Edubray Ramos Firing A Fastball Behind Asdrubal Cabrera's Head For His Walk-Off Home Run Last Year Is Lame As Hell
I’m not gonna sit here and act like this is the first time in baseball history that something like this has happened. It’s happened more than a handful of times. For those who don’t know the back story of what “this” is, Asdrubal Cabrera hit a walk-off home run off of Edubray Ramos last September, and then tossed his bat to the moon.
Shout out to our girl Alyssa Rose’s dad, the legendary Howie Rose, for killing that radio call. But let’s just travel back in time for a second. The night of that walk-off home run, the Mets were trailing by two runs in the bottom of the eleventh, got the three-run bomb by Cabrera to win the game, all while they were fighting to keep a playoff spot. That win for the Mets gave them an identical record to the Giants (81-72), and they had the Cardinals breathing down their neck, who were just a half-game behind both of them at that point.
I don’t think you can look at that night and be like, yeah, that was definitely an overreaction by Cabrera. It wasn’t. Like, at all. The postseason basically started early for the Mets last year, and they were fighting for their playoff lives, so emotions were running understandably high, and they didn’t clinch a Wild Card spot until Game 160 of 162. If you’re tossing bats to the moon in the second week of May, then I could probably understand why that would rub somebody the wrong way, but that was a HUGE win for the Mets at the end of the year.
If we’re gonna be fair here and look at this from both sides, then I think it’s important to note that I don’t think Ramos had any intentions of actually hitting Cabrera. The point was to send a message to him, and obviously Cabrera got the hint, but the main point is that the message sucks. What’s the message, stop being happy and celebrating important victories as you try to get into the postseason, which is extremely hard to do? Fuck that, dude. You don’t play 162 games to not get excited for October baseball. That’s the whole point.
The big takeaway here is what Cabrera said after the game — the fact that he didn’t even remember it was Ramos who he hit the home run off of. The bat-flip wasn’t meant to show up Ramos, who obviously took it personally. If it was personal, then Cabrera would’ve remembered exactly who was pitching that night. But it wasn’t personal at all. It was simply just celebrating an exciting moment at the end of a long season, which shouldn’t be discouraged by butthurt pitchers who didn’t get the end result that they had hoped for.