Payback’s a Pitch ⚾️

On September 1st of this year, as the truncated baseball season was just beginning, Tampa Bay Rays batter Mike Brosseau was nearly hit in the head by a 100mph pitch thrown by Aroldis Chapman, the Yankee’s hard throwing ace reliever. It was interpreted by many that Chapman was setting down his own agenda of fear to any and all hitters to come. MLB found his reckless action worthy of a three-game suspension, deeming it dangerously careless. 

Four years earlier, in 2016, Brosseau had been a free agent nobody wanted. The Rays got him for the bargain basement price of $1,000. Yes, one thousand bucks!!!

Chapman is 6’4” 220 pounds, to Brosseau’s 5’9, 170 pounds. Chapman makes $16 million per year. Brosseau makes the MLB minimum salary. All advantages to Chapman.

Brosseau has spent the last four years in the minor leagues playing for the Bowling Green Hot Rods, the Charlotte Stone Crabs, the Montgomery Biscuits, and the Durham Bulls, traveling in a second hand Greyhound bus from city to city, waiting for a call up to the Major Leagues.

Monday night’s game was close. Yankee starter Gerrit Cole, who makes $36 million per year and is arguably the best starting pitcher in baseball, held Tampa Bay in check for seven innings, giving up only one hit, before being relieved by Chapman, the dreaded pin-striped hulk lurking in the Yankee bullpen.

Facing Brosseau once again, Chapman was ready to come with his hated heater, a 100mph fast ball aiming at the same guy he almost beaned six weeks before. 

What happened next, the rheumy eyes of this reporter has seldom, if ever, seen.

The $1,000 pick-up had a great at-bat, and on Chapman’s 10th pitch, got full around on the fast ball, hitting a line drive home run into the empty left field seats that would send the Rays on to the ALCS, and the Yankees home.
One can only imagine the sense of joy and redemption Brosseau must have felt jogging around the bases. Payback’s a pitch.

The ebullience in the Rays dugout was in stark contrast to the stunned Yankee bench at game’s end when Giancarlo Stanton, a Yankee home run threat all through the playoffs, waiting for “his right pitch,” nonchalantly took a called third strike to end the 2-1 game. Arrogance personified.

It brought to mind Lin-Manuel Miranda’s stirring anthem of “Young, Scrappy, and Hungry” from the Broadway hit, “Hamilton,” upon our defeating the hated English at Yorktown in the Revolutionary War. 

Like those brave fighters, our Rays, too, were not going to “give up their shot” at moving on towards the World Series down the road. Next stop, the cheating Houston Astros, where, as of Tuesday night, they have gone up three games to none in this best of seven series.

Rays manager Kevin Cash, a Tampa native, joins other great MLB former managers Al Lopez, Lou Piniella, and Tony La Russa, all from Tampa, as well as many players such as Wade Boggs, Dwight Godden, Gary Sheffield, Luis Gonzalez, and Tino Martinez, all also from the Tampa area.

Sports are going a long way in keeping spirits up despite Covid-19. The Stanley Cup is already secured thanks to the incredible Tampa Bay Lightning. The formerly troubled Tampa Bay Buccaneers are now in first place in their division. The Tampa Bay Rays are moving towards the World Series. And the Super Bowl is being played here, in Tampa Bay, this year. I’m just sayin’.

Hut one. Hut two. 🏈