Back in my day, players batted out of order…
You know the saying “He’s forgotten more baseball than I know?”
Apparently this applies to Dusty Baker and his short-term memory.
Yesterday, he took the blame when his Cincinnati Reds batted out of order.
My initial reaction was to give him and his team the benefit of the doubt. My thought process went something like this: “Well, they may be professionals, but each team plays 162 games every year. Sure they may have scoreboards with the lineups posted, but for there to be that many games and that many opportunities for something stupid like that to happen, it’s surprising it doesn’t happen more often.”
Then I read that the home plate umpire said he’d never seen it happen in his 23 years of umping.
Okay, so maybe it is kind of a stretch, but even if I concede the odds are about as low as, I don’t know — a bird flying into a pitch between the mound and home plate — maybe it doesn’t matter if this particular ump had dealt with that situation before. All that means is some other ump with lottery-level luck had the fortune to deal with the headache of figuring out whom to call out and who should be batting.
But then Dusty stepped in and dropped a “my bad.”
You see, as I suspected, this does happen from time to time.
But what are the odds that the same manager whose bat-boy son would have to be saved from being run over at the plate during an active play in the World Series would be the one whose team would bat out of order?
As it turns out, about as good as the last time it happened to him (scroll down to the 7th inning recap).
Dusty’s memory must be on the way out, or he’s just got a lot of stuff on his mind, because he apparently forgot about that one.
All he could remember was way back in 1980 when he, himself, batted out of order during his playing days (scroll down to the 1st inning recap).
Sounds like someone needs to get Dusty some ginseng.
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