In some ways—dealing with insects during a baseball game, most notably—the internet has made us more efficient. In situations like last night’s, when a colony of bees set up shop on the netting behind home plate at Chase Field sometime before first pitch, we used to not know what to do. Now? Now, we all text our friends and relatives to let each other know there’s a bee delay. Then, we all go online to find out what silly stuff happened while the bees were waiting for their keeper. The saga, told through videos:
- The colony, massing on the netting.
- A montage of the beekeeper (Matt Hilton, of Blue Sky Pest Control) arriving, dealing with the bees, pumping up the crowd, and throwing out the first pitch.
- A video taken from the stands in which Hilton vacuums up bees while “Holding Out for a Hero” by Bonnie Tyler plays over the loudspeakers.
- A fancam of Hilton’s performance.
It was a sensational evening in Arizona. You have to imagine this completely made up for the Coyotes getting kicked out of the NHL and the Suns kicking themselves out of the NBA Playoffs.
We at The Barking Crow have a long history with beekeeping. Do we beekeep? God, no. That sounds cool, but that also sounds scary. It is somewhere past 200th on our list of our top 500 prospective hobbies. We did, however, beseech Weber State to change its nickname from Wildcats to Beekeepers back in 2018, on the basis that nobody knows what Weber State is, Wildcats is a boring and overused nickname, Beekeepers rock, and Utah is the Beehive State. (Weber State is in Utah. See? Nobody knows what you are, Weber Staters. I bet half the people reading this are pronouncing your name like the grill company.) We weren’t ahead of the curve on beekeeping or anything like that. Everyone knows beekeepers are really fucking cool. But we do count ourselves among the noteworthy advocates for beekeeper representation in the world of sports. Hopefully last night’s events at Chase Field rang some bells in the minds of Weber State administrators.
Where Was Joe Kelly in All of This?
To be honest, I don’t think anyone saw much of Joe Kelly while the bees were up there. Being a reliever, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for him to be ready to go much before gametime. He did pitch, though, for the second straight night, making it three outings in four days. Clearly, he’s back in the circle of trust.
Did Joe Kelly reward that trust? Of course. Carved the Diamondbacks up. Look at this last pitch to Ketel Marte (the pitch clock was winding down, so that was part of the reason for the bobblehead routine). The only issue is that he also hurt his groin. After an infield single by Pavin Smith, Jake McCarthy did one of those bunts for a hit where the guy knows he’ll get credit for a sacrifice if he’s thrown out. Joe Kelly did throw him out, but he tweaked the right side of his groin on the play, and while he was able to finish the inning, it’ll be something to monitor going forward. Hopefully the IL can be avoided.
The Brewers Are a Contentious Bunch
Remember a few weeks ago, when we talked about how the Brewers were beefing with everybody? After they cleared benches with the Orioles just weeks after the Rhys Hoskins/Jeff McNeil tiff in Queens? Well, it got a little real-er last night. This time with the Rays:
What happened here was this:
- Jose Siri took Freddy Peralta deep in the third inning.
- Peralta hit Siri with a 3–0 fastball in the sixth inning.
- Peralta and Brewers manager Pat Murphy were ejected after the HBP.
- Jose Siri and Abner Uribe had a chat in the eighth inning that led to more than a chat, and not in a romantic way.
- After the game, Peralta said he wasn’t throwing at Siri intentionally, pointing out that he’s given up plenty of home runs in his career without incident.
Thoughts:
- I love Rhys Hoskins. Love that he was in the middle of it, keeping the peace but also sticking up for his team. When I say that it was hilarious to see Rhys Hoskins faceplant as the punches started, I mean it from a place of love.
- Peralta’s claim about not throwing at Siri adds up, but I’m still suspicious. I’m curious if this is a Pat Murphy move. Murphy’s background, for those who don’t know, is that he was a college baseball coach in the 90s and 2000s, most notably at Notre Dame and Arizona State. He stepped down at ASU in the middle of an NCAA investigation in which the NCAA’s findings were that 1) Murphy was impolite to them and that 2) while Murphy didn’t necessarily know about the violations happening, violations were happening. I don’t know a ton about Murphy overall, but a 65-year-old who came up through the college game does fit the prototype for someone who’d encourage pitchers to look for opportunities to drill a .179 hitter for pimping a home run while losing. Peralta didn’t walk a single batter yesterday, and after a first-pitch curveball he threw Siri three fastballs nowhere near the strike zone. All were inside.
Why We Stopped Liking the Georgia Bulldogs
Boy. Big video day. Here’s a Jomboy breakdown of Georgia pitcher Christian Mracna doctoring baseballs with sticky stuff. As far as these things go, this is one of the most obvious instances we’ve ever seen. Idiot stuff by Mracna. Definitely cheating.
Will the SEC do anything? I don’t know. The SEC is pretty competent, but I don’t know that they’ll go back and institute any punishment over something the opponent and umpires didn’t catch at the time. More likely, they’ll have umpires start checking Georgia pitchers left and right, and start checking other pitchers too. Big miss by the A&M fan who took the bullpen video. If you take that video, you need to get a player’s attention right away to have the ump check that glove. I assume the A&M fans in question are kicking themselves. They might have cost their team a big game.
What I’m more curious about here is how we all feel about Georgia. My impression for a long time was that Georgia was pretty likable compared to the median SEC school. They’d bark at you, but the barking was way less common than they made it out to be, and basically…they had no bite. They had good football but not great football. They were gracious hosts. There weren’t a lot of grounds for non-SEC fans to hate them.
Now…it’s getting a little different. I’m not saying that doctoring baseballs is shaping anybody’s perception of a school, but I think the reaction is telling. The reaction isn’t, “Oh wow, weird move!” like it would be if this were Mississippi State or South Carolina or another docile, harmless Southeastern Conference institution. Instead, the reaction is, “Hey SEC, get his ass!” We want justice. We want vengeance. We want Georgia to get its comeuppance, even in something as low-stakes as the fourth or fifth-biggest college sport.
What changed? A lot of this was Georgia finally actually getting good at football. It’s easier to hate someone when you’re sick of them winning. But a lot of it is about how Georgia responded to the winning. They didn’t go the Nick Saban route, where the winning stayed the point. They went the Urban Meyer route, where the assholery became the point. Kirby Smart wins a lot of football games, but he can’t get his players to stop driving recklessly and sometimes drunk even after a reckless drunk driving incident led to the deaths of a player and a recruiting staffer last January. Fairly or unfairly, college football coaches are perceived to have a lot of control over their players’ behavior. Fairly or unfairly, Smart’s failure to take away the keys reads as a choice. Especially when no other program in the country is in the spotlight for these kinds of issues at this kind of scale. Meanwhile, Georgia fans became a problem.
Every SEC school except for Vanderbilt, Florida, and now Oklahoma and Texas deals with a massive fear of being inadequate. There is not a lot of natural self-confidence among the other twelve SEC schools. I love the South. But. This is a Southern tendency in general, something some say traces all the way back to Scotland and Ireland. The South is laced with insecurity. Maybe it’s because up until Vietnam, it was the only part of the United States that had ever lost a war.
Whatever its origin, SEC insecurity is something real and pertinent. It’s ironic. It’s highly ironic. Even after all their success in the Saban era, Alabama fans are so insecure that a number of them responded to the incident where their best basketball player delivered a murder weapon to a murder and their head coach said ‘wrong place wrong time’ by filling up comment sections with amateur legal analyses that in no way exonerated anybody of being an idiot, including them.
Georgia, though, sits towards the more secure end among the other twelve. As a non-Southerner, I tend to get along well with Georgia fans. I think this is because, like me, they’re suburban folk by birth. Athens is a little ways outside Atlanta, but Georgia students mostly come from the Atlanta suburbs. Atlanta suburbs are the most white–bread of any in the heart of the South. In general, suburbanites get along with other suburbanites, no matter where in the country their respective suburbs lie. There are some norms we all tend to follow. Where those norms break down is when someone starts to win.
When Georgia was always losing, Georgia fans were great. Tortured and frustrated and shaking their heads, the products of a hundred suburban Atlanta high schools were always harder on themselves than you could be on them. They were easy to hang around, like professional fans of D.C. teams. Now that Georgia’s winning? Georgia fans have gotten cocky. There’s a self-deprecating norm among suburbanites when you’re a loser. When you’re a winner, the norm is gone, and only arrogance remains. We lost Georgia fans. They won too much. They’re arrogant now. (I know, I know, #NotAllGeorgiaFans, I still get along well with most of you.)
Between SEC fanbases, there is always a belief everyone else is cheating harder than you and a corresponding desire for punishment. Other SEC fans always didn’t like Georgia. What sets this sticky stuff incident apart is that in the past, a Big 12 fan might have seen the pine tar and said “Dang, I kind of liked Georgia.” Now, it’s “Get his ass!”
Etc.
Chicago:
- I had a moment of terror this morning when I saw Obvious Shirts promoting Pat Hughes merchandise (Hughes has been absent from the Cubs’ booth recently), but they were just hyping up an upcoming meet and greet with him at their store. Information at obviousshirts.com. May 18th. Hopefully he’s back by then.
The Ottawa Senators:
- Thomas Chabot is going to have wrist surgery soon, but he’s expected to be back to full strength by the end of the summer. Guessing this might impact Chabot’s tradeability, if he’s indeed on the block. (Told you guys I’d be locked into the Sens offseason. A few weeks in and I have not looked away. It’s a Sens Summer, folks. Get used to it.)
- Game 1 tonight for the Belleville Sens against Cleveland. In the meantime, Spartacus is enjoying some Tim Horton’s smile cookies. What a goof. Mascot hands are so silly and fun.
