New York Mets ace Max Scherzer is already one of the more intense pitchers in baseball. He’s also not someone you’d like to have distracted mid-pitch, which could have ended badly for one Mets bat boy.
During Saturday night’s Game 2 of a doubleheader between the Mets and Braves, a Mets bat boy ran along the backstop as Scherzer was starting his windup to Travis d’Arnaud in the fifth inning. Basically, the bat boy saw that some gear was left behind in the Mets’ on-deck circle, but he chose an extremely inopportune moment to go retrieve it.
Luckily for him, Scherzer noticed the bat boy and was able to stop his motion without actually throwing a pitch.
A slight delay to the start of the 5th inning… pic.twitter.com/xTGLHkVv5x
— SNY (@SNYtv) August 7, 2022
Home plate umpire Manny Gonzalez granted time and stopped play, so there wasn’t any controversy over the strange interruption. Still, it wasn’t something you see very often — particularly from a bat boy.
But the best part of the whole sequence was how MLB Twitter reacted to it. They turned the replay into a meme and had plenty of jokes about Scherzer’s unforgiving intensity.