Apparently, there's a new pitching practice in Baltimore. Or, at least, Daniel Cabrera has one. When you commit a balk that invites an opposing run on the house, at a time when you're already down 2-0 against a bristling opposing pitcher, you shake it off by sticking the next pitch in the hitter's ear.
With Coco Crisp on third and two outs in the top of the fourth at Camden Yards Friday night, Crisp danced off the pad as if thinking about stealing home, but halted on a dime, startling Cabrera into a balk when he stopped his windup.
Crisp trotted home for the third Boston Red Sox run Friday night. And the 6'9" pitcher's idea of regrouping was to wing one behind 5'9" Dustin Pedroia's head post haste.
This wasn't a pitcher looking to dust someone after one of his own mates got dusted, which would be understandable. This wasn't even close to a pitcher who'd just suffered a little public humiliation from the previous batter's hitting one onto South Howard Street and took it out on the next man up, which would be deplorable enough.
Apparently, Crisp's daring feint startled Cabrera's brains into taking part of the inning off. Enough to make him think about turning Pedroia's brains into butterscotch pudding.
"I think everyone in the whole stadium except him thought that was pretty stupid," Pedroia told reporters, after the 4-0 Red Sox win behind Jon Lester and company. (The Red Sox got the rest of the runs on a pair of RBI singles and a sacrifice fly.) "Maybe he wanted to come out of the game. I don't know what he was thinking. It was pretty weird. He's like a foot-and-a-half taller than me. I really can't go to the mound after him."
So the Red Sox marched out of their dugout, led by manager Terry Francona himself, after Francona, outfielder Bobby Kielty, and first baseman Kevin Youkilis barked at Cabrera over the pitch. Home plate umpire Mike DiMuro handed both clubs a warning and both clubs emptied their dugouts and their bullpens.
And while his hapless teammates did their best to restrain him, Cabrera and his catcher, Ramon Hernandez, began waving arms at the Olde Towne Team and all but challenging them.
"They say bad (four-letter euphemism for excrement)," the pitcher said after the game. "They were talking (same four-letter euphemism for excrement) from the other side and that's something I don't like. I didn't lose my temper, I didn't lose nothing. The ball slipped out of my hand and after they started getting off the bench and say bad things. I think I don't lose (my temper)."
What on earth did Cabrera expect the Red Sox to say after he nearly turned Pedroia's ear canal into a model of the Chesapeake Bay Tunnel? "Way to bring it, big man?"
That the Red Sox might not have liked watching their rookie star ducking on the first pitch after a balk didn't seem to be programmed into Cabrera's software just yet.
Challenging them overtly to fight, and throwing down his glove to punctuate it for measure good enough, while trying to excuse himself as having a near-hundred mile an hour head shot slip from his hand, probably wasn't the ideal way for Cabrera to suggest that he'd been the wronged man, either.
"I don't think we escalated anything," Francona said when it was all over. "I don't know. I've got my hands full trying to de-escalate. We're in the middle of a pennant race here. We've got more important things to worry about. You can ask them. It wasn't the focal point of our night; the focal point was the win."
And, on Lester's magnificent pitching in his eighth start since he returned to the Show after his 2006 ended in a fight against lymphoma, he punched out four, walked a pair, and let only one Oriole (Brian Roberts, who opened the bottom of the first with a hit and stole second) past first base for his entire seven innings' work.
And, perhaps, on hitting 30 games above the .500 mark for the first time since they last reached the Promised Land a mere three years ago.
The Orioles, unfortunately, haven't had all that much about which to crow since Dave Trembley accepted a contract extension removing the "interim" from his job title and his players rewarded him, in his first game without "interim," with that 30-3 deep frying at the Texas Rangers' hands.
"I think [Cabrera] lost his cool. I can tell you very honestly it's going to be addressed," said Trembley after the scrum and the game. "I'm just glad Pedroia didn't get hurt. He didn't do anything."
Perhaps so far as Cabrera was concerned, Pedroia's mere presence in the batter's box after the balk was offense enough. Certainly so far as the umpires were concerned, trying to drill a hole in Pedroia's head was bad enough. But wriggling free of first base umpire Bill Welke restraining him, then running toward the third base side and challenging the Red Sox to a piece of himself, were more than enough to get Cabrera an invitation to early relief.
Trembley exploded at the ejection. Fat lot of good that must have done him. It sure wasn't going to undo a sorry streak of fourteen Oriole losses in 16 games entering Friday, including 10 consecutive home losses to tie a record the franchise set in their first season of being the artists (we use the term loosely) formerly known as the St. Louis Browns.
It sure wasn't going to undo the damage done to and by a club with a put-upon bullpen, a heart of the order whose power is drained enough, a shortstop who covers just enough ground to make a dubious and injury-addled pitching staff reach for the tranquilizers between innings, and a run of lopsided losses lopsided enough (now ear this, too: the Orioles were outscored 149-66 in the 15 games prior to the Red Sox coming to town Thursday) to make the 1988 Orioles — the ones who opened the season with a 21-game losing streak and finished with a 54-107 record — resemble overachievers.
And it sure wasn't going to erase any images Cabrera might have fashioned, of himself (and his 9-15/5.11 ERA/1.45 WHIP) and his fellow Orioles, even among no few of their own put-upon and classy fans, as classless losers who have more fight when their pitchers throw at heads to shake off their own mistakes than they do when it's time put up more runs than the other guys on the field.
Sorry, I didn't lose my temper, I didn't lose nothing. The words slipped out of my keyboard.
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