“Pitcher” Is A State Of Mind

As part of our Defector Meets Its Future Plaintiffs series, a gaggle of subscribers, accomplices, and other ne'er-do-wells were treated in some form or other to the magicks of Cubs-Giants, mostly to buy their future financial acquiescence. And what they got was one of the last charming bits of baseball whimsy: the non-pitcher pitching. In this case, Cubs backup catcher Reese McGuire.

Indeed, the evening across baseball was a festival of position players used as pitchers, as McGuire was one of five to be used in the ceremonially sacrificial role. It is not known by your typist if this is the most profligate use of non-pitchers in pitching roles in the sport's history, and we'll be damned if we're going to ruin a perfectly good morning looking it up, but moments like this are good for the game—more specifically, for that game.

We will deal with the others momentarily, but for the one we saw in person, well, it made the beer colder, the fries warmer, and turned a mere rout into a memory. On a pleasant evening at San Francisco's storied Palais du .500, 20-some-odd friends, compatriots and desperates were luxuriating in a game they weren't really paying that much attention to, given that the Giants provided the Cubs with a comprehensive what-for, 12-3. The Giants, normally a notoriously Amish power team, hit four homers for the first time all season to blow open the game almost before it started, and by the eighth inning Chicago manager Craig Counsell decided too much was enough and sent McGuire out for the second time in his career to save a bullpen arm that could be more usefully employed in a game they had some stake in.

If the opposite of a lively arm is a deadly one, McGuire’s is neither: Three years ago, in a 9-3 loss by the Boston Red Sox to the Toronto Blue Jays, he threw seven pitches, all sliders in a speed range from 53.6 mph to 72.3 mph. That was somehow capable of retiring Bo Bichette, Matt Chapman, and Cavan Biggio, and, toward that end, he has better career metrics than Roger Clemens, which is probably why Clemens is not in the Hall of Fame today.

It might also be why Counsell went to him in the eighth last night, although the Cubs losing by eight at the time also might have factored in. Only this time, McGuire, knowing he might face Chapman again, decided he needed more trickeration in his repertoire. So he came out all guns … uhh, pffft-ing. Unlike his last outing, in which he felt compelled to go at hitters with his mightiest stuff, he was more mindful working on only 1,101 days of rest. He went with his offspeed stuff, and when we say offspeed, we noticed how offspeed it was even from the third deck and immediately stopped talking about whatever right-brained detritus we had been spewing, to watch a master at work.

He started off Giants catcher Andrew Knizner with a 40-mph curveball, probably as a professional courtesy to a fellow squatmaster, and stayed in that range for three pitches, the third of which was a fly-out that left Knizner's bat at 99.8 mph, a feat of strength without benefit of momentum none of the Giants’ homers could match.

Not that they didn't try, though. Heliot Ramos gauged McGuire's next curve, which was actually a 37-mph eephus that Ramos deposited nearly 400 feet away in Oracle Park's capacious left-center field seats. That made it 12-3 and ruined McGuire's career ERA.

But he'd made his point. McGuire would not allow the Giants to juice his best heater, so he stayed below the two-lane highway speed limit of 50 for his remaining 13 pitches, giving up a single to Rafael Devers (a teammate in that '22 game) on a pitch that nearly broke the 35-mph barrier, a four-pitch walk to Willy Adames, a fly-out by Dominic Smith, and a meek grounder to short by Christian Koss, pinch-hitting for the obviously fearful Chapman. It was in all a captivating outing, and like most such player-tries-pitching incidents included a gratuitous run for the winning team.

Let it not be said that McGuire didn't enter into the spirit of the thing by essentially throwing at two-thirds batting practice-speed with an arc that relied more on gravity than guile to achieve its goal. It provided a valuable talking point in an otherwise desultory game, and a reminder that tactical whimsy is still whimsy, and who among us gets enough whimsy in our lives?

Anyway, McGuire got out with his dignity and rotator cuff intact, and the same can be said for Chicago White Sox backup catcher Korey Lee, who pitched the last two innings of a 12-1 home loss to Kansas City, giving up a lone run despite going fully through the Royals lineup. Sadly, if you weren't locked into that game, you might have missed Lee's outing, given that most of his pitches were well into the 70s and he humped up an alleged 90 to Maikel Garcia. He looked, well, like a pitcher, even though he dotted a few 40s into his repertoire just as a different look for the Royals lineup.  

At the other end of the velo-spectrum, though, is our true hero of the evening: Angels utility infielder Oswald Peraza, who stayed below 40 mph for each of the nine Texas Rangers he faced to see if he could actually reverse time. It didn't work. The Rangers conga-lined him by going single, single, hit-by-pitch (Wyatt Langford, on a 35.2-mph seagull impersonator that convinced manager Bruce Bochy to pull Langford from the game, doubtless to much teasing), single, double, RBI groundout, single, single, three-run homer—seven hits and eight runs in a third of an inning. The ERA-wreckage must have come as a surprise, given that Peraza had thrown two scoreless innings earlier in the year, and being taken out must have been even more stunning for him, given that he was replaced by first baseman Niko Kavadas, who pitched the final inning and two thirds (between 50 and 60 mph, if you must know) in a grandly entertaining 20-3 Rangers win.

Somewhere, of course, someone is calling all this non-pitchery pitchingism a travesty and an affront to the dignity of the game, and that person should be frogwalked to a Mississippi prison farm to trim highway weeds until the end of the World Series. This was good for baseball, period, and our only regret in being at the McGuire game was not being at the Peraza game. Yes, that would have meant watching the Angels and Rangers, but it's the price you pay for whimsy. And if it weren’t enough, this festival of Freaky Friday On Wednesday also included Washington pitcher Shinnosuke Ogasawara staring at three straight strikes from Yankee starter Max Fried in the fifth inning of an 11-2 Yankees win. Baseball provides in all contexts if you can maintain your attention, even the least baseball of all.

CORRECTION: Because we cannot be everywhere monitoring every rout, we omitted Javier Sanoja's uneventful two scoreless innings in Miami's 12-1 loss to Atlanta in the battle for 11th place. The author has been severely chastised with a croquet mallet.