This is Baseball, Man : A Sweeping Walkoff
I had a feeling about that game. I don’t know what exactly told me this, perhaps the baseball gods whispered in my ear. But around the time Bo Schultz was having issues and the defense did absolutely nothing to bail him out, I looked at what inning it was and thought “Lots of time. Oodles.”
Even as Pat Neshek came out to do his irritating yet effective routine that shuts hitters down, I thought “Well, every ‘pen sucks sometime. Why not today?”
There was a vibe. It also illustrated perfectly the role luck plays in a winning streak and how baseball truly is a game of inches. That José Reyes moment with the Bautista pop up was some serious luck.
The bench power clapping in unison at the end of that GIF is my favourite part.
Then a double steal.
And then Chris Collabello took a pitch low and outside and shot it up the middle to score the tying and the winning run.
And then they tried to kill Chris Collabello. Seriously, it looked like lions taking down a wildebeest.
Everybody tackle Chris Colabello! pic.twitter.com/6JJ3JtsSJo
— Ian Hunter (@BlueJayHunter) June 7, 2015
What did Reyes say about the inning?
“This is baseball, man,” he said. “In baseball, a lot of crazy stuff happens.”
As reported in the National Post, Houston skip AJ Hinch protested:
“He can’t just hold his position or hold where his feet were,” Hinch told reporters. “They (umpires) huddled to see if there was any intent either way. It’s a difficult play all the way around, but it’s all about intent. I don’t think he was necessarily trying to get in the way. My take was he wasn’t trying to get out of the way. And a lot of it has to do with the fact that the base is right there. He’s got a little bit of a safety net being on the base as opposed to if he was off the base standing in the middle of the baseline.”
“He can’t just hold his position or hold where his feet were,” Hinch told reporters. “They (umpires) huddled to see if there was any intent either way. It’s a difficult play all the way around, but it’s all about intent. I don’t think he was necessarily trying to get in the way. My take was he wasn’t trying to get out of the way. And a lot of it has to do with the fact that the base is right there. He’s got a little bit of a safety net being on the base as opposed to if he was off the base standing in the middle of the baseline.”
By the way, that's the quote you give if your team was just swept by the Blue Jays.
The following is the quote you give if your team just swept the Astros:
“If I’m on the other side, I definitely see what they’re saying,” Gibbons said.
“If I’m on the other side, I definitely see what they’re saying,” Gibbons said.
He paused a beat: “But I’m not on that side.”
And I'm pretty sure Reyes did what he was supposed to do. He has a right to that base and it's not like he waved his arms around or something. It was a bit of bad luck for the Astros, for sure, but I'm struggling to care.
R.A. Dickey went 5 and 2/3 innings and didn't really have his best stuff, but battled enough that he kept the team in it. For his part, Dickey also felt something in the air in the ninth:
Destiny.
“It’s crazy, this game is crazy,” said Colabello. “I know he’s slider heavy, we obviously have scouting reports and I’ve faced him a couple of times now. We were just talking about how great it was that the Joses pulled off a double steal because getting the runner to third makes it a little bit harder for him to want to bounce one or throw his really nasty one. I told myself if it’s above my waist I’m going to swing. Little did I know that I would swing at one in the other box, but thankfully it worked out.”
