Flippin' retribution.
I’ve been on record for years, and as late as yesterday’s seventh inning, that as much as we as Rangers fans can’t stand Jose Bautista and Josh Donaldson, I’d take them on my team in a second. I like good baseball players who bring an edge to the game.
Well, after yesterday, this is as close to a sports-lock as it gets: It’s not ever happening.
And though you’d be hard pressed to find one admitting it in the last 15 hours, I bet, deep down, there are diehard Blue Jays fans that would love to have Rougned Odor on their team.
We get territorial. That’s part of why sports grabs us in the first place, eh?
Would I trade circumstances right now with Toronto — for my team to have been the one whose bat flip moment led to an ALCS date with the Royals, and the one whose dirty play on Sunday led to my guy(s) getting embarrassed on the judges’ cards and on the scoreboard, boarding a Sunday evening flight to Tampa a season-high 5.5 games back in the division?
You bet.
My team had ALCS tickets printing and let the other team take that away.
Yesterday was energizing for so many reasons, but let’s face it: Texas came back to win a series against the Jays, but not that kind of series.
OK. Enough of the rational stuff.
When Matt Bush came on to relieve a struggling Tom Wilhelmsen in the top of the seventh, inheriting a two-run deficit and a bases-loaded, no-outs situation in what was his second big league appearance, he struck Darwin Barney out looking, gave up a run-scoring sac fly to Kevin Pillar, and got Donaldson to sky out to center himself.
With the score Toronto 6, Texas 3 at that point, I wasn’t really joking when I tweeted: “Whaddaya say we get Matt Bush his first win?”
I didn’t say it with a lot of conviction, but, hey, you know: Twitter.
Then, in the Texas half of the seventh: Double. Single. Run-scoring double play groundout. Now it’s 6-4, but the bases are clean. A little demoralizing.
But with those two outs: Walk. Infield single. Ian Desmond bomb.
Texas 7, Toronto 6.
Bush in line for a flippin’ win.
And, given the state of the Texas pen (with Shawn Tolleson unavailable), the 30-year-old rookie was sent back out for the eighth to preserve the lead he’d just been given.
The top of the eighth lasted 10 pitches.
And, seemingly, an hour and a half.
The most descriptive account of what would then go down was delivered by WFAA Sports writer Levi Weaver. I’m going to try and be more succinct.
Bush’s first pitch of the eighth traveled 97 miles per hour on a direct line from the righty’s hand to the velcro cyclone around Bautista’s elbow.
Texas, minutes after regaining an emotional lead in front of 40,000-plus, put the tying run on base to lead off the eighth.
And 40,000-plus cheered.
Because sports fans, by and large, have a hockey mentality, and long memories, many with an irrepressible urge to maintain both.
That’s not a criticism. It’s in me, no doubt.
Bush then threw three balls outside the zone to Edwin Encarnacion, followed by strike one looking, strike two swinging, and a flyout to left.
Jake Diekman was brought in to face Justin Smoak.
Bush exited to wild cheers.
Ball one. Ball two. And then a bounder to Adrian Beltre’s left.
Beltre snared it on the run and darted the ball to Odor in an effort to start an inning-ending, lead-preserving twin-killing.
And by “darted,” I don’t mean “fired.” I mean “threw like a dart towards a dartboard.”
By time Beltre’s throw reached Odor, somewhat low and inside the bag, Bautista was bearing in on him, with no less premeditation about what he was doing than anything that was in Bush’s head when the inning’s first pitch was delivered a few minutes earlier.
Then, as artistically rendered by local baseball coach and T-Shirt designer Paul Ylda, this happened: https://teespring.com/thepunch051516
As Weaver wrote: “What happened next, you’ve already seen a hundred times by now, so let me do my best to put words to it: Rougned Odor got elected into the Texas Rangers Hall of Fame.”
(Here’s an angle of all of it you may not have seen. Stick with the video to the end to see what Russell Martin did the next half-inning.)
I’ve never seen Twitter, at least in the algorithms that populate my timeline, more frenzied. Not in October. Not in 2011. Not ever, I’m pretty sure.
This is where I’m not going to revert to lengthy memory or a hockey mindset to comment.
I get emotional in this space all the time, which is why you should go to your favorite beat writers for information. I’m not a journalist.
My emotions on this are no more informed than yours, no more acute. Probably no less, but likely no more. You know how you feel, I know how I feel, and there’s a real good chance nobody’s going to change that.
I’m right there with NBC Sports columnist Craig Calcaterra, who wrote this morning: “There was last night and certainly still will be today . . . an effort by columnists, pundits, radio hosts and fans to portray who among [Odor and Bautista and Bush] was worse. Resist that urge and ignore people with hot takes about who was so very wrong and who was so very right. . . . . Calcaterra’s First Rule of Sports Opinion is that one’s opinion on any sports controversy can invariably be determined by one’s rooting interest in the participants of the controversy. It’s no different here. If you’re a Rangers or a Blue Jays fan, save it. You’re blinded by the laundry.”
You’d hate Odor if he were the opponent.
He’s not. And that’s awesome.
(Yahoo’s Jeff Passan last night: “One scout when Rougned Odor debuted: ‘The thing I love about him the most is you do not want to [expletive] with him.’ That’s a good scout.”)
Saturday was Rougned Odor Bobblehead Day at Globe Life Park. Sunday, on the other hand, . . . nah, I’m not gonna say it.
The flip side (sorry) is that Jays fans would despise Bautista (whose reputation, at least before yesterday, was far more cemented than Odor’s) if he were on any of the other four big league clubs he’s played for (including Jeff Banister’s 2004-08 Pirates) or any of the 25 who have yet to put a uniform on him. He’s consistent. Though he said repeatedly in October and over the winter that he expected retribution for his Game Five hammer throw and that he’d wear it, nobody really thought he’d really take the ball off his elbow armor and consider it done. Odor was clearly ready for the dirty slide, because of who was sliding.
It would be gratuitous at this point for me to toss in this Calcaterra line: “Bautista dropping the ‘play the game the right way’ bomb after the game last night is one of the more hilarious things I’ve heard in a long time.”
Maybe even more gratuitous, cheap almost, to point out that Donaldson had zero hits in the three-game series.
Your opinions right now on Banister and John Gibbons, whatever they were, are probably firmed up this morning. They are for me.
You will never again be ambivalent about Marcus Stroman, who’s a really great pitcher and sort of outspoken.
Maybe Stroman wishes he hadn’t sent that tweet before getting on his plane. Maybe he doesn’t. There will be no such mixed feelings in show prep meetings today.
Like Calcaterra said, national media voices will inevitably raise today, taking sides. In some contexts, this is bona fide ratings- and click-driving theater. Hey, it’s gonna suck me in until Sean Manaea delivers a pitch a little after 9:00 local time tonight, playing in Oakland before a soft multiple of the number of uniforms that were on the field in Arlington in yesterday’s eighth.
But those takes aren’t going to sway you, and they don’t really matter. That goes for this column, too.
Order was temporarily restored. Jesse Chavez made Prince Fielder laugh with a post-warning ejection pitch to the backside, Texas eventually put two men on, but pushed none across in its half of the eighth.
With Tolleson shut down for the day, Sam Dyson trotted from the bullpen to the diamond for the third time in less than hour, this time handed the ball.
With the cut across his right cheek swabbed down, Dyson started Troy Tulowitzki and Michael Saunders and the fully unbuttoned Martin off with strikes, inducing groundouts to third, second, and short in a matter of eight pitches, and the most quiet and eerily anticlimactic save of a one-run game between teams that clearly hate one another seemed to take about 20 seconds.
Texas 7, Toronto 6 put the Rangers back in first place in the division for the first time in almost two weeks, which drew almost as much notice as the fact that Keone Kela was there yesterday and evidently kept himself in check.
The first place result, of course, is exponentially less meaningful than what the consequence of Toronto 6, Texas 3 was on October 14, a game that also featured Bautista and Odor and Dyson in roles that one fan base will never forget, and that the other one won’t, either.
But signature moments don’t always have a stage set.
Ian Desmond wasn’t there in October, but you think Beltre is glad that beast is now on his team?
Bryan Holaday wasn’t there, but you think he’s relieved that Dyson isn’t on someone else’s team?
Nomar Mazara wasn’t there, but you think he’s happy that he plays for Banister?
[insert name of anyone else who wasn’t a Ranger in October] wasn’t there, but you think he’s fired up to share a uniform with Odor?
Matt Bush wasn’t there — he was getting his release from a halfway house in October and throwing in a Golden Corral parking lot in Jacksonville for Rangers officials Josh Boyd, Jake Krug, Brett Campbell, Josiah Igono, and Roy Silver — but do you think he earned something Sunday as far as his new teammates, his first as a big leaguer, are concerned?
Toronto can keep Jose Bautista and Josh Donaldson.
I’ll keep my team, and a lot of the rest to myself.
P.S. Here’s a couple perspectives from the Blue Jays market that might surprise you, one offered up by Ottawa Sun columnist Don Brennan and the other by former Jay and former Ranger catcher Gregg Zaun, who’s tremendously outspoken and very good on television.
(I watched hours of Zaun commenting on the ALDS over the two days I spent in Toronto in October, and — though maybe it was because Texas won twice while I was up there — I thought his work was insightful, hard hitting, and honest. He’s not a typical former jock putting time in on television. He’s really, really good.)
The Brennan column.
The Zaun commentary.