It is foolish and dangerous for a fastball to drown opponents. Doing so at your own fault is the next step.
Take the Toronto Blue Jazz, for example.
Tampa Bay Ray outfielder Kevin Kirmeyer picked up the plate to face Blue Jays reliever Ryan Boruki in the eighth inning on Wednesday. The Rays took a 7-1 lead in the final of the three-game series and will be the last time AL East rivals will play each other in the 2021 regular season.
On his first and last pitch of the bat, Boruki released a sinker at 93 mph which spun behind Kiermeyer.
A look came down as Kiermeyer took the first base. Dugout cleared. Boruki was eventually expelled. The Blue Jazz pitching coach was like Pete Walker after an argument with Punch Joe West.
Before plunking the policy-card scam
Violations of unwritten rules of baseball – and unheard of before – all happened two days after the alleged.
During Monday’s 4-4 Rays victory, Toronto catcher Alejandro Kirk looked like an index card on the home plate while tagging the sliding Kiermeyer. Kirk got up and went to the dugout. Kirmeyer looked down, saw the card, and grabbed it.
The card apparently contained detailed information on Toronto’s strategy of playing against the rays.
Kiermeyer said after the game that at first he thought the card was his. But when he realized it wasn’t, he wouldn’t give it back.
That “other employee” was Paul Hoover, Tampa’s chief league field coordinator. Madani reported that the Blue Jazz sent a batboy to Tampa’s dugout demanding the return of the card. According to the report, Kiran “joked” at the request.
This apparently caused all sorts of outrage in Toronto. It was as if Kearmeyer had entered the Blue Jazz Club House and hid secret information while no one was looking. Instead, you know, Kirk literally put thousands of fans and TV cameras on the home plate in front of Kiermeyer.
No, this was not a fraud. Cancer deteriorated and valuable intel was not properly secured. Instead, he stopped putting it on the home plate.
Would Kirmeyer have returned it to the Blue Jazz dugout? Exactly. But it is not binding on him. And expecting that from a competitor without capitalizing on the obvious error doesn’t work in the reality of high-quality professional games. It’s on Cancer.
But it is not clear how Blue Jazz interpreted the situation, despite Toronto manager Charlie Montoya declaring him a “leader under the bridge” after talks with Ridge manager Kevin Cash on Tuesday.
Boruki refused to kill Kirmeyer on purpose, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
Montoya argued after Wednesday’s game that Boruki’s pitch was not intentional.
“We didn’t want to use another pitcher,” Montoya said. He continued: “I understand what it looks like.”
And there’s no reason to believe that Montoya and Walker didn’t order hits.
But the situation – Boruki hit Kirmeyer late in an already lost game and Tampa Bella has no chance of revenge – suggests nothing but an accident. And catcher Danny Janssen made no attempt to coral the Boruki pitch as she went inside.
Kiran doesn’t buy it
Kirmeyer did not buy the argument and called it a “weak move” after the game. Rage Second Baseman called it the “Bush League” according to the Times. Rokha agreed that the pitch was “intentional” and the umpires did not pull Boruki out because they thought it was an accident.
This brings us back to the concept of retaliatory bening.
In any American place that is not an MLB diamond, deliberately projecting 93 miles per hour to someone is considered a deadly weapon attack. But for some reason (unwritten rule), it still flies into baseball in 2021.
To make it all the more ridiculous, Blue Jazz’s mistake sparked an uproar. If you don’t want your opponent to know your strategy, don’t let it sit on the home plate.
