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Greinke makes the ‘Stros trade winners

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2019-08-01 ZackGreinke

Zack the Knife makes the Astros the big trade winners. Will he help make them World Series winners?

No questions asked. The Astros slipped in at the eleventh minute, practically, and not only stole the new single trade deadline show but they did the absolute most to fortify themselves for the postseason run nobody doubts is theirs this season. Barring unforeseen disaster, of course.

With Gerrit Cole looking at free agency after the season it made sense for the Astros to seek a top-of-the-line starting pitcher with at least another full season of team control to line up with (don’t doubt it) future Hall of Famer Justin Verlander, so far the new ageless wonder of baseball.

So it came forth after the deadline passed that the Astros sent a quartet of prospects—good, promising, but not quite platinum-rated prospects—to the Diamondbacks for Zack Greinke, who isn’t exactly a slouch on the mound and who’s having a solid season in his own right so far.

They’ll get the rest of this season plus the final two seasons on the gigadeal Greinke signed with the Diamondbacks. The Snakes also sent the Astros a reported $24 million to help cover the rest of Greinke’s contract, on which the Astros will be responsible for the other $53 million. They’re not exactly complaining.

General manager Jeff Luhnow knew only two things about Greinke before he pulled the trigger on the big deal of the day: Zack the Knife has been a consistent pitcher who’s on the borderline of a Hall of Fame case; and, the righthander isn’t exactly one of the most combustible personalities in baseball.

“I don’t know him personally,” Luhnow told reporters, “but I think he’s not a guy that seeks the limelight, and that actually works well for us here in Houston. And slotting in with Verlander and Cole, he’s gonna not have to be the guy that’s in front of the camera the whole time.”

The Astros weren’t exactly over-occupied on doing the Greinke deal. Before that deal hit the news running Wednesday, they did a little bullpen fortification, getting Aaron Sanchez and Joe Biagini from the Blue Jays. The Jays also sent the Astros minor league outfielder Cal Stevenson. The Astros sent the Jays outfielder Derek Fisher.

Greinke was last seen striking out seven Yankees in five innings Wednesday. He left the park without talking to reporters, which may or may not have been an indication that he suspected or was told it was time to re-pack his bags.

On the same day, the Astros got flattened by the Indians, 10-4, in Cleveland; they finish with the Tribe Thursday before a weekend hosting the Mariners, but Greinke may not have his first Astros start until the Rockies hit town starting Monday.

“I know he’s really good. I don’t know him personally, but I’m going to get to know him,” said Astros manager A.J. Hinch. “We acquired him because of how good he is. Certainly we expect him to be a big part of our push to win the division and keep winning into October. He’s an incredible pitcher.”

He has been, and he still is when all is said and done. His new teammates won’t disagree. “What a pickup!” Cole himself crowed. Referring to the front office, he added, “They nailed it. They did a fantastic job.”

Landing Greinke shot the Astros into being World Series co-favourites with the Dodgers at Caesar’s Palace Sports Book. But the Astros are smart enough to know Berra’s Law is immutable. Zack the Knife increases their odds of a return to the Series, but so is Andujar’s Law, as uttered by a long-ago Astro, the late Joaquin Andujar: “In baseball, there’s just one word—you never know.”

What we do know, though, is who were really the big winners and the big losers of major league baseball’s first single mid-season trading deadline.

THE WINNERS

Braves—Another starting pitcher wouldn’t have hurt them, necessarily, but what the National League East leaders really needed was a back-of-the-bullpen retooling. And, they got it, in an almost rapid fire series of deals.

They landed Shane Greene from the Tigers. They landed Chris Martin from the Rangers. They landed Mark Melancon from the Giants. As CBS Sports’s Matt Snyder observes, if the prices were too high for such reported availables as Edwin Diaz (Mets) and Felipe Vasquez (Pirates), the Braves did well enough shopping the sale aisle.

None of the new pen trio are anything near the most glittering names in the relief world, but neither are they slouches or pushovers. Changes of scenery from nowhere land to pennant contention do wonders for such pitchers, and it would be absolute gravy if the Braves get something out of Melancon resembling his final years in Pittsburgh and his only spell in Washington.

Greene, of course, was an All-Star this year and was wasted on a Tigers team in the middle of a rebuild. When the Braves can turn to him near the end of a game, either as the sure ninth-inning option or if things get a little dicey in the eighth, the sight of Greene warming up with his 1.18 ERA should be enough to make their division and the rest of the league quake.

Throw in Martin’s 10+ strikeout-to-walk ratio and 10.2 K/9 rate, and all of a sudden the Braves’ bullpen doesn’t look like it’s full of bull anymore.

Indians—So Trevor Bauer turned out to be a bigger pain in the you-know-where than his otherwise solid pitching was worth. Doesn’t mean the Indians dealt from weakness. Not with Corey Kluber on the threshold of returning from the injured list.

And the Tribe managed to address their biggest weakness in the deal: their corner outfielders weren’t hitting anywhere near the same area code as their new toys Yasiel Puig (from the Reds) and Franmil Reyes (from the Padres) put together. Add Puig’s mostly plus throwing arm in right field, and all of a sudden the Indians outfield isn’t just going to roll over and play dead.

The Indians also landed lefthanded pitching youth Logan Allen (also from the Padres), and when you consider how well they develop or re-tool starting pitching this is an upside acquisition for them, too.

But the real key was the impact bats. Puig secures them in right field for the rest of the season, and perhaps if he continues doing well enough the Indians would think of pursuing him when he hits free agency in the fall. Reyes, though, secures a DH spot for them for the foreseeable future while giving them an outfield platoon option in the bargain.

Suddenly it’s not to laugh about the Tribe’s outfield anymore.

Mets—Don’t laugh. Not only are they on a six game winning streak at this writing, the formerly left for dead Mets—and even I thought they were just awaiting the nails to be hammered into their coffin after that terrible weekend in San Francisco—are 12-7 since the All-Star break.

And maybe it’s an illusion since, aside from the Giants, they faced only real contender during the string. But they did take both games against the Twins in Minnesota, including a 14-4 blowout. All of a sudden, these Mets can play as well as they can pitch.

And while the world seemed to be sure only that either Noah Syndergaard or Zack Wheeler would have a change of address after Wednesday’s deadline, it took the Astros landing Greinke to knock the Mets’ landing Marcus Stroman well enough before the deadline out of the park.

Maybe Stroman wasn’t thrilled at first to go to what he thought was a non-contender. And maybe someone ramped up for kicks a rumour that the Mets had ideas about flipping Stroman to the Yankees post haste for some of the Yankees’ top farm produce. But the Mets wasted no time ridding themselves of Jason Vargas—who should have been cashiered over a month earlier—sending him to the Phillies almost as soon as Stroman’s acquisition was a done deal.

The Mets rotation now looks like Jacob deGrom (who pitched brilliantly against the White Sox Wednesday night only to get his almost-usual no-decision, the poor guy), Stroman, Syndergaard, Wheeler, and Steven Matz. And with Matz putting on a deadly off-speed clinic shutting out the Pirates last Saturday night, looking as though he’s finally found the secret to pitching without the power of a deGrom or a more disciplined Syndergaard, it gives the Mets a rotation with two number-ones, a two, and a pair of threes.

Nationals—Like the Mets, the Nats were left for dead a few times before the All-Star break. Like the Mets, too, the Nats are riding resurgent, sort of: 10-9 since the break. And the Nats needed a bullpen remake in the worst way possible.

Not at the absolute rear end, where closer Sean Doolittle remains effective when he has something to save. It’s getting the games to Doolittle that caused one after another National migraine. But then the Nats landed Jays reliever Daniel Hudson and Mariners reliever Roenis Elias.

All of a sudden, the Nats seemed to find relief in the best way possible for that beleaguered bunch of bulls. And then they got really surreal—it turned out that they also got an old buddy (ho ho ho) from the Mariners, Hunter Strickland.

Strickland—who carried an almost three-year grudge over then-Nat Bryce Harper taking him deep twice in a division series, the second time awaiting whether his fresh blast straight over the foul line would leave the yard fair but misinterpreted as admiring the shot. (It flew fair into McCovey Cove.)

Strickland—then a Giant, who somehow hadn’t gotten the chance to face Harper until 2017, then entered a game with Harper leading off an inning and threw the first pitch right into Harper’s hip. Triggering Harper’s charge to the mound and the very delayed Giants pouring out of their dugout, during which pour former Nat Michael Morse’s career ended up being sealed when he collided with Jeff Samardzija and suffered a concussion.

Harper, of course, now wears the Phillies’ silks. But it would have been intriguing if Harper was still a Nat with Strickland coming aboard. Strickland’s coming back from a lat strain that disabled him for almost three months. And the Nats don’t see hide nor hair of the Phillies again until a four-game home set beginning 23 September.

By which time, the Nats may or may not be in the thick of the NL East race (the Braves suddenly started looking human enough the past couple of weeks), securing a wild card berth, or hoping they’ve got a leg up on 2020. A lot rides on the new bulls. But for now, the Nats took their number one need and addressed it respectably enough.

THE LOSERS

Red Sox—Like the Braves and the Nats, the Red Sox needed bullpen help badly. Unlike the Braves and the Nats, the Red Sox landed nothing. Not even a calf, never mind Diaz, whom the Mets were making available and who probably could have been had for a little less than they were said to have demanded for Syndergaard and Wheeler.

The Red Sox bullpen ERA in June: 4.92. The Red Sox bullpen ERA in July: 5.18. Letting some reasonably effective pieces make their ways to Atlanta and Washington instead does not portend well for the Olde Towne Team.

Dodgers—I know, it sounds funny to apply “losers” in any context to the National League’s 2019 threshing machine. But the threshing machine has one monkey wrench looming: the Dodger bullpen isn’t as formidable as it used to be.

Kenley Jansen isn’t really pitching like the Kenley Jansen of old this year. What’s behind him in the pen depends on whose description you read: mess, disaster, toxic waste dump, landfill, take your pick.

If the Mets and the Pirates were asking the moon for Diaz and Vasquez, the Dodgers if anyone had the moon to give in return. They’re loaded with prospects on the farm, and money in the vault, enough to have dealt a package of them for either reliever and still have a bountiful harvest to come.

Good luck holding leads against postseason lineups with that kind of pen. And the Dodgers won’t be able to hit themselves beyond their pen’s capability eternally. They won’t lose the NL West, necessarily, not with a fifteen-game lead at this writing, but their chances at a third consecutive World Series appearance and just one Series ring since 1988 just got a lot more thin.

Brewers—The pre-season favourites to defend their NL Central title aren’t exactly that good anymore. Losing Brandon Woodruff and Jhoulys Chacin to the injured list has left their rotation in tatters, and with the Giants yanking themselves back into the wild card play there went their ideas of maybe adding Madison Bumgarner for a stretch drive.

But they also needed some pen help, and what they brought aboard (Ray Black, Jake Faria, Drew Pomeranz) is serviceable but not quite as serviceable as what the Braves and the Nats brought aboard. The Brew Crew is liable to spend the rest of the season watching the Cardinals’ and the Cubs’ rear ends, but then with the NL Central as it’s been this year there could be a surprise in store. Could. Remotely.

Because the Brewers can’t live by Christian Yelich alone.

Twins—The AL Central leaders have gone from a double-digit division lead to looking only human at three games up on deadline day. They needed a little rotation help and a little bullpen help.

And they got only a little in the pen. Sam Dyson (from the Giants) and Sergio Romo (from the Marlins) are solid but not overwhelming. Maybe not for lack of trying, but the Indians’ blockbuster suddenly puts the Twins close enough to the Tribe’s mercy to make for a too-interesting stretch drive for them when they once looked like the division’s runaway train.

They can hit all the home runs they want, but if their pitching is compromised the Twins have a big problem coming. Like the Yankees, the Twins should have been more aggressive trade deadline players. Like the Yankees, they weren’t, for whatever reasons. And it could come back to haunt them down the stretch.

Yankees—Even Yankee haters won’t understand this one. The number one need for the injury-battered Bombers was rotation help. Especially after they’d just been flattened by the Twins and the otherwise-troubled Red Sox. And they did nothing to fix it.

The question may be why, or why not. If Bumgarner was off the market, they could have played for Stroman or for Mike Minor, even allowing for Minor’s rough July after a sterling June. They didn’t seem to play for any of the above. They didn’t even seem to be a topic if the Diamondbacks—knowing their own chances were still none and none-er—were looking to move Greinke to a contender.

And since their number one American League competition overall did land Greinke, the Yankees may ride a weakening AL East into October but they’re not liable to get past round one again, even if it may not be the Red Sox shoving them to one side this time.

Baseball takes the Fourth

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2019-07-04 LouGehrig

Lou Gehrig, who said farewell eighty Fourths of July ago . . .

This year is a splendid one for baseball anniversaries, not all of them pleasant. A hundred years ago the Reds were cheated out of the thrill of World Series victory by the agony of the Black Sox’s chill of self-conscious defeat; fifty years ago, the eight-year-old, crazy Mets were crazy enough to win a division, a pennant, and a World Series. Just to name two.

Today America will have its annual red, white, and blue pyrotechnic racket celebrating the declaration without which this hardy if too often self-buffeted experiment would not be alive to watch twelve major league baseball games and a few hundred more minor league games.

And the Mets, crazy this year for reasons having too little to do with the craziness of 1969, get their first Fourth of July off in a non-strike-impacted season in their entire franchise history, after splitting a pair with the Yankees Tuesday and Wednesday. No such luck for the Empire Emeritus; they have landed in Florida to open a weekend with the freshly upstart but lately teetering (they’ve won 5 of 7 but lost 9 of 16 entering today) Rays.

Twenty seasons after the shenanigans of the 1919 World Series, America’s 4 July fireworks were handed a sober contrast in the old Yankee Stadium. Two weeks after receiving his diagnostic death sentence, the insidious disease that now bears his name, Lou Gehrig accepted the honour of his teammates past and present and did what he’d rarely done on the field prior to his self-imposed removal from the Yankee lineup.

He wore his heart on his sleeve. He also spoke without a script, without premeditation, without a speechwriter. You can hunt all you like but find no actual or alleged American leader that gifted by spontaneous soul:

Fans, for the past two weeks, you have been reading about the bad break I got. But today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.

I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans.

Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn’t consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them for even one day? Sure, I’m lucky.

Who wouldn’t consider it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert? Also, the builder of baseball’s greatest empire, Ed Barrow?

To have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow, Miller Huggins? Then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology, the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy? Sure, I’m lucky.

When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa, sends you a gift—that’s something. When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies—that’s something.

When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles with her own daughter—that’s something. When you have a father and a mother who work all their lives so you can have an education and build your body—it’s a blessing. When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed—that’s the finest I know.

So I close in saying that I may have had a tough break, but I have an awful lot to live for.

Leave it to Hollywood to bowdlerise such transcendence the way it did when, despite availability’s freshness, they put a completely fictionalised version of Gehrig’s “Luckiest Man” speech into Gary Cooper’s mouth, the crowning insult from a film that insults more than embraces Gehrig’s actualities. In a later generation a Hell’s Angels president lamented their press coverage by wondering, “All that bullshit, hell, ain’t the truth bad enough for ’em?” Film students and baseball fans alike have every right to ask of The Pride of the Yankees, “All that bullshit, hell, ain’t the truth good enough for ’em?”

On the same day Gehrig graduated from baseball excellence to soul transcendence, Jim Tabor, a Red Sox third baseman, hit two grand slams in a doubleheader nightcap against the Philadelphia Athletics. (One of them was an inside-the-park number.) He became one of only thirteen players to perform that feat, on a day he driving in eleven runs over the entire doubleheader.

In 1983 a Yankee pitcher, Dave Righetti, subsequently a respected pitching coach, kept the Red Sox from making their own Fourth of July fireworks. He threw a no-hitter, the first Yankee to do it since Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series and the first Yankee lefthander to do it since George Mogridge—in 1917, while the world war alleged to be ending all wars continued apace.

Righetti finished his no-hitter with a flourish. In 1983 Hall of Fame third baseman Wade Boggs struck out a mere 36 times. The bad news is that one of those strikeouts completed Righetti’s masterwork. Which reminds me that sixteen pitchers have struck out 3,000 or more batters and only two of them secured number 3,000 on the Fourth of July: Nolan Ryan (1980; his victim: Cesar Geronimo) and Phil Niekro. (1984; his victim: Larry Parrish.)

One year after Knucksie’s milestone the Mets and the Braves played a game that started on the Fourth of July and ended on the fifth of July. The good news for the Mets: Keith Hernandez hit for the cycle. The better news for the Braves: pitcher Rick Camp tied the game with a home run—in the bottom of the eighteenth. (“If this team needs me to tie a game, they’re in trouble,” Camp remembered later.) The best news for the Mets: They scored three in the top of the nineteenth before Ron Darling—now a Mets broadcaster, then a starting pitcher pressed into survival relief—struck out Camp himself to end the 16-13 win.

The Braves said nuts to that and went ahead with their postgame fireworks show anyway. Nothing keeps some people from their red, white, and blue racket making—not even the fifth of July and nineteen innings of baseball.

Sixty years to the day before that Fourth, two Hall of Famers—Lefty Grove (Athletics) and Herb Pennock (Yankees)—tangled in a pitching duel that went fifteen innings before Grove surrendered the game-losing RBI to Yankee catcher Steve O’Neill. The bad news: It was one of only ten RBIs O’Neill would have all season long. The worse news: it was the first game of a doubleheader.

Today, the eyes of baseball will fall most likely upon the Dodgers, who enter a home game against the Padres on a streak of five consecutive games won in the final plate appearance of the inning. The last two of the streak were won by Cody Bellinger, the Dodger outfielder doing his level best to give Dodger fans a taste this season of what Angel fans have tasted since 2012 from Mike Trout.

On Tuesday night, Bellinger received the fifth consecutive walk of the bottom of the ninth to win, 5-4. On Wednesday night, having opened the scoring with a parabola over the center field fence, and with his parents in Dodger Stadium, Bellinger stepped up in the bottom of the tenth and sent one into the right center field bleachers. Winning again, 5-4.

The two Wednesday blasts put Bellinger into the Dodgers’ record book. He knocked two Brooklyn legends—Hall of Famer Duke Snider, and eventual Miracle Mets manager Gil Hodges—to one side for the most home runs by a Dodger in any season prior to the All-Star break.

But the eyes of baseball are just as likely to fall upon the Nationals, in Washington, when they host the Marlins in the nation’s capital. The Nats have gone from basket case in the making to winners of 15 out of 17 and a resurrected National League East threat, and even their once-lamented 2019 bullpen seems to be shaking off its early season penchant for throwing kerosene balls.

An American president-to-be fired the pronouncement heard ’round the world 243 years ago. (If you’re scoring at home, that’s one year more than the total home runs a former Nationals manager hit during his own playing career.)

May [our Declaration] be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all) the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded to bind themselves, and to assume the blessing & security of self government.

Let today’s American political (lack of) class sully America’s birthday all it wishes, if only because the formal legal holiday allows even a single day’s relief from their suffocating mischief. Immune as almost completely they are to America as an idea as well as a country, let them stew all they choose that they can’t really impose that immunity upon still-sovereign Americans, enough of whom will re-embrace America the idea in hand with America the country today.

Descended from stock as varied in international origin as baseball players are in performance, approach, and style, still-sovereign Americans will spend a fair portion of her birthday watching the game that above all others begins with the act of a sovereign individual but scores with the act America the idea embraces in the abstract and, at her best, the actuality. Enunciated best by the Yale scholar of renaissance literature (Dante in particular) who eventually became baseball’s overseer, if for a tragically brief term:

Baseball is quintessentially American in the way it tells us that much as you travel and far as you go, out to the green frontier, the purpose is to get home, back to where the others are, the pioneer ever striving to come back to the common place. A nation of migrants always, for all their wandering, remembers what every immigrant never forgets: that you may leave home but if you forget where home is, you are truly lost and without hope.

Mr. Jefferson, meet Professor Giamatti. Preferably behind home plate, but anywhere you might see America’s best annual birthday present, that roaming to the frontier, that hope of coming home, its starting cry the one with which you, Mr. Jefferson, might have finished your declaration and America’s, had you been clairvoyant enough to see its advent: Play ball!

 

A method to Donaldson’s madness?

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2019-06-11 JoshDonaldson

If Josh Donaldson was really furious over his jersey being brushed by an inside pitch, rather than the pitch actually hitting him, he’s baseball’s biggest crybaby. But if he was trying to rattle the Pirates into a starter’s ejection and an unexpected bullpen game when their pitching staff is already addled, he might be a genius . . . might . . .

Next to the question of former Red Sox bombardier David Ortiz’s prognosis following his being shot in a Santo Domingo ambush Sunday, baseball’s number one question Monday night just might have been, “Who whacked Josh Donaldson and Joe Musgrove with the stupid stick?” Don’t be sure anyone’s in a big hurry to claim responsibility for the deed.

Musgrove pitched to Donaldson in the bottom of the first with Dansby Swanson on third following a one-out double and a ground out advance. The Pirates righthander started Donaldson with a four-seam fastball inside. The ball grazed Donaldson’s jersey so obviously you could see it flap like a flag in the high wind.

It never touched the Braves’ third baseman.

Donaldson and Musgrove shared some glares as Donaldson began walking to first base. Pirates catcher Elmer Diaz stepped forward to try urging Donaldson toward first and Donaldson all but threw him to one side as if hoisting a sack of feed from a warehouse pallet.

Out came the benches. And out of the game went Donaldson and Musgrove, not to mention Pirates manager Clint Hurdle after he hustled to the umps to argue against Musgrove’s ejection.

Some thought Donaldson smirked at Musgrove as he stepped away from the batter’s box. Some thought Donaldson hollered words along the line of, “What the [fornicate] are you looking at, [female dog]?”

I can’t help wondering whether there wasn’t a little mischievious gamesmanship involved in the whole thing to begin with. Leo Durocher, Billy Martin, pick up the house phones. As a Pirates beat writer, Adam Berry, noted aboard Twitter, the Pirates at the moment didn’t have an actual starting pitcher to use for Wednesday’s and Thursday’s games against the Braves. The last thing they needed Monday night was an unanticipated bullpen game to open the set.

But now Musgrove is likely to get the Thursday start, since he only worked two-thirds of an inning before the jersey brush. Except that he was originally scheduled to make his next start against the Marlins come Saturday. There goes that start. And though the Marlins normally make the Pirates resemble the Yankees, this year’s Fish have become known for making a few tough times for a few actual or alleged contenders now and then.

And for better or worse the Pirates seem to be the National League’s leading mound dusters this season. But the last thing they needed Monday was another pitching issue after sending Jordan Lyle to the injured list with a tightened hamstring.

“We’ve had no beef in the past until now,” Musgrove told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette after the game. “For him to act that way and I did nothing but stand my ground. I hit him with the pitch and he stared at me and tried to intimidate me and I’m not going to let that happen. I looked back at him and he had a few words to say. He crossed the line and came at me. I took my hat and glove off and got ready to fight. I don’t know what else you can do in that situation.”

Musgrove may have been ejected less for the pitch itself than for throwing his hat to the ground angrily as the teams began scrumming. Hurdle still wasn’t happy about his man getting the ho-heave. “The hard part is watching a man cross the line and push the catcher out of the way,” Hurdle said of Donaldson’s shoving Diaz. The pitcher drops his hat and glove and . . .

“Since the time we’ve been on the playground at six-year-old we’ve tried to find ways to stand our ground,” the skipper continued. “I understand that in a vacuum saying that you shouldn’t throw your hat down, but if you’ve played the game or been around sports there’s time when you drop your hat and glove. The hard part is if the batter goes to first none of this happens.”

Is it possible Donaldson was aware enough of that scenario that he was willing to take one for the team in order to leave the already-vulnerable Pirates staff completely at the potential mercy of the Braves’ swingers with their bullpen in earlier than hoped for? The 13-7 Braves win certainly makes it look that way.

Because even though the Braves ended up going calmly in the bottom of the first, and Braves starter Kevin Gausman kept it 1-0 after a leadoff base hit in the top of the second, the Braves broke out the cudgels in the bottom of the second: a leadoff hit batsman, a walk, a runner-advancing ground out, a strikeout that loaded the bases thanks to the passed ball on strike three, and Ronald Acuna, Jr. coming to the plate. Acuna turned on a hanging curve ball from Alex McRae and drove it halfway up the left field bleachers.

If only it was one of Gausman’s better nights. Starling Marte hit the first pitch he saw in the top of the third over the center field fence with Kevin Newman and Bryan Reynolds aboard and nobody out. Part of it was Gausman’s own fault, after he threw offline trying to force Newman (leadoff single) at second on Reynolds’s grounder back to the mound.

Now both teams were into each other’s bullpens. Ozzie Albies flattened McRae’s hanging changeup on 1-2 and sent it into the left center field bleachers in the bottom of the third. If McRae was trying to take one for his team, what he took was almost cruel and unusual punishment when he walked Swanson to open the Atlanta fourth and Freddie Freeman drove a 2-1 fastball not far from where Acuna’s salami landed.

Geoff Hartleib had the dubious pleasure of seeing the score swell to 9-4 when Nick Markakis drove home his 1,000th career run on a single up the pipe. His teammates toasted him after the game. “It just means I’m getting old,” Markakis cracked to reporters.

Albies made it 10-4 in the seventh with a solo over the center field fence. Marte saw him leading off the top of the eighth with a first pitch bomb off former Met Jerry Blevins. Later in the inning, with Dan Winkler having relieved Blevins, pinch hitter Corey Dickerson shot a two-run single to make it 10-7.

So, naturally, in the bottom of the eighth, Johan Comargo, who’d replaced Donaldson after the jersey brush, singled Swanson home before Markakis, apparently deciding he wasn’t getting that old, hit a two-run homer. And Jacob Webb shook off a two-out walk to sink the Pirates in the top of the ninth.

“Musgrove and Donaldson have no particular history, and these teams are not rivals,” wrote Deadspin‘s Chris Thompson, who called Musgrove and Donaldson steakheads for their trouble. “And the ball that ‘hit’ Donaldson didn’t actually hit him at all. There was no reason for anyone involved to feel proud or pissed or slighted or triumphant, at all.”

But maybe, just maybe, Donaldson wasn’t as much of a steakhead as he looked.

These foolish things

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MLB: Atlanta Braves at Miami Marlins

Braves catcher Brian McCann with the ball that just zipped behind Jose Urena, squarely in his mitt, squarely behind Urena’s leg . . .

It didn’t take even an eighth as long as it took Hunter Strickland to let Bryce Harper have it over a pair of monstrous postseason home runs. But it took long enough, and was just as stupid. The other difference is that the Braves’ Kevin Gausman threw behind, not into the Marlins’ Jose Urena in the second inning Friday night.

If you need to know what Gausman intended, you don’t remember what happened last 15 August. When Urena threw what ESPN Stats & Info determined was the hardest and fastest pitch he’d thrown all year to that point right into Braves Rookie of the Year in waiting Ronald Acuna, Jr.’s elbow to lead off the first.

Urena simply didn’t like Acuna treating the Marlins like batting practise pitchers. If they couldn’t get him out, Urena was going to try to take him out. And the warnings were handed out immediately after the umpires then tossed Urena on the spot.

Friday night, there were no warnings issued going in, not until Gausman—who’d just surrendered the tying run on an infield ground out after hitting Marlins third baseman Jon Berti with a pitch—sailed one behind Urena’s thighs.

When Urena drilled Acuna last August, he was condemned almost universally but quite rightfully for hitting him after he’d put on a long distance show for two nights running. Gausman himself suggested there might be consequences for that after that game.

“I think he decided he was going to handle it a certain way,” Gausman said after that game, which the Braves went on to win 5-2. “I don’t agree with it, but it’s his career and he’s going to have to deal with the consequences.”

You might have thought the consequences would have come sooner than Friday night. Usually though not exclusively someone else in the Marlins lineup might have faced a message pitch. On the same night. Even despite the warnings.

But none went forth that night last August. Or, in the subsequent set between the Braves and the Marlins in Miami later that month, one of which games Gausman himself started. Urena got a six game suspension for drilling Acuna, which a lot of people thought was impossibly lenient in the circumstance, and didn’t face the Braves in that Miami set.

Having sort of telegraphed it after last August’s postgame remarks, Gausman didn’t exactly deny premeditation after the Braves banked their 7-2 win Friday night, either. “Obviously, the umpire thought that there was a reason behind it and decided to throw me out of the game,” the righthander told reporters. “Obviously, MLB’s going to look at it, investigate it, so I’m not going to really comment anything further than that.”

Obviously, too, Gausman had his chances to send the Marlins a message last August if he wanted to. He could have replied in kind when the Marlins batted in the top of the second after Acuna was drilled, despite the warnings, sending one up and in just enough to drop the hint.

If those warnings were too much for him to think about, he could have sent the message later that month when the Braves went to Miami and he started one of the games.

He didn’t do it either time. Whether it was a mutual agreement among the Braves’ pitchers to wait until they might face Urena himself again isn’t known as I write. Just as Urena looked to one and all as though committing a premeditated act last August, Gausman looked the same Friday night.

At least Urena got the start for the Marlins this time, a mere eight months after drilling Acuna. It’s not as though Gausman had three years to plot revenge.

But the late Don Newcombe had a policy of going after the opposition’s hottest lineup hand whenever he thought they needed an immediate message to be sent, whether it was over their pitcher knocking down or hitting a Dodger batter or—as he did once with the Phillies—silencing a bench coach throwing racial insults at the Dodgers’ early black players by dropping Del Ennis, at the time the Phillies’ hottest hitter.

When Cubs pitcher Bill Hands opened a critical September 1969 showdown with the onrushing Mets by knocking Tommie Agee down leading off, Mets starter Jerry Koosman—following Newcombe’s policy—sent one up and in tight to Hall of Famer Ron Santo in reply the next inning.

“I knew right away I was going to go after their best hitter,” Koosman said years later. (Santo led the National League with 112 runs batted in at the time.) “You mess with my hitters, I’m going after your best one. I’ll go after him twice if I have to.” Santo got hit on the wrist as he fell away from the chin music.

“If it didn’t hit his arm,” Mets outfielder Ron Swoboda said, “it would have hit him onside his head.” Mets bullpen coach Joe Pignatano had another verdict: “Koosman won the pennant for us that night.” (Agee didn’t exactly shrivel, either: when he faced Hands again in the third that night, he sent one over the fence.)

Urena looked cowardly drilling Acuna last August after Acuna’d been a wrecking crew at the Marlins’ expense. But Gausman had his chances to send the Marlins a message last year and he didn’t take a one of them. He doesn’t look all that much better than Urena did. And there’ll be those saying his possible five- or six-game suspension won’t be sufficient, either.

The old school, which is discredited often enough and with cause these days, says there do come times to take one for the team. Especially when the season is still young and you’re less likely to cost your team something critical that you would be down the stretch of a pennant race. The Braves may be lucky it happened the third night of May.

If you doubt Gausman’s or the Braves’ premeditation, be advised they called up pitcher Touki Toussaint before Friday night. Guess who went out to pitch for the Braves after Gausman got the ho-heave, stopped the second inning bleeding, and pitched four total innings of one-run, six-strikeout ball to give the Braves’ bullpen a respite.

“In the end, the biggest failure in this situation has to fall on the umpiring crew,” says Call to the Pen‘s David Hill. “Anyone who saw that the Braves called up Toussaint, and that Urena was the opposing starter, had to know what was going to happen. That both benches were not warned prior to the start of the game, or that Gausman was ejected after throwing that pitch, is entirely their mistake.”

Not theirs entirely.

“From the beginning, they were saying I did it on purpose,” said Urena about the Acuna drill and Friday night’s festivities, “but look at how they did it. That’s the way they claim they are professional?” Unfortunately, when it comes to professionalism, Urena isn’t exactly in any position to talk.