Why did Rangers manager Bruce Bochy spend Saturday’s final two innings in the visiting clubhouse?
“It was a blown call,” Bochy said after the Twins defeated Texas 5-3 at Target Field. “That’s why I didn’t get to see the end of the game.”
Bochy was fired by home plate umpire Laz Diaz after claiming that Twins second baseman Edouard Julien fouled off reliever David Robertson’s full-count curveball into catcher Jonah Heim’s glove. It was also Diaz’s call that Julien had struck out on a foul tip, but third base umpire Erich Bacchus signalled to Diaz that the ball had rebounded in the dirt and thus should not have been strike three.
“I’m not sure how you make that call down at third base. He couldn’t have seen it clearly enough to overturn it. “He was wrong, first and foremost,” said Bochy, who was ejected for the second time this season and the 83rd time in his managerial career.
Making matters worse, the four-time World Series winner claimed, was the fact that Julien, given a second chance, eventually walked, moving two baserunners up, and Carlos Correa hit a sacrifice fly that would have been the third out had Diaz’s original call stood.
“It’s such a shame. That was a huge run. “It cost us a run,” Bochy explained. “That should not happen unless you’re absolutely sure the ball hit the dirt, and there’s no way he could have been, because we saw it well.”
Close enough.
By the time Target Field’s gates opened on Saturday, more than 100 fans had lined up to claim a popular giveaway.
“I like the bells,” Jhoan Duran said of the recording of his entrance music, which plays when his bobblehead, 10,000 of which were given out to an announced crowd of 30,957, is turned on. “That’s my favourite part.”
Duran questioned some of the mini-Jhoan’s aspects, such as the lack of visible tattoos and the small stud earrings. “I wear rings on the mound,” he explained.
But the Twins closer was overjoyed to be lionized by such a popular giveaway, even if it just bore a passing likeness. “They give me a big box of them,” he remarked, approximately three hours before collecting his sixth save with only eight pitches.
His teammates also appeared amazed. Kyle Farmer’s only bobbleheads are from his time at Georgia, not as a major leaguer, so he liked opening and exhibiting Duran’s.
“If they made a bobblehead of me today, it would have its hands up, being robbed,” Farmer quipped, referring to extra-base hits nullified this season by diving catches from Baltimore’s Cedric Mullins and, on Friday night, Texas’ Josh Smith.
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