Oh What a Night

Emotions ran high last night as the game turn from baseball to Ultimate Fighting as Nate Schierholtz blasted unsuspecting China catcher Yang Yang with a left shoulder to the neck area. The blow sent Yang flying backwards as my manager Jim Lefebvre and I bolted towards the plate. Jim Lefebvre argued the call, or lack of a call, by the home plate umpire. There was no play at the plate, the ball had been cut off at the pitchers mound and the plate was open for him to slide or score standing up. He elected to make a left turn and hurl his body, leaving his feet, into the catcher.
Interestingly enough, there was a collision at the plate earlier in the inning in which our starting catcher was taken out by their base runner. Our catcher had to leave the game and he is doubtful to return for any Olympic play. The play, however, was a good one. The throw came in from the outfield and it was going to be a close play. The ball had beaten the runner to home and the catcher slid in front of the plate to block the runner from scoring. The runner charged into the catcher in hopes of dislodging the ball. That is why you run the catcher over, to dislodge the ball. The umpire ruled that he missed the tag and called him safe. The replay showed otherwise, he had tagged him twice. That is good hard baseball in its purist form. It is terrible that you have to loose a player in the collision but that is part of the game and it is within the spirit of the competition.


"I wasn't trying to take him out," Schierholtz said. "That was the nature of the play. If the ball was right there, no one would have said anything. But they cut the ball off. It's baseball and if they can't accept that it's not my problem."

According to Schierholtz it normally is the nature of the play. He is absolutely correct, "if the ball was right there, no one would have said anything". The trouble with his logic is that the ball was not there, it had been cutoff and the plate was available to him. I was in the visitor dugout almost directly in line with the play. The image is still clear in my mind, he was racing down the line slightly to the foul side of the line and charging hard. I watched him intently and he never looked at the plate, his intention was to take him out from the start as he made a left turn into the catcher. He veered from his course of home plate and moved left, vaulting his body into his. The question is why would he do that. The answer is, he was his with a pitch earlier in the inning. And it was a doosie, a 76 MPH fork ball. Oh the humanity, call up the National Guard, he was hit with an off speed pitch and he took it upon himself to exact revenge for such an atrocity.
His last response gives you a glimpse into his personna, "It's baseball and if they can't accept that it's not my problem". Let me take a few minutes to tell you about "baseball" Mr. Schierholtz. If it were truly baseball (in the major leagues)two things would happen.

1. The catcher would have gotten up and pummeled you into oblivion. A huge 20 minute brawl would have taken place and there would have been at least 5 players and coaches ejected from both sides.
2. You would be wearing a target for the next two years right on your back. That is the type of infraction that bears grudges and players do not forget.

That is the "Dark" side of baseball. Unwritten rules and codes that players and coaches live by. Now is not the time to "play" major leaguer, not in international competition and certainly not in the Olympics.

Our Chinese players do not know those codes or unwritten rules. They are infants in the game. I liken in it to training our youth baseball teams at my Line Drives training center in AZ. You don't teach your 13 year olds to throw at hitters for retaliation. You don't teach your players to run the catcher over. You don't teach your players to take out the second baseman with a high slide. In fact there are rules against such infractions in youth baseball and those rules transfer into international competition as well. You should have been ejected and the umpire was overmatched with this level of pressure. He looked like a puppy in the middle of the freeway. He lost control of this game and let it escalate.
Members of USA baseball that we have tremendous relationshiops with, as you can imagine, were thouroughly embarrased by the behavior of Team USA. To a man, described what I have just written down. You have taken this great game of baseball, in one of the greatest venues and have given USA a black eye. Your reply to the incident says it all, it's the perception of America that the world sees. It is exactly why we are hated abroad. Cocky, arrogant and ungracious in one of the most gracious, and friendly spirited competition setting in the world......The Olympics. Nice job.