Earlier this week, a Major League Baseball game was delayed nearly two hours due to…bees. That’s amusing, but it has happened before. It was actually what happened after the bees were cleared that stood out to me.

When the bees were discovered near home plate, the teams knew the game would have to be delayed.

D-backs vice president of operations Mike Rock was alerted to the problem, and he told both managers that there would be a delay. The danger was that a foul ball that hit near that area would disturb the bees and cause them to move down toward fans or players.

At that point, Rock called Blue Sky Pest Control. The company called employee Matt Hilton away from his son’s tee ball game and drastically altered the course of his day:

Once Hilton arrived at the ballpark, he was ushered into a cart and driven onto the field, where he received a standing ovation from the crowd.

“I wasn’t [expecting that],” Hilton said. “I thought I was just going to do my thing and cruise out. But it was fun.”

Indeed, he played to the crowd, waving his arms for them to make more noise. As the scissor lift took him up toward where the bees were gathered, Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out for a Hero” blared over the public address system.

While the crowd cheered, Hilton calmed the bees with a non-toxic spray, then vacuumed them up for release elsewhere. After that, the field was ready for play.

However, before the game started, Hilton was called upon once again. For his second act, he delivered a ceremonial first pitch, which is both amazing and ridiculous. How exactly did it come about? Who made that call? Didn’t Arizona already have someone lined up for to do that?

I can think of only three explanations.

• There were multiple first pitches
  Semantically, that’s not possible, of course. Nevertheless, I have definitely seen multiple ceremonial “first” pitches at a ballgame, and it could’ve happened here.

• The delay led to scheduling issues
  Given that the game was delayed almost two hours, it’s possible the person originally scheduled to toss out a first pitch had to go. In this scenario, Hinton stepped up twice to play the hero.

• Matt Hilton bumped the original first pitcher
  This is my favorite possibility. I hope some local celebrity was scheduled to throw out the first pitch, until Arizona told them they’d been bumped.

I’d very much like to know which of the above occurred.

The A’s may soon be gone, but Oakland has a new team: The B’s. Thanks to reader Kirk S., who tipped me off to Oakland’s new independent baseball team, the Ballers. They’ll be competing in the Pioneer League starting this year, and I hope Oakland’s baseball aficionados will rally around them.

Just look at this tremendous logo:

See also this interview with B’s designer Dustin O. Canalin.

Today in incredibly arcane minutia: Are the Chicago Cubs finally ditching the tiny registered trademark symbol on their home jersey patch? While reading about the apparently terrible new uniforms MLB is planning to use for the 2024 season, I stumbled upon the existence and possible disappearance of this goofy little ®.

Apparently, the symbol was added in 1979, and has been there ever since. If the update seen at the bottom of the linked post is accurate, it was (at least originally) intentional. I look forward to confirmation of the disappearance of this needless little bit of clutter when the baseball season opens.

The Los Angeles Dodgers are spending incredible sums of both current and future money in their pursuit of a World Series championship. You should check your mail, because it’s very possible they’ve signed you to a multi-year deal without you even knowing it.

After signing Shohei Ohtani to a massive 10-year, $700 million contract, they next managed to scoop up Japanese phenom Yoshinobu Yamamoto with a relative bargain of a 12-year, $325 million deal. Yamamoto’s contract apparently includes some amusing perks. Baseball writer Jon Heyman has the details:

Perks in Yamamoto Dodgers contract: personal trainer; physical therapist, interpreter; 4 business class RT airline tickets ($8,500 max per RT) per year; 1 premium economy RT airline ticket to LA for use by family per year; best efforts to make Japanese food available.

Two things about this amuse me. Firstaball, if you’re making over $27 million a year, do you really need five comped airline tickets? And secondaball, having spent over a billion dollars on just two players, is it worth the Dodgers’ time to provide only four business class tickets, holding at premium economy for the fifth one?

A few years back, Major League Baseball mandated that all stadiums have metal detectors to prevent attendees from bringing in weapons. After a recent shooting at a Chicago White Sox game, their effectiveness must surely come into question. It would seem they might need some work.

On Tuesday, ESPN Chicago reporter Peggy Kusinski said that the gun was snuck into the stadium by one of the women who was hit. The shooting was “an accidental discharge” by the woman whose injury was previously identified as “a graze wound.”

“She reportedly snuck the gun in past metal detectors hiding it in the folds of her belly fat,” Kusinski said in a post on X.

On the one hand, that might seem difficult to believe. On the other hand, I attended a baseball game just last night where I was instructed to keep my keys and full-of-metal cell phone in my pocket as I went through the clearly-not-very-sensitive metal detector.

Update (September 5, 2023): When I wrote about this, I made it a particular point to not convey anything here as established fact. Over a week later, there’s still a lack of clarity. One of the women involved denies bringing in a gun, and police have merely said they’re still investigating:

Chicago police earlier Tuesday issued a statement saying the claim that a woman had brought in a gun and suffered a self-inflicted wound was “not released or confirmed by the Chicago Police Department.” Police said the investigation was “still active and ongoing.”

Meanwhile, White Sox sources believe the shots came from outside the park, but of course they’re incentivized to think that.

Hopefully the mystery will be solved eventually.

When the MLB season starts at the end of March, it will feature several rule changes. One of the most notable of those is sure to be the new pitch clock, which requires pitchers to deliver a pitch in a set amount of time and batters to be ready to face it. On Saturday, the rule led to a game ending after an automatic strike was assessed to a slow batter for Atlanta.

It was the situation that every child growing up playing baseball dreams of. Game tied at 6, bottom of the ninth inning, bases loaded and a 3-2 count. Atlanta infielder Cal Conley was at the plate, facing Boston relief pitcher Robert Kwiatkowski. Kwiatkowski stared in for the sign from his catcher and came set to throw a critical pitch on a full count.

Conley was charged an automatic strike for not being ready in time under the new pitch clock rules, and the strike out was called.

…

Not…exactly how kids dreamed of that situation unfolding when playing in the backyard growing up, but this is the new normal in MLB. Thankfully everyone has spring training to get adjusted before this happens in the regular season.

This particular incident is extra silly because spring training games don’t have extra innings, and thus the game simply ended in a tie.

Despite this foolishness, I’m quite excited about the pitch clock. I expect it will speed up game times significantly, particularly given what we saw last seasons in the minor leagues:

To people familiar with the myriad rule changes MLB officials tested in recent years, the pitch clock has long felt like the most foolproof way to rejuvenate the sport. In its first year in use across the minor leagues, it has reduced the average game time from 3 hours 4 minutes in 2021 to 2:36 in 2022, according to MLB data through Sunday. MLB matchups have not averaged a game time that brief since the early 1980s.

Substantially shorter games will be a boon for the sport. I just hope players adapt quickly, so these penalties don’t wind up playing a critical role in big moments.