Friday, June 15, 2018

There's No Place Like Home

by Neal Pollack

It's impossible to persuade a non-baseball fan that baseball is actually an engaging sport. Even a World Cup match between Iran and Morocco contains more intrigue to the uninitiated than your average MLB throwdown. The average midweek home broadcast contains 45 minutes of blather about "hitting mechanics", discussions about the mound-visit rule, and broadcasters yukking it up about who'll pick up the tab for that night's steak. I get it, baseball can be boring.


Only two occurrences make the jaded non-fan look up from their phones and stifle their yawns. The first, a home-run by the home team, creates such a chaos of noise and light that it's hard to act bored.




The other is the play at the plate.

 Wednesday night's Dodgers-Rangers game, an otherwise unremarkable midseason matchup between two teams with very little history between them, saw three separate masterpieces.

The first one got all the attention. In the third inning of a 1-0 game, the Dodgers' Kiké Hernandez hit a line-drive single to center. Matt Kemp was out, as Vin Scully used to say, from me to you, and he chose to take his frustrations out on Rangers catcher "Danger Will" Robinson Chirinos.  A nifty little schoolyard shoving match ensued, and both players got tossed.



An inning later, 53-year-old Adrian Beltre clearly got tagged out on a close play at the plate, involving a nifty throw from the always-mentioned Kiké Hernandez, but the gods in New York called him safe after a disputed call.




Then in the bottom of the 9th, with the bases loaded, Kiké Hernandez dashed home from 3rd and somehow avoided the catchers' tag using a salsa move of which Marc Anthony would approve.



Keep in mind that was the final play of the game. If every game ended like that, no one would ever be bored watching baseball again.
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