Baseball has been around for 126 years and I guarantee nothing like this has ever happened before. It was Thursday and at the plate, Chicago Cubs outfielder Matt Szczur was looking at an 0-2 pitch from St. Louis Cardinals’ left Brett Cecil. Cecil’s partner in the Cards’ battery was Yadier Molina, who, unbeknownst to him, was about to go viral all over the place.
Cecil fires the pitch, low and inside, hoping Szczur will chase the ball into the dirt. The plan works and Szczur strikes out. The ball bounces behind the place, hits Molina in the chest pad and then vanishes.
Only it didn’t.
Molina searches the dirt in vain, only to see the ball stuck to his stomach plate like a giant, white wart. Szczur was safe at first. At the time, the Cardinals were up 4-2 in the top of the seventh. Szczur’s freebie would cost them as Cecil walked Jon Jay, then gave up a three-run bomb to Kyle Schwarber. It gave the Cubs a 5-4 lead. They’d win the game 6-4.
Cecil, of course, was freaked out by the whole incident because he knew all the suspicion would first go to him. Any pitcher caught putting a foreign substance on a ball gets an automatic 10-game suspension, not to mention a fair amount of public derision.
Cecil just signed a four-year, $30.5 million deal and didn’t want to put any stink on it. Of all the cheating we let go in sports, or even encourage and reward, tampering with the ball or the bat in baseball is one we simply won’t forgive. The corked bats and busted pitchers live on in infamy.
“I really don’t have any explanation for it. I don’t use any foreign substance to put on there,” Cecil told reporters Friday. “You guys saw Yadi spinning around and the ball didn’t even come off. I think if I was throwing with something that sticky, I’d be throwing 45-foot dirtballs the whole game and that’s not the case. I have no idea. I talked to Yadi. He has no idea. I can’t explain it.”
Yadier Molina with the pine tar on the chest plate?! Is that the #Cardinals secret to having a top staff every year! WOW #mlb #STLCards pic.twitter.com/q6vEGL3SwY
— High and Outside (@abaseballpod) April 6, 2017
I bet Yadi can explain it. While sticky substances like pine tar are banned for pitchers, they aren’t banned at all for position players. Hell, it’s the reason it’s in the dugout in the first place. The most obvious place you’ll find pine tar is on the bat handle, which players use along with batting gloves, to improve their grip. Position players will put it in their field gloves and catchers have been known to cover their shin guards with it, not only to be able to apply to their hands between pitches, but to slow down the ball if it gets loose int he dirt.
Molina obviously put it on his chest plate too. He was asked about it and got a little pissed.
“Do I put anything on my chest protector? No. That’s a dumb question,” Molina said.
It really wasn’t. Molina probably doesn’t know it’s OK that he does that. There’s no rule against it. He wouldn’t be the first player in a sport to not have a real grasp of its rules. He’s afraid he got busted doing something wrong. He didn’t. It just turned out to be a game-altering crazzy-ass thing that happened that never happened before and if they play baseball another 1,000 years, will not happen again.
It’s why the Cubs didn’t give a shit when it happened and didn’t ask for any ball or equipment check. It’s also why the umpires didn’t do anything but laugh at Molina and his new belly button accessory.
“It was probably Tuf-Skin, sticky spray, something like that, maybe pine tar,” Cubs outfielder and former Cardinal Jason Heyward said. “Probably Tuf-Skin. I’ve never seen that happen. We joked about it the next time I came up to the plate. We had a saying when I was over here: ‘Never seen it.’ It definitely came into effect right there. It was hilarious. Guys that aren’t pitchers have stuff on all of the time, on their glove, whatever. It is what it is. Catchers have stuff all the time.”
And here’s Schwarber.
“Catchers like to put pine tar on their shin guards and throw balls to second base and get a good feeling,” Schwarber said. “Maybe it rubbed off some and it stuck. You never know. That’s a pretty crazy theory. I don’t know. I put pine tar on my shin guards. It happens.”
Yep. It happens. But, in this case, we got a nice little viral video out of it.
Baez blasted in outfield
Just a day later the Cubs got another highlight play, except this one wasn’t so funny. Second baseman Javier Baez, chasing a fly ball into the outfield, collided with Heyward. It looked bad, but in the end all Baez got out of it was a black eye. He returned to the line up Saturday.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVLH3ejMXTA
“I’m 100 percent normal,” Baez said. “I went to hit, and I was feeling good. Since I came out of the game, I was icing it, so the swelling was going down. It was kind of purple today, but I’m good.”
Baez didn’t even want to come out of Friday’s game against the Brewers, which the Cubs lost 2-1 in 11 innings. Manager Joe Maddon overruled him.
“It looked like (his eye) was going to start swelling,” Maddon said. “He (Baez) said he was all right, but I didn’t feel good about it. He insisted he was good, but I wasn’t convinced. I’m certain he’ll be fine by tomorrow. But I wasn’t feeling really strongly about it at that moment.”
The irony of the collision is it happened a year to the day as Kyle Schwarber’s regular season-ending knee injury last year when he collided with Dexter Fowler in the outfield. Baseball players are notoriously superstitious so when a reporter brought that up to Heyward, he shut him down real quick.
“Stop. I’m just saying,” Heyward said. “He (Baez) said he was OK.”
The Cubs won Saturday’s game 7-4. Baez didn’t start in the field, but he came in as a sub later int the game.
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