Baseball certainly has its share of strange plays, but what happened with Tigers starting pitcher Justin Verlander in the 5th inning of Saturday’s Tigers/Athletics game is one for the record.
With Daric Barton of the A’s standing on first base and David DeJesus at the plate Verlander stepped off the pitching rubber and lobbed the ball home. A surprised DeJesus danced to get out-of-the-way of the “pitch” while the rest of us were left wondering what the hell just happened.
After the play the Umpires who were as baffled as the rest of us had a conference on the mound and ultimately decided that the play was a balk.
Oakland manager Bob Geren who said he hasn’t seen anything like that in his 30 years of coaching sided with the umpires ruling on the play.
“That was the strangest [thing] I’ve ever seen,” Geren said. “I had to ask everybody what they saw, too, because everybody was like, ‘Did I see that right?’ It took like six coaches to try to figure out what he did. It was the most bizarre balk, or illegal pitch or whatever. Explanations were sketchy, everything. Ultimately, he did step off the mound, so it wasn’t a pitch. You could not get a hit batter.”
Verlander later tried to make sense of the play himself.
“I went to go pick one and I didn’t get my body turned,” Verlander said. “The way I thought — and this was all in milliseconds — if I just throw it home, they won’t call anything.”
Verlander who appeared to try to keep a straight face about it on the field admitted he was laughing about it after the game.
“I saw the video of it and I couldn’t help but laugh at myself,” Verlander said. “It might be the first time it happened in general. I thought nothing could happen at the plate. It was funny talking to the umpires. They gave me a hard time about it, too.”
Verlander who ended up getting himself out of the jam, took the loss that night.
Source: MoTown Lowdown, Yahoo Sports