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Updated: July 30, 9:40 AM ET Wild Pitches: Hampton smacks one a 'centimeter' By Jayson Stark ESPN.com | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The hits that have made Coors Field famous are the hits that never come down, the hits that soar over fences and seats and rock piles to slam off of Rocky Mountain peaks.
But Monday at Coors, we saw a different kind of hit.
"Had to be the shortest hit in big-league history," Rockies coach-witticist Rich Donnelly told Week in Review. "One inch."
Mike Hampton was the man at the plate. He took one of those furious, look-out-Wes-Ferrell kind of swings. And he did, in fact, hit the ball. Straight down.
It's become one of those annual events, kind of like 4th of July barbecues and Bret Saberhagen comeback attempts. It's the yearly Rey Ordonez home run. And you know it's coming.
Speaking of unlikely homers, it would be tough to top Tomas Perez's evening Tuesday. Before Tuesday, the plucky Phillies utility man had no home runs all year and had hit exactly three in his six-season big-league career. Then, naturally, he became the second player in the 120-year history of the Phillies to hit a home run from each side of the plate in the same game. What's even more amazing is that the only other Phillie to do it was Steve Jeltz, who had only hit two career homers before he did it, on June 8, 1989. Meanwhile, Perez also became just the eighth shortstop in history to switch-hit homers in the same game. And he was very interested to learn after the game that among the switch-hitting Phillies -- and shortstops -- who never managed this feat it was his own manager, Larry Bowa. "I might tell him that," Perez said. Illegal bad hop of the week We always thought that before each game at Camden Yards, all baseballs were given careful instructions to make sure they took perfect, orderly hops into the glove of Cal Ripken Jr. whenever possible. So what was up with the highly unauthorized carom taken by a Bengie Molina ground ball in the 10th inning last Saturday -- a carom that resulted in Ripken getting nailed in the collarbone while the Angels scored the winning run? Even Angels manager Mike Scoscia was stunned. "That hop," he told the Los Angeles Times' Mike DiGiovanna, "was right out of the Twilight Zone." Equally shocked was Molina, who couldn't figure out how he'd managed to thunk a ground ball that routine and wound up with a game-winning hit. "I thought it was a routine ground ball," he said. "I didn't see a throw -- so I thought, 'Damn, I'm fast.' " Initiation of the week In his 13th start with the Red Sox, in his fifth start with the Red Sox at Fenway Park, David Cone finally felt like he belonged Tuesday. But not quite in the way he had in mind. In the seventh inning, he gave up what he thought was a mundane little fly ball to right by Toronto's Cesar Izturis. Next thing Cone knew, he was watching that mundane little fly ball float past the foul pole and land in the third row of the right-field seats. "I was introduced to Pesky's pole," Cone said. "It's official. I'm a Sox now." Intentional walk of the week We've seen Barry Bonds intentionally walked with the bases loaded. We've seen Sammy Sosa intentionally walked with first base occupied. But the surest sign of respect was the intentional walk Reds manager Bob Boone issued last Sunday to Florida bopper Cliff Floyd. It was the seventh inning, you see, of a game the Marlins led by seven runs (11-4) at the time. So what the heck was Boone thinking, you ask? "It was friggin' brilliant," Boone said. "It was a seven-run lead, and I wanted to keep it at a seven-run lead." Box score line of the week Tampa Bay's Ryan Rupe vs. the Angels on Thursday: 1 IP, 5 H, 5 R, 5 ER, 1 BB, 2 K, 4 HR.
What makes this box-score-line-of-the-week material? Rupe allowed more homers (four) than he got outs (three). Quote of the day Rupe had to pitch on short rest because the scheduled starter, Albie Lopez, had gotten traded to Arizona earlier in the day. But Rupe wasn't in excuse-making mode. "I don't care if I ran the Boston Marathon yesterday," he said. "To give up four home runs in one inning is terrible." Slide of the week You might not have been able to tell from the replays, but it's official Mets policy to discourage their players from sliding headfirst. And that especially goes for perennial All-Star catchers. But Wednesday night in Florida, Mike Piazza was so hell-bent on scoring from third base on a medium-deep fly ball by Jay Payton, he went careening in to home plate in a headfirst "slide" that looked more like a car overturning on the Grand Central Parkway. Piazza did sneak his left hand around Charles Johnson and touched the plate. But his forearm clanked off Johnson's shin guard, throwing Piazza into a triple-salchow tumble that resulted in scrapes and bruises from shoulder to knee. The run scored. And Piazza lived. So it turned out OK. But his superiors still weren't particularly thrilled. "When the catcher comes down to shut the door, he comes down with his shin guard," said manager Bobby Valentine. "He comes down on fingers, knuckles, elbows, faces -- all of those things that aren't real hard." So the Newark Star Ledger's Lawrence Rocca wondered if the $100 fine that the Mets assess on minor leaguers for headfirst slides might be levied on Piazza. But apparently, standards are different for franchise players -- assuming they score. "I don't think we'll fine him," said Mets GM Steve Phillips. "We'll pat him on the back and tell him, 'Good hustle.' " Hair today, gone tomorrow "do" of the week Nothing in baseball is more dangerous than an off day in New York. The Tigers had one Monday. So off went pitcher Jose Lima to get a brand new $70 hairstyle.
Our favorite Diamondbacks left-hander, Brian Anderson, took a perfect game into the fifth inning against the Giants last Sunday. Then a funny thing happened to his perfect game. It not only disappeared. It disappeared via back-to-back-to-back home runs, by Jeff Kent, Eric Davis and Benito Santiago. But Anderson told the East Valley Tribune's Ed Price he wasn't even impressed by his first back-to-back-to-back trifecta as a Diamondback -- because he once gave up four home runs in a span of eight pitches, when he was with the Angels (on Sept. 5, 1995). "This," he said, "is nothing for me." Reunion of the week In other Brian Anderson developments, no Diamondback was happier to see the arrival of Albie Lopez than Anderson was. They played together in Cleveland. They once shared a house. They were together the night Anderson met his wife. And they've even had the same injuries this year: bruised thumb on their throwing hand, strained groin. That was the right groin for Lopez, who throws right-handed, and the left groin for Anderson, who is left-handed. So explain that, huh? "We were tight," Anderson told Ed Price. "But not that tight." Power failure of the week It's been a big month for ballpark light-tower snafus. Exactly a week after the lighting circuits blew up in San Diego, the Devil Rays and Angels were playing a game in Anaheim on Wednesday when a bunch of lights abruptly went out. So the umpires convened a conference of themselves and the two managers to figure out what to do next. The Devil Rays -- who were 32-68 at the time -- held a 3-0 lead. So you know which way their manager, Hal McRae, voted. "I thought the lights went out (on the Devil Rays) in April," McRae quipped. "So naturally, I wanted to play." Sellouts of the week We finally found out what's wrong with the Pirates. They just love people. Heading into this weekend, they were 7-2 this year in games in which PNC Park was sold out -- and 31-60 in all their other games. "If we sold out every game," Brian Giles told the Beaver County Times' John Perrotto, "we'd win 140 games." Jayson Stark is a Senior Writer at ESPN.com. Wild Pitches appears each week. |
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