St. Louis Cardinals manager Mike Shildt asked umpires to check Nick Castellanos’ bat after he hit a grand slam in the second inning Wednesday at Great American Ball Park.
The four umpires huddled together next to home plate, then chatted with Cincinnati Reds manager David Bell. Castellanos walked out of the dugout with his bat and immediately handed it to crew chief Phil Cuzzi. There was a large chip at the top of the bat.
“It’s really just more of a dangerous thing because … if he gets a ball off the end of the bat, it could shatter and who knows?” Cuzzi told a pool reporter afterward. “It goes in somebody’s eyes, in somebody’s face. It was more of a safety thing, but it had nothing to do with the home run. The home run was never in question about not counting it.”
Reds vs. Cardinals game 2:St. Louis can’t stop Nick Castellanos
After chatting with the umpires, Castellanos handed the chipped bat to a young boy, Arlis, sitting behind the Reds’ dugout. Arlis, who saw his favorite player, Eugenio Suárez, homer later in the game, took the bat home with the handle wrapped in plastic.
“My view is that was my second homer and I drove in six,” said Castellanos, who hit a two-run homer in his first at-bat. “All of a sudden, there was an issue. There was no issue when (Jon) Lester absolutely carved me up. And there was no issue in the first game. But then there was an issue.
“My feelings of it are kind of irrelevant. It’s what he chose to do. I decided to give the dangerous piece of lumber to some lucky kid that was sitting above the dugout, so at the end of the day, everybody wins.”
The umpires initiated a rule check with the umpiring crew in New York to determine if the umpires could allow the home run to stand despite the chipped bat, which was allowed. The bat was removed for safety reasons.
“What I do – I’ve been doing it all year because I don’t want to just waste a bat – I will just pick the pieces of wood that are pushed back until the entire bat is intact,” Castellanos said. “Then I just go and use it. Actually, my Opening Day homer against them had a chunk missing because the same thing happened in spring training.”
Following the rule check with the headsets, Cuzzi spoke with Shildt before running over to the Reds’ dugout to speak with Castellanos and Bell. Castellanos appeared to ask who asked for the bat check during his conversation with the umpiring crew.
Jesse Winker, standing in the dugout, lightheartedly did a “get out of here” wave when the umpires returned to their positions to resume the second game after a delay that lasted several minutes. Castellanos explained the situation to his teammates once he returned to the dugout.
“The home plate umpire from the first game (John Tumpane) – actually in my last at-bat – told me, he’s like, ‘Hey Nick, you see your bat at the top?’” Castellanos said. “I said, ‘yeah, yeah, it’s fine.’ He goes, ‘OK,’ so the umpire in the first game was aware that my bat was in that condition.”
Said Joey Votto: “I don’t know the rules on that one, but it sounded like the feedback from the umpire was the home run counts, but in the future, just for everyone’s safety sake, the bat needed to get replaced. And I mean, to Nick’s credit, he passed it off to a young person in the stands and made someone’s year, so it worked out for everybody that’s a Reds fan today.”
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