this-frigging-place look, as they realized this baseball could be anywhere from in the seats to tanning on St. Petersburg Beach. "Usually," Indians pitcher Dave Burba told Wild Pitches, "you watch the flight of the ball and you look at the outfielders to see where it's going to go. But we all looked up, and the ball was gone. We're like, 'What's going on?' Kenny and Ellis are looking around, looking in the stands. Then we look up, and for some odd reason, we see Omar running back." Yes, only one man in the entire stadium saw this ball. And it was the amazing Omar Vizquel. He saw it rolling along the catwalk, 145 feet above the field. So he started following it. Then he said, "Oh, my God, I'm going to have a chance to catch it." So he sprinted practically to the left-field warning track and gathered in the wackiest out of the season. But how the heck did he see it when no one else did? That was the question. "I don't know," said Devil Rays manager Hal McRae. "Maybe he has X-ray vision." Turn-down service of the week There's nothing sweeter than those ballpark scenes where men propose to the woman they love via the romantic setting of a stadium Diamondvision attraction. That's what true love is all about. But a bad, bad thing happened to a Montreal man last weekend on the way to wedded bliss. He held out the ring. He smiled for the camera, as the beloved Expos mascot, Youppi!, looked on beaming, while wearing a tux and holding flowers. And his fiancee-to-be turned him down flat. "Maybe," reported our eyewitness, Astros broadcast-humorist Jim Deshaies, "in her wildest dreams, the idea of a big, furry guy in a tuxedo wasn't in her plans for her engagement. Probably, when her mom tucked her in at 12 years old, she didn't tell her, 'Your prince will come along -- with a big orange guy in front of 2,700 happy Canadians at a ball game.' " Fan-friendly guy of the week Some guys apparently will do anything to see if those fans in the front row have any nachos left. Take Phillies first baseman Travis Lee, for instance. Monday night, he took off in quest of a foul ball down the right-field line when second baseman Marlon Anderson slammed into him just in front of the stands. Lee still caught the ball, then tumbled right over the wall and into the front row, where he remained tangled up in humans and concession-stand offerings for what seemed like 10 minutes. It was a web-gemmish moment, except for one minor technicality: Ump Jim McKean wouldn't rule it a catch and an out because by the time McKean arrived on the scene, the glove and ball were lying on the floor in the stands -- but weren't attached to Lee's hand at the time. "He told me I had to bring the ball out," Lee told the Philadelphia Inquirer's Bob Brookover. "I said, 'Come on, Jim, I just ate a rail.' The last thing I was going to do was find some ball and put it in my glove. I heard this one guy on a cell phone say, 'Hey look, I'm on TV.' " It seems to us that there should be some sort of clause that gives a guy an out on a play like this just for letting fans get on TV. And we're not alone. "There should be some kind of clause for that," Phillies quote machine Doug Glanville told Wild Pitches. "A fan-friendly clause. A compound-fracture clause. Something." Water hazard of the week Here's something we can't figure out: The Pirates are now keeping track of home runs that land in the water behind the right-field stands at new PNC Park. Right? So last Friday, Colorado's Todd Helton slammed a ball that deflected off the back of the stands and bounced into the river. But the official ruling was that home runs like this don't count. "I don't get it," Rockies coach-witticist Rich Donnelly told Wild Pitches. "It was wet, wasn't it? When you jump in a swimming pool, they don't say, 'Did you bounce in?' You're in. The ball was wet. They had to go in a boat to get it. What's up with that?" But if this is indeed the ruling, Donnelly thinks it has more positive, practical implications in other walks of life. "If you hit a golf ball in a sand trap," he said, "nobody ever asks if it rolled in or went in on the fly. But if this is the way it works, I guess from now on, if it bounces in, I get a free drop because it doesn't count." And speaking of golf, one more golf-related observation from Donnelly on Helton's homer: "It's the first time in his life Todd ever hit a ball in water -- and something good happened." Entranced team of the week If you thought the Tigers looked as if they were playing baseball in a trance last Sunday, maybe that's because manager Phil Garner brought in two comedians and a hypnotist to "entertain" them in the clubhouse before the game. Well, it sounded like a good idea at the time. Except the Tigers sleepwalked through a 3-2 loss to Anaheim in which they went hitless over the final 5 2/3 innings. "We never woke up, huh?" observed Dean Palmer. Box score line of the week Dodgers reliever Jose Nunez had the strangest relief appearance of the year last Saturday in his team's 20-1 loss to the Cubs: 1 2/3 IP, 6 H, 9 R, 5 ER, 5 BB, 5 K, 1 HR, 1 throwing error, 69 pitches to get 5 outs. Stat of the day All five outs Nunez got were strikeouts -- but he still gave up nine runs in 1 2/3 innings (plus two more charged to Terry Adams). Nunez's outing went: strikeout, homer, strikeout, strikeout, strikeout, four straight Cubs reach, strikeout, seven straight Cubs reach. Quote of the day From Dodgers pitching coach Jim Colborn, on why the club left him in there to take one for the team: "It just snowballed into an untenable situation, and before you knew it, there was no good decision left." Transaction of the week This Sunday, in America, it's Mothers Day. Last Saturday, in Anaheim, it was Brothers Day. Well, Molina Brothers Day, anyhow. When catcher Bengie Molina partially tore a hamstring running the bases, the Angels put him on the disabled list. And called up his little brother, Jose. It was the second brother-for-brother transaction in history, alongside a golden moment in 1997 when the Reds sent down Bret Boone but called up Aaron. It was a classic good-news, bad-news kind of occasion. But it will have to do. "I'm happy," said Bengie, "and at the same time I'm sad. At least he's got me here to support him." Ex-zero hero of the week Florida's Lyle Mouton and Seattle's Charles Gipson remain the final contenders in the Last Guy To Get A Hit competition, thanks to the first hit of the year from Mets catcher Todd Pratt last Saturday. Pratt was 0 for 19, with 11 strikeouts, before he doubled Saturday. When he arrived at second base, he got a standing ovation, and Arizona second baseman Jay Bell handed him the ball, which Pratt humorously tossed into the dugout for safekeeping. "I knew," Pratt said, "I'd get a hit one time before this year was over." Gun of the week After Reds shortstop Juan Castro went so far into the hole to throw out Phil Nevin last weekend that he was practically behind third base, manager Bob Boone said: "He's got a cannon. Maybe I ought to put him on the mound." Cheesehead of the week The Mets careened through another rough week last week -- not hitting, not pitching and firing baseballs all over the field. The sum-it-all-up quote from Mike Piazza to the Newark Star Ledger's Lawrence Rocca: "We've been giving away outs like government cheese." Jayson Stark is a Senior Writer at ESPN.com. Wild Pitches appears each Friday. |
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