Astros’ Gonzalez proves his mettle
BOSTON — Fenway Park’s Green Monster looks like a benign ogre from a distance. Its rich green hue and charming, old-fashioned scoreboard mask the fact that it is a 37-foot left-field wall that will leave its mark if you are an outfielder who has just crashed into it.
Which is just what happened in the bottom of the third inning of Game 2 of the American League Championship Series Sunday night when Houston Astros left fielder Marwin Gonzalez hit the Green Monster while trying, and failing, to catch a drive off the bat of Boston’s Steve Pearce.
After the game, Gonzalez was able to summon a laugh as he described what had happened. “I know it’s hard,” he said of the wall, “because I just hit it.”
Gonzalez was knocked down — but not out — by his collision, with the ball hit by Pearce bouncing off his glove. It was a key play in the game, leaving Red Sox runners on second and third with one out and setting up the rally that allowed the Red Sox to take the lead for good in the game, which they won, 7-5, to pull even in the ALCS at 1-1.
Gonzalez was stretched out on the warning track after hitting the wall, and he was coughing as manager A. J. Hinch and the trainer Jeremiah Randall came out to left field to examine him. He said afterward that he had some dizziness after the play, and that his back and his chest hurt. Still, he remained in the game.
“I was scared, I was pretty scared,” Gonzalez said. “I was dizzy for the rest of the inning, and it was really painful in my chest, too.”
Actually, Gonzalez appeared to wage his own personal battle Sunday night with the Green Monster. In the top of the third, not long before the collision, Gonzalez handed the Astros a 4-2 lead by smashing a two-run homer far above the wall.
But after he could not hang on to Pearce’s drive, and finally got back on his feet, Rafael Devers walked to load the bases. After Ian Kinsler struck out, Jackie Bradley Jr. lifted a 2-1 fastball from Gerrit Cole down the left-field line. The ball hit off the Green Monster, about halfway up, and then bounced along the adjacent wall that hugs the line as Gonzalez chased after it and finally picked it up.
By then, all three runners had scored, giving the Red Sox a 5-4 lead on their way to tying the series.
“I really wanted to throw it,” Gonzalez said in reference to the ball hit by Bradley that he finally chased down.
Perhaps he was envisioning a play at the plate similar to the one is ALCS last year when he threw out the tying run at home in a 2-1 victory against the New York Yankees in Game 1 and then hustled to the hospital to witness the birth of his third child.
Sunday night, Gonzalez, 29, jogged off the field gingerly when the bottom of the third finally ended and was the last Astros player to reach the dugout. He said that he was still woozy on Bradley’s hit but that he began to feel much better when he went into the Astros clubhouse after he came off the field and was given ibuprofen.
This is an era when baseball, along with just about every other sport, is being forced to be more aware of the possibility that a player has sustained a concussion during a game.
Yankees outfielder Clint Frazier was sidelined for much of the season after being unable to shake the symptoms of a concussion he incurred when crashing into a wall twice in a spring training game.
In this instance, the Astros made the judgment that Gonzalez could keep playing.
“He banged his back, upper back and neck,” Hinch said after the game. “We went out there to make sure there was no issue with his head — and there wasn’t.”
Gonzalez’s teammates, at least, certainly appreciated the effort that he made on Pearce’s drive, not to mention his determination to stay in the game.
Cole waved to him when he got to his feet. But he did not look like the same player at the plate the rest of Game 2, striking out on just seven total pitches in his final two at-bats.