This is why I love baseball.
Slingshots are cheap and effective.
In 2017 Michael Dillon Brosseau went halfway around the world to play winter ball for Perth in the Australian Baseball League after a season in the minors for the Rays. Three years later he sends the Rays on a trip to the ALCS with one of the more dramatic home runs in history.
That 2017 season was when Aroldis Chapman signed back with the Yankees as a free agent.
Chapman came back to New York after winning a World Championship with the Cubs in 2016. Brosseau went undrafted after coming out of Oakland University in Michigan in 2016 and signed with the Rays for $1,000. On Dec. 15, 2016, Chapman signed with the Yankees for five years, $86 million, the largest contract given to a reliever.
Fast forward to September 1, 2020 when Chapman nearly took off Brosseau’s head, and let’s make this clear, everyone is saying the ball was over Brosseau’s head. That’s wrong.
The 101 MPH pitch was right at Brosseau’s head. He ducked.
Then 39 days later, Brosseau faced Chapman once again and took Chapman deep in the eighth inning to give the Rays a 2-1 victory Friday night over the Yankees and the ALDS, three games to two.
This was a phenomenal 10-pitch at-bat. True Grit.
It was the stuff of dreams and was the most unlikely and crushing late-inning home run against the Yankees since the Pirates’ Bill Mazeroski sent Yankee fans home crying 60 years ago, I know, I was one of those crying fans, just seven years old.
Sure, Jose Altuve sent Chapman and the Yankees home in 2019 with his walkoff home run for the Cheatin’ Astros (are you beginning to see a Chapman pattern here), but Altuve was an All-Star and as we all know the Astros at home had a way of sitting on pitches.
That home run was a bad slider from Chapman.
This time Chapman did not want to get beat with his second-best pitch.
Brosseau’s home run was his first ever in the postseason and was only the 12th of his career. It came on that 10th pitch from the left-handed Goliath. If you watch carefully, and I always do, David readied his slingshot on that 100.2 mph pitch with a quick toe tap he had not taken the previous nine pitches, making his lift and drop with his front foot much shorter.
As a result, his bat was quicker to the power zone.
It was a thing of beauty and not a fluke in any way. Brosseau crushed the low, inner-half fastball, sending it into the left field seats at lovely Petco Park at a speed of 105.2 mph, the hardest hit home run by any Ray in the Statcast Era.
1 comment:
Great story on Brosseau. For clubs as a whole to turn to slingshots is a trick that few can make work.
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