Antics abound
From bat flips to tongue flicks, Astros-Dodgers promises no shortage of theatrics following monumental home runs
From bat flips to tongue licks, there have been no shortage of theatrics.
On a night made epic by a World Series-record eight home runs, the post-dinger theatrics in Game 2 between the Astros and Dodgers flaunted the new pageantry of America’s pastime.
Cooperstown is for bronzed legends and their worn antiques. These millennials want to live in the moment, not the box score. They won’t wait for the HOF when they can have the GIF.
Take Carlos Correa, 23, in the 10th inning at Dodgers Stadium. With the game tied 3-3, Jose Altuve hit a solo homer to give the Astros the lead. Then Correa homered to unleash their swagger.
Correa recognized his World Series moment as sharply as the knuckle curve he sent smoldering for 427 feet into the warm Los Angeles night. His no-doubter to center granted him the time to savor it.
He made one Carlton Fisk skip out of the box with his eyes tracking the ball, turned to the visitor’s dugout and punctuated his homer with a bat toss.
“When I first saw it, I thought of Jose Bautista,” Dodgers utility player Charlie Culberson, 28, said. “That big bat flip.”
But Correa’s expression was not a flip. It was not quite the tape-measure distance of The Bat Flip, Bautista’s reaction to winning 2015 American League Division Series with a walkoff home run.
Whereas Bobby Thompson followed The Shot Heard ‘Round The World with a gallop around the bases, eager to complete his walkoff homer that won the 1951 World Series, Bautista set a precedent with his watch-wait-and-waltz approach. Bautista flung his lumber like he never wanted to pick it up again, its purpose fulfilled.
‘We like to have fun’
Correa’s bat did not twirl endover-end like a cheer wand. He lifted it from the knob in the motion of a shovel scoop and sent it soaring into space. It appeared headed out of orbit before arching into a nosedive.
On his walk out of the batter’s circle, Correa faced his exulting teammates for one more offering, because giving the Astros a tworun lead and a chance to take a split series to Minute Maid Park for three games was not spectacular enough.
Correa widened his eyes and unraveled his tongue.
His teammates poured out of the dugout to greet him with a cavalcade of chest bumps and elaborate high-five routines.
Correa consistently explained during the year that: “It’s baseball. We like to have fun.”
On Wednesday, that also meant getting even.
“If they hit a homer, they’re going to flip over there, too,” Correa told mlb.com. “So we’re going to go out there and play the way we play the game. We’ll play with a lot of swagger and let them know we’re here.”
Correa was the sparkler atop the Game 2 cake, but the Dodgers fanned the flames after their home runs. Corey Seager yelled in the batter’s box while squeezing his bat like a samurai sword after he delivered Astros starter Justin Verlander a fatal strike.
Culberson propelled a final push for L.A. when he hit the last homer of the game and jetted around first base in the 11th.
In between Seager’s scream and Culberson’s flight, Yasiel Puig countered Correa with more than his solo shot in the bottom of the 10th, when the Dodgers tied the game. Puig placed his bat down on the dirt, which sent a loud message to all of baseball about his command of the moment.
After the one-upmanship of homers and gesticulations ended in a 7-6 comeback win for the Astros, Correa alluded to Puig for inspiring his performance.
“Like one friend of mine once said,” Correa explained, “I don’t know why my bats are so slippery.”
Correa was referencing a message Puig wrote on Twitter that included a photo of him homering in the Dodgers’ 5-2 victory over the Cubs in Game 1 of the National League Championship Series. Puig — baseball’s Internet cable for streaming eccentric highlights, from tongue wagging to bat licking to the dyed ruby lips shaved into his head — flipped his bat high into the air.
Puig, 26, enjoyed the exchange with Correa, where their bats did the talking.
“I loved it,” Puig said. “It was a little bit higher than the bat flips I normally do. He was happy, and that’s the way you should play in the World Series. Not everybody gets in a place like this. It’s good that he plays like that, and it’s good that Latino players are able to contribute that way. He wasn’t batting too well, he was only getting a few hits, and when he hit the home run, it was a moment for him to be happy. I’m glad he was able to celebrate that way.”
Adrenaline takes over
Puig’s anti-bat flip seemed respectful. Tension had simmered but did not boil over between the Astros and Yankees in the American League Championship Series. After the Astros’ Josh Reddick finished a groundout by slamming his helmet to the ground, Yankees starter CC Sabathia barked expletives at him.
Players on both World Series teams said the celebrations will not fuel animosity.
“Adrenaline’s really high,” Seager said. “Nobody’s trying to show anybody up. Nobody’s trying to do any of that. The adrenaline and excitement takes over. It’s a big series.”
George Springer hit the most impactful homer of the night, a two-run shot in the 11th, which held up when Astros reliever Chris Devenski surrendered the game’s final homer to Culberson.
Culberson pointed at his wife in one section and parents on the other side of the ballpark, spreading his arms out like wings.
“I just held it,” he said. “It was like a weightless feeling.”
Call them showboating, call them swaggering, players are unveiling their emotions on a stage they might never reach again.
“I didn’t really showboat a bat flip,” Culberson said. Then he doubled back, reconsidering how the opposition took his reaction. “Or I didn’t really think I did.”