But as Blake Sabol rolled his head back in disbelief and dejectedly trotted back to the dugout following an inning-ending 388-foot out, the reality of the game was coming into focus. They went down in order again in the fifth. They remained in it only because Jakob Junis had dealt four dazzling innings of his own with seven strikeouts, giving the team a clean slate for the fifth inning. And suddenly four scoreless innings were in the books, with the Giants mustering just one baserunner off of old friend Zack Littell. I wondered if it might jumpstart the Giants offense, but Meckler struck out three pitches later. If I had to venture a guess as to Kapler’s motive, it was all three. Sometimes you’re really just that ticked off. Sometimes you’re trying to show support for someone. Sometimes you’re trying to light a proverbial fire in a proverbial ass. It can happen for so many reasons, the bulk of them at least partially premeditated. SkH7LCzivL- Danny Emerman August 16, 2023Ī manager ejection is a funny thing. Zack Littell through 4 scoreless on the mound he showed up Kapler on last year. Kapler's 2nd ejection of the year, 7th as a manager. Giants manager Gabe Kapler ejected for arguing balls and strikes after the second Wade Meckler strikeout.
Six plate appearances into his career - and just a few years after his college coaches advised him to transfer from Oregon State (spoiler: he did not) because there wouldn’t be playing time for him - his manager was standing before 26,000 people, on live TV, throwing a temper tantrum in his honor. Kapler was ejected before taking the field, but then got his money’s worth, and you’d have to think that felt good for Meckler. His rookie was getting hazed and his lifeless team was sitting in a hospital bed flatlining while the doctors and nurses gabbed about Barbenheimer. Sooner or later Ashton Kutcher was bound to leap out from behind Whitson’s catcher gear, with the hair and face of a 16 year old, to inform Meckler that he’d been Punk’d. After all, in his debut on Monday, he had taken a called strike that was nowhere near the plate, and another that was a borderline pitch only in the strictest sense of the term.
Meckler was playing in only his second career game, so all he could do was shrug and wonder why he was being picked on. On paper, an innocent enough first-pitch strike. The third pitch was well out of the zone he swung at it with the helpless desperation of a man who doesn’t understand why his so-called friends in the dugout hadn’t explained to him that there aren’t strike zones in the Majors, every pitch is a strike, damn it.Īnd then came the fourth. The second kissed the strike zone the way a grapefruit kisses a can of Pamplemousse La Croix it was called a strike. The first was as close to hitting his elbow as it was to finding the strike zone it was called a strike. It was only the fourth pitch of the game that Meckler had seen. Home plate umpire Chad Whitson called it a strike. In the fourth inning of the San Francisco Giants game against the Tampa Bay Rays on Tuesday night, Wade Meckler took a first-pitch fastball about one copy of Infinite Jest above the strike zone.
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