Tag Archives: Atlanta Braves

The Phillies look a gift Brave in the mouth

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Will Smith, Travis d'Arnaud

Will Smith and Travis d’Arnaud, after the Phillies somehow declined the gift Smith tried to give in the ninth Tuesday.

Until the top of the ninth Tuesday night the Phillies hadn’t scored a single run in their previous twenty innings. Then the Braves all but gifted the Phillies a run in that ninth. They’d even gifted the Phillies the potential go-ahead run and then the bases loaded with one out.

The problem was the Phillies picking the wrong way to say thank you. All that got them was elimination from the National League’s wild card race with a 2-1 loss. It’s win the NL East or wait till next year for them now.

But the ninth-inning high-wire routines of lefthanded relief pitcher Will Smith—with a rather remarkable ability to get himself into hot water—got a little too high on the wire Tuesday night.

It wasn’t so much that he and the Braves escaped as that the Phillies sent a helicopter overhead to lift him to safety when they should have left him and the Braves wiring mad. The Braves won’t always find the opposition that willing to bail them out.

Thanks in large part to their grand old man Charlie Morton’s seven-inning, ten-strikeout, shutout-ball gem, while managing to pry only two runs out of Phillies starter Zack Wheeler in seven otherwise-strong innings, the Braves may have been lucky to take a 2-0 lead into that ninth.

But with Smith having the opening advantage against lefthanded Bryce Harper, the major leagues’ OPS leader, Smith found himself in a wrestling match that ended with Harper wringing himself aboard with a leadoff walk. Phillies catcher J.T. Realmuto now represented the potential game-tying run at the plate.

Realmuto hit one on a high line to right center that ninth-inning center field insertion Guillermo Heredia had to run down long to catch on a high backhand. That spot of Braves fortune lasted just long enough for Phillies pinch-hitter Matt Vierling to hit a high liner to left, where Braves left fielder Eddie Rosario ran over, extended his glove, and watched the ball carom off its fingertips, setting up second and third for the Phillies.

Now the Phillies had veteran Andrew McCutchen—a long way from his days as a center field gazelle and a 2015 NL Most Valuable Player for a better array of Pirates—coming to the plate. McCutchen isn’t the danger he was once seen to be anymore, but he’s a veteran who still knows what he’s doing at the plate, and the Braves had no intention of letting his righthanded bat lay them to waste.

So the Braves ordered McCutchen walked intentionally, putting the potential second go-ahead run aboard, even while it looked as though Smith fooled nobody at the plate. The problem was that putting McCutchen aboard also put the Phillies’ fate into two bats described best as balky.

Phillies shortstop Didi Gregorius continued playing through a bothersome elbow and a shrunken ability to handle pitching from the same side as which he swings, lefthanded. Third baseman Freddy Galvis, lately pressed into everyday service, simply keeps proving why the Phillies unloaded him in the first place four years ago—he’s not truly an everyday player, and though he switch-hits he’s not exactly a game-breaker at the plate.

The Braves now had only to pray that Smith could survive. The Phillies had only to pray that Gregorius and Galvis had a few more unexpected surprises in their bats. Every Braves fan in Atlanta’s Truist Park had to pray that Smith could put his own fire out with a real retardant, not with gasoline.

He served Gregorius a 1-1 offering, and Gregorius hit a high liner that looked for a few seconds as though it would find a way off the right field wall—but Braves right fielder Adam Duvall ambled back in front of the track to haul it in for the critical second out even as Harper was able to tag and score from third.

Now Smith went to work against Galvis. Two balls in the dirt, ball three high, a grounded foul for strike one, a called strike right down the pipe, and a hard line foul down the left field side out of play. Then, Smith threw Galvis a meatball so fat it could have been hit with a cardboard paper towel tube.

Galvis swung right through it. Strike three and the game.

The Cardinals won their seventeenth straight behind the aging arm of their own grand old man Adam Wainwright and a trio of home runs in a 6-2 win over the Brewers Tuesday night. The Phillies’ postseason hopes shrank to a hair in their none-too-formidable division.

“We have to win out,” said Phillies first baseman Brad Miller postgame. Easier said than done. They have to beat the Braves tonight and tomorrow and hope the Mess (er, Mets) beat the Braves over the coming weekend.

That’s what happens when you open a game the way the Phillies did, with back-to-back singles in the top of the first, but you can’t cash them in after a force out, a swinging strikeout, and an infield ground out—two days after the Phillies were shut out by the NL Central bottom-feeding Pirates, of all people.

That’s what happens when Morton—the last man standing on the mound when the Astros won their now-tainted 2017 World Series title—all but toyed with them the rest of the way, the 37-year-old righthander making the Phillies’ lefthanded lineup stack look silly in going 2-for-15 with a walk before his evening ended.

“The moment doesn’t get too big for him, I know that,” said Braves manager Brian Snitker about Old Man Morton, who kept the Phillies off-balance on a deftly blended diet of curve balls, changeups, and fastballs. “I think he does a really good job of just staying with the next pitch and doesn’t get caught up in the big picture. And it’s just about making the next pitch, which is really, really good. That was, gosh, seven really good innings.”

That’s what happens when Wheeler, the National League’s strikeout leader among pitchers entering Tuesday, could manhandle the more formidable portion of the Braves’ lineup but couldn’t quite contain their lower-leverage bottom of the order in the bottom of the third—a leadoff double (Travis d’Arnaud, hitting seventh), an immediate first-pitch single (Dansby Swanson, hitting eighth) put Braves on the corners with nobody out.

Morton then bunted a high chop off the plate that pushed Swanson to second on the out, but Jorge Soler, the Braves’ leadoff hitter in the lineup, ripped a hard single down the left field line to send both runners home easily enough, before Wheeler retired Freddie Freeman and Ozzie Albies on grounders to second baseman Jean Segura.

That was the game until that too-close ninth. But the game put the Phillies’ core flaws into stark light, too. Even before the Phillies and the Braves squared off, The Athletic‘s Matt Gelb isolated the point: “[T]hey have too many holes right now.”

Didi Gregorius is tough to play against lefties. Andrew McCutchen is tough to play against righties. They love what Brad Miller has done, but he won’t start against lefties. Matt Vierling has provided a surprise boost for the Phillies in September, but he hasn’t gained the full trust of [manager] Joe Girardi.

The Phillies also lack the one thing that’s enabled the Braves to hang in and stand now on the threshold of wrapping an NL East that wasn’t exactly a division of baseball terrorists in the first place. Sure, the Mets spent 103 days leading the division—deceptively, as things turned out—but nobody in the NL East looked that much like a powerhouse.

What the Phillies lack that the Braves proved to have in abundance is depth. Their Harpers, Realmutos, and Wheelers all but willed them to stay in the race in the first place, but it may not have been enough. They just weren’t deep enough to hang in without major effort. A coming off-season overhaul may not shock anyone.

The Braves were deep enough in system and in the thought process of general manager Alex Anthopoulos that they withstood the full-season loss of their best young pitcher (Mike Soroka) and the rest-of-season loss of franchise center fielder Ronald Acuna, Jr. to serious injuries.

But they still have to find ways to neutralise that ninth-inning high-wire act.

Don’t let the 36 saves fool you. Smith’s 3.55 ERA and 4.28 fielding-independent pitching (FIP) should tell you the real story. So should 28 walks against 84 strikeouts in 66 innings’ work so far, not to mention 3.8 walks per nine innings. He seems too much to play with matches.

Snitker has two far-superior pen men to send forth when the game gets late and dicey, Luke Jackson (1.90 ERA) and Tyler Matzek (2.66 ERA). Between them, Jackson and Matzek pack a 3.34 FIP, a lot more comfortable than Smith’s. They should be considered more than in passing as viable ninth-inning options.

If these Braves want to get past postseason round one, they may want to consider how much less Jackson and Matzek like to tempt fate or challenge for baseball Darwin Awards. The last thing the Braves need now is to be the cobra with its own ninth-inning mongoose.

There’s another nice Mess they’ve gotten themselves into

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Jacob deGrom

Losing Jacob deGrom for the season was the key blow, but the Mets lacked the ability to overcome that the Braves and the Phillies—squaring off critically this week—really had.

This is what 2021 became for the Mess (er, Mets). As MLB Network’s Jon Heyman points out rather cruelly, this year’s Mets have done what no Show team ever has done: spent the most days in first place (103) in a year they’ll finish with a losing record.

Look to your non-laurels, every St. Louis Brown ever, every Washington Senator before and after 1924, every Indian since the Berlin Airlift, every 1964 Phillie, every 1980s Brave, every 1987 Blue Jay, and even every 2007 Met.

Feel just a little better about yourselves, fellow 2021 collapsers in San Diego. Maybe you both fell out of contention officially and once and for all on the same day. But that exhausts whatever you actually had in common.

Well, ok. You both spent lavishly last offseason to augment, fortify, and strengthen. “It is a familiar formula,” the New York Post‘s Joel Sherman reminds us. “The teams that spend the most and/or add the most famous players are cheered and crowned in winter, often followed soon after by dismay in summer.”

Dismay? How about deflation? How about disaster? How about formerly gleeful prognosticators and impatient fan bases who feel again as though they’ve been walked up to the mountaintop, shown the Promised Land, and given a swift kick in the tail with a jackboot to crash on the rocks below?

Joe and Jane Padre Fan should count their blessings. They’re not half as accustomed to great expectations turning to gross vaporisations as are Joe and Jane Met fan. Joe and Jane Padre Fan adjacent to the pleasant, embracing San Diego waterfront expect no miracles but merely hope.

Joe and Jane Met Fan inside the belly of the New York beast, adjacent to the rumbling East River, expect everything—until they don’t. Even when the Mets held fast at the top of the none-too-powerful National League East heap this year, there was always the sense that, somewhere in New York or beyond, there was at least a minyan worth of Met fans thinking to themselves, “OK, when’s it going to happen?”

If you don’t know what “it” is, you haven’t watched the Mets for half as long as I have. And I was there to see them born with Abbott pitching to Costello and Who the Hell’s on first, What the Hell’s on second, You Don’t Want to Know’s at third, You Don’t Even Want to Think About It’s at shortstop, the Three Stooges in the outfield, the Four Marx Brothers on the bench, the Keystone Kops in the bullpen, and Laurel and Hardy on the coaching lines. I’m still not sure whether it was Casey Stengel or Ernie Kovacs managing that team.

Even by the standards of this year’s NL East, the division was the Mets’ for the taking—and they let the tellers reach for their own pistols to stick them up at the bank window. Meanwhile, the Braves and the Phillies open a series today in Atlanta. A measly two games separate them at the top of the division.

Too many Met injuries? Well, yes. But let’s look around.

The Braves lost a franchise player (Ronald Acuna, Jr.) trying for a leaping outfield catch dead middle through the season. One day later, they sat at 44-45. Since the All-Star break: 39-27. The Phillies almost lost a franchise player (Bryce Harper) at April’s end, hit in the face and wrist hard with a pitch, watched him struggle to get back into his full form through a wrist injury. At the All-Star break: 44-44. Since the All-Star break: 37-31.

Braves general manager Alex Anthopoulos simply reached out, plucked a few spare outfielders at or around the trade deadline, and found the unforeseen gems in Jorge Soler and (after wearing out his welcome in Los Angeles and Chicago) Joc Pederson.

Phillies general manager Sam Fuld might have shocked more than a few observers (and a lot more than a few Phillies fans) when he went trolling for pitching at the deadline—but he came away with Ian Kennedy for the bullpen and Kyle Gibson to augment the rotation.

As in, the rotation that already included Zack Wheeler pitching his way into this year’s Cy Young Award conversation after spending last year only beginning to make the Mets wish, possibly, that they hadn’t given up his ghost just yet. In case Joe and Jane Met Fan need it rubbed in a little further, Wheeler to date has a 2.63 ERA, a 7.14 strikeout-to-walk ratio, and a .216 opposition batting average against his former team.

Entering this week’s just about do-or-die set with each other, the Braves are fifth in the National League for team OPS to the Phillies at sixth. The Braves are sixth in the league with a team 3.95 ERA against the Phillies tenth with 4.41. They both play in home parks hitters love, but the Braves as of Tuesday morning were a .500 team at home while the Phillies as of Tuesday were seven below .500 on the road.

They’re both in better shape than the deflated Mess in New York. Losing deGrom for the season, after he dropped a few more jaws despite earlier injury interruptions, was a blow that couldn’t be cauterised or treated simply. That goes without saying.

But the Mets’ pitching staff not named deGrom got reminded rudely and the hard way that they could even pitch no-hit ball and still discover themselves betrayed. The Mets turned up lost or terribly inconsistent at the plate, almost with or without men in scoring position and showing a distinct knack for bats coming back to life only after it mattered the most.

Marcus Stroman in particular pitched like an ace among the remaining starters; Aaron Loup turned into the Mets’ most dangerous bullpen weapon; Javier Baez shook off his early shakes upon arrival in New York to perform according to his previous notices.

But Francisco Lindor remained a textbook and casebook study at shortstop while struggling to live up to his glandular extension at the plate for the first two-thirds of the season. Michael Conforto in his walk year may or may not have pressed too furiously under the weight of his hopes for either a Met future or a free agency pay day. Pete Alonso re-learned the hard way that his bomb sight meant too little when there wasn’t always someone for him to drive in or someone behind him to drive him in.

That was how the Mets collapsed in August, entered September on a roll showing 10-5 from 28 August-12 September, then went 1-10 from there through Tuesday morning.

It’s one thing to give the boo birds a taste of their own medicine. To this day too many sports fans and too many sports commentators alike equate defeat with moral and character failure. Too many sports fans and too many commentators alike think a loss, or even a losing record (with or without spending 64 percent of the year in first place), equals the end of what’s left of the free world.

But from the top down, these Mets also seemed more interested in blaming the outside than looking inward when trouble arose. It’s something else entirely to say it’s all the fans’ or the press’s fault that a genuinely talented team didn’t know how to overcome the injury bugs the Braves and the Phillies overcame—in a division that looked so modest most of the season that any team ironing up for it could steal it in broad daylight.

Still-new owner Steve Cohen’s growing pains must end after the season does. The end must only begin with finding a new general manager and president of baseball operations. (Preferably, men or women who have verifiable allergies to scandal.) Possibly a new manager, though incumbent Luis Rojas hasn’t been a bad manager so much as he’s been a befuddled one as often as not.

But the most important acquisition the Mets can make to begin their revival should be an unfogged, unclouded mirror. The kind that enables them to see clearly, without alternative, where the issues lay. The kind that might have them unwilling to break the dubious record this year’s model’s collapse enabled them to set.

Good luck trying to “replace” Acuna

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Ronald Acuna, Jr.

Three Braves trainers help Ronald Acuna, Jr. onto a medical cart, after Acuna landed awkwardly and tore his ACL trying to catch Jazz Chisholm’s high liner Saturday.

It can happen any time, any place. There’s no particular rule about when a simple running down of a drive to the back of right field will turn into a completely-torn anterior cruciate ligament that takes you out for the rest of a major league season.

It happened to Ronald Acuna, Jr. in Miami’s Ioan Depot Park Saturday. All he did in the bottom of the fifth was draw a bead on and run down Marlins second baseman Jazz Chisholm’s one-out, high liner toward the back of right field, take a leap trying to catch it before it hit the track near the wall, and land on his right knee hard and awkwardly enough to tear that ACL.

Acuna hit the track and the wall after the ball that eluded him by inches ricocheted back to the outfield grass as Chisholm finished running out an inside-the-park home run. Chisholm was anything but thrilled about getting it that way.

“For it to come at that expense, it kind of sucks for me and him, because the way that I got my home run is because he got hurt,” Chisholm told reporters following the 5-4 Braves win—and that was before he knew just how badly Acuna was injured on the play. “The baseball world is going to miss him if he’s out for long.”

The baseball world in general, and the Braves in particular. So sit down and shut up, you social media miscreants who think the same as one poster who said, ignorantly, “Sorry don’t feel sorry for any injury everyone gets them, next man, up.”

If you think it’s that simple, let’s see you try to replace an effervescent clubhouse presence, and a guy who actually has as much fun playing the game as the Braves are going to sweat trying to replace a .900 OPS at the plate and twelve defensive runs saved above the National League average for right fielders this year so far.

Three Braves trainers tended Acuna on the track. He tried to get up and walk but could barely limp before the pain became too much. The trainers plus first base coach Eric Young, Sr. helped Acuna aboard the medical cart that drove out to him. Teammates talked to him like a fallen brother.

“It was more just trying to let him know that we love him and that we care about him, and we’re obviously with him throughout it all,” said shortstop Dansby Swanson post-game. “He didn’t really have anything else to say other than thank you for those words.”

This wasn’t a case of a player getting himself badly hurt doing what he wasn’t supposed to be doing. This wasn’t a baseball player attacking the game with a football mentality or playing the outfield as though the fences either didn’t exist or were there purely to surrender when he came barreling through.

This was a right fielder, maybe the best in the game this season, running down and leaping for a high liner he thought he had a chance to catch, landing with unexpected awkwardness followed at once by disaster.

This is also the game’s most dynamic leadoff hitter now gone for the year. Not to mention one of the classic current examples of reminding the Old Fart Contingent how foolish they look demanding players play the game like a business but remember it’s only a game when it comes down to its business.

“In his case,” writes The Athletic‘s David O’Brien, “there is even more substance than style, which is saying a lot considering he has style and swagger coming from his pores every moment he’s on the field . . . Though Freddie Freeman has been the undisputed captain of the Braves and the face of the franchise since Chipper Jones’ retirement, Acuna rivals him not just in terms of popularity among Braves fans but also in all-around performance and standing in the baseball world.”

Before Saturday night the only issue for Acuna seemed to be the Marlins having a particular penchant for hitting him with pitches. Acuna may like to take a couple of liberties with his batter’s box positioning, but the Marlins who’ve hit him with pitches twice this year and six lifetime—the most by any opponent in his career—have looked like headhunters when facing him.

It couldn’t possibly be that Acuna has more total bases against the Marlins (147) than any other team he’s played against in 50+ games, could it? It couldn’t possibly be that Acuna has a lifetime .736 real batting average (RBA: total bases + walks + intentional walks + sacrifice flies + hit by pitches, divided by total plate appearances) against the Marlins versus his .617 career mark to date, could it?

“This is actually the fourth time Acuna has had to make an early exit from a game this season due to an injury,” writes MLB Trade Rumors‘s Mark Polishuk, “but while those previous instances resulted in just a couple of missed games, [Saturday’s] injury appears to be much more serious in scope.”

That was just before how much more serious in scope came to pass. With a recovery time up to ten months, the Braves may well begin the 2022 season without Acuna for a spell, too.

“The only thing I can say,” Acuna himself said on a Sunday Zoom call, “is that I’m obviously going to put maximum effort to come back stronger than ever. If was giving 500 percent before, I’m about to start giving 1,000 percent.” The spirit is certainly willing. Unfortunately, the body may have other things to say about that. May.

“Acuna will be missed throughout baseball and especially by the Braves and their fans,” O’Brien writes. “Those fans scooped up Acuna jerseys and stood in line for Acuna bobbleheads and celebrated his every home run and bat flip, every stolen base and blazing dash from first to third—or home—and every cannon-armed throw to cut down a runner trying to take an extra base.”

Good luck trying to “replace” all that.

Stickum up!

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Jacob deGrom

Jacob deGrom sets an unexpected precedent: first pitcher searched under baseball’s new rulebook crackdown against that new-fashioned medicated (and otherwise) goo . . .

History won’t quite record Jacob deGrom as the first pitcher in baseball history to be patted down on or departing the mound. Rare as it’s been, it’s happened before. Still-living Hall of Famer Gaylord (K-Y) Perry, the late Hall of Famer Don (Black & Decker) Sutton, and the late Hall of Famer Whitey (The Chairman of the Board) Ford could tell you from experience.

But on Monday afternoon, deGrom was the first to be stopped, stood for inspection, and also ordered to open his belt as though he was a holding-cell suspect about to be placed on suicide watch.

The fact that he beat the Braves in game one of a doubleheader seemed incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial.

Welcome to Day One of the Show’s official crackdown on that new-fashioned medicated goo. Purely by an accident of timing, deGrom’s Mets were due to host the Braves in the first of Monday’s games. Purely by the same accident, deGrom himself had the dubious honour of first come, first frisked.

It almost seemed a by-the-way kind of thing when the tall righthander spent the rest of his working hours deGromming as usual. He struck six Braves out in five innings, surrendered one two-out double in the fifth inning that was good enough to let him lure Pablo Sandoval, that early-season pinch-hitting sensation, into a pop out to third for the side.

While he was at it, deGrom speared a leadoff line drive back up the pipe in the third with a swipe of his glove that looked so effortless he might as well have been swatting a pestiferous fly.

It makes you wonder how insect repellant escaped entry on baseball’s contraband list.

“I’m only surprised the umps didn’t think about having his glove checked for Krazy Glue right then and there,” said my friend Kenny Keystone, long-retired sub-minor league infielder, who rang my cell phone right off—well, I can’t say the hook with a cell phone, can I?

Kenny blew up my phone the moment home plate umpire Ben May flagged deGrom down as he strode off the mound after punching two out of three Braves out in the first.

“You seeing this?” he hollered wildly.

“I’m seeing it, Ken,” I replied. “I’m not exactly believing it, but I’m seeing it.”

“Whaddya mean, you’re not exactly believing it?”

“Easy,” I said as the frisking began. “How many times has baseball government threatened a crackdown on this, that, or the other thing? How many times have those crackdowns amounted to, ‘If we catch you doing that again, we’re going to be . . . very, very angry at you’?”

Ken was about to answer when I cut him short. “Wait,” I said. “Here it is.”

There it was. DeGrom strode off the mound, and May flagged him down. It looked at first as though May tossed the last ball deGrom pitched in the inning to either one side or to third base umpire and crew chief Ron (Mea) Kulpa, whichever came first.

May said something illegible to lip readers watching on television. DeGrom waved his right arm away, flashing the kind of grin that in another time and another place might have been the grin of a guy whose well-timed hotfoot was about to explode right up the victim’s heel—not to mention his Achilles tendon and his calf.

Then Kulpa arrived. “Never mind the dental work, buster,” he seemed to say, “hand over the glove.”

Kulpa had his back on the camera view, but we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt that too many indignant fans wouldn’t know the meaning of when real cheaters get caught on the spot and then cuffed and stuffed. He inspected deGrom’s glove almost as though he’d found the tape that fell off the lock at the Watergate.

The only thing missing was the Citi Field P.A. people cuing up and playing the famous theme from The Pink Panther.

“Glove, hat, and belt,” is what turned out to be the instructions to deGrom from the men in blue-black and gray. In the moment, if you weren’t in the ballpark, a half educated guess might have the exchange like this as deGrom handed his gear over:

DeGrom: Here. Nothing to see here, Ron.

Kulpa: Don’t tempt me to say you had nothing upstairs.

DeGrom: You’d have laughed your head off saying it.

Kulpa: Then you’d have been tempted to throw one at me upstairs!

DeGrom: Where it has plenty of room to bounce around?

I did say half educated. DeGrom’s not one of those guys who’s going to let a little thing like baseball’s government imposing and enforcing on-the-spot inspections and searches kill the mood.

For all anybody knows, behind that prankish looking grin of his deGrom was humming the theme to CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: “Who are you? Who? Who? Who? Who?”

Next, Kulpa moved a little to his right. Then, deGrom moved his right hand to the front of his almost non-existent stomach. And the next thing anybody saw, deGrom loosened his belt.

“Are you seeing that?” Kenny whooped. “Why the hell don’t they just have him drop his drawers right then and there while they’re at it?”

At the same moment, May moved left and deGrom had his hat back. After re-fastening his belt and accepting his glove back, too, deGrom moved to his own left, toward the dugout, and never once stopped grinning big and wide—except when he was laughing his own not-so-fool head off.

I had to laugh, too.

“Kenny,” I said, “You know better than me that if they drop his drawers there, it’s going to be tough to decide which is worse—the umps strip-searching a player right there on the field, or that Citi Field audience going you-know-what-shit nuts. And nobody will be able to tell if they’re going you-know-what-shit nuts because of the outrage of the strip search or because the women in the park think deGrom’s got the best legs in baseball.”

“If they were gonna frisk him and search him,” Kenny replied, “why the hell didn’t they just march him into the dugout, move him up against the wall, and pat him down the old fashioned way?”

“Because they were making history, too.”

“History?”

“Purely by an accident of timing,” I said, “deGrom’s the first pitcher to get searched for syrup, stickum, SpiderTack, or other kinds of blends we don’t even know were invented yet. Even if half of baseball world thinks half or better of the pitchers out there today spend as much time in their private laboratories as watching the videos of their most recent pitching turns.”

“Yeah?”

“Well,” I said, “May and Kulpa have become the first umpires to perform searches for syrup, stickum, SpiderTack, and other kinds of blends we don’t even know were invented yet.”

“Who cares about those guys” Kenny asked indignantly.

“I’ll name you two,” I said. “I’m willing to bet half deGrom’s salary that Joe West and Angel Hernandez are steaming mad because the Elysian Fields gods couldn’t bring themselves to arrange it so that one of them would be the first to approach some pitcher with a search warrant.”

Rookie Braves pitcher Kyle Muller was stopped and frisked likewise after working the bottom of the first. Over in Texas, Rangers starter Kyle Gibson and Athletics starter Frankie Montas got stopped and frisked after working each half of the second.

By then it was about as funny as a strip search warrant for a nudist colony. And who cared about them, anyway? They didn’t get to make history. The guy with the 0.50 ERA on the season after his day’s work was done did. He passed inspection with flying colours. Who says deGrom isn’t leading a charmed life this season?

“You can’t bet half deGrom’s salary,” Kenny shot back.

“It’d be the easiest $17.75 million I ever made.”

“I’m coming to Vegas on the morning plane,” he said. “I’ve got two words for you and I’m saying them to your face.”

“And what might those two words happen to be?”

“Stickum up!”

The bench is for fannies, not fists

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Huascar Ynoa

Repeat after me, young marksman: To err is human, to forgive is not bench policy when it meets a flying fist.

I don’t want to be a spoilsport or anything, but some baseball traditions manage to hang around in spite of themselves. Traditions like the guy who performs a feat of back-to-back derring-do one moment, then swings himself out of the starting rotation and into “a couple of months,” maybe the rest of the season, on the injured list the next.

Let the record show that Braves pitcher Huascar Ynoa had every right on earth to feel frustrated Sunday evening, after the Brewers slapped him and his silly for five runs on nine hits, including Avisail’s two-homer that bumped out of center fielder Endier Inciarte’s glove web over the wall, en route a tough enough 10-9 Braves loss.

Let the record show further that rightful frustration doesn’t necessarily counsel you that it’s wise beyond your years to punch the dugout bench out after you’ve been removed mercifully enough from further slappage.

“I knew he had done it and it was sore,” said Braves manager Brian Snitker, after the Braves’ team flight back to Atlanta, “but in the flight it started bothering him more. They checked [Monday] morning and it was a fracture. It’s a shame.”

Maybe hitting home runs including a grand salami during back-to-back starts gives a young man an unlikely and perhaps unreasonable sense of his own invincibility. But maybe Ynoa will learn the hard way that, frustration or no, bad outing or no, benches are for fannies, not fists.

He joins not that fraternity of ballplayers who sent themselves to the injured list in freak accidents. He joins the dubious brotherhood of boneheads who thought they could punch their way out of their bad moments by taking on inanimate objects that don’t hit back but leave mucho damage when they’re hit at all.

The core reasons are as varied as the ways you can win or lose a ball game. There’s no way to predict just what will make a player mad at himself in any inning, on any day.

When Pat Zachry established himself as a new Mets ace, after being traded there in a package sending the Reds the old (and Hall of Fame) Mets ace (Tom Seaver), he faced his old buds from Cincinnati a year later and ran right into Pete Rose’s then-36-game hitting streak.

Zachry kept Rose quiet until the seventh, when Charlie Hustler slapped a single. A couple of batters later, Zachry was lifted from the game and not a happy trooper about it. He decided to kick whatever came within reach of his hoof . . . until he saw a stray batting helmet. He reared back to deliver, then—as if the helmet was the football Lucy kept jerking away from Charlie Brown—swung his foot, missed the helmet, and nailed a concrete block.

Broken foot. Season over. Zachry was probably grateful if no teammate decided to serenade him upon his return the following spring with a chorus or three of a certain old hit by Paul Revere and the Raiders.

A.J. Burnett had a tough enough time pitching in 2010 without deciding the way to take out his frustrations after the Rays made a pinata of him one fine day was to punch out . . . the clubhouse doors. The good news was that Burnett didn’t miss serious time. (Cue up Teddy Pendergrass.) The better news: He wasn’t half as foolish as another short-term Yankee six years earlier.

Kevin Brown wasn’t having a bad 2004 despite a few little injuries in The Stripes when he ran into the Orioles in early September, came out in the sixth inning, and tried to challenge a clubhouse wall with his fist. Guess who won that debate and took Brown out of action for three weeks. We’ll have a wild guess that it was a long time before Brown could listen to a certain Pink Floyd song without cringing.

Legend has it that Elvis Presley was given to picking up a pistol and blowing out the screen whenever he saw something (or someone) he didn’t like on television. Jason Isringhausen once saw and raised Elvis, during his final season as a Cardinal: Having a bad 2008 as it was, Isringhausen decided like Popeye that was all he could stand because he couldn’t stand no more, after Jason Bay blasted a three-run homer on his dollar.

He punched a television set out—cutting his hand and ending up on the old disabled list for fifteen days. The least advisable music with which to serenade him the rest of the year was probably this Allan Sherman chestnut about a pair of early 1960s TV addicts, even if the song was funny as hell otherwise.

Boys will be boys, grown men will be boys, but when on earth will even the most severe competitors finally figure out that certain inanimate objects (in the case of Isringhausen’s would-have-been-victim, inanimate is in the eye of the beholder) live by the motto, “To err is human, to forgive is not my policy?”

Lucky for Ynoa that he doesn’t yet have even a short-term a reputation as, shall we say, a testy guy. John Tudor, ordinarily a quiet fellow who preferred to let his pitching do about 90 percent of his talking, had that reputation to some extent. It was more than a little unfair.

When he felt like using his mouth to cover the other ten percent, Tudor was actually thoughtful, articulate, sensitive, self-aware, and modest. (His least favourite subject was himself.) At least, he was with writers who treated him like a man and not a commodity. When he incurred difficult times with the press, as he did down the stretch in 1985, Tudor could and did bristle enough to challenge at least one writer to put his fists where his mouth was.

When he got knocked out of Game Seven of that World Series at the earliest time in his career that he’d ever been chased (his often-troublesome shoulder gave out), Tudor went into the clubhouse, took a swing at an electric fan with the hand by which he earned his living, and needed a hospital to stitch it up. Tudor apologised publicly one week later. (The following spring training, he admitted to Thomas Boswell the incident and bad press still bothered him: “I can’t worry about it, but that’s not saying I like it.”)

But in the immediate moment, word of Tudor’s ill-fated fan-shake reached the press box. Apparently, at least one of the occupants was one of his least favourite writers. The feeling was surely mutual enough. Said writer whose identity is lost to time and memory is said to have cracked, “Ahhhhh, the sh@t finally hit the fan!”