The Baltimore Orioles have had a no good, very bad season. They’re 43 and a half games back in their division, one loss away from triple digit Ls on the year, and Twitter trolls have taken aim at their one feel-good story, cancer survivor Trey Mancini. It’s a mess, and on Wednesday night that mess took another darkly comedic turn when umpire Tim Timmons tossed the team’s entire grounds crew in the ninth inning of their showdown with the Wild Card-hunting Yanks … yes, we said grounds crew.
File that one under “things you don’t see everyday.” Making matters even more quizzical is the fact that it happened in the ninth inning with inclement weather on the way. The grounds crew had queued up behind the tarp, ready to go at a raindrop’s notice, but Timmons wasn’t having it, and away they scuttled like scolded puppies. Moments later, the Orioles turned their 3-2 lead into a 4-3 loss. Coincidence? Absolutely.
Timmons later explained to the AP that he didn’t actually eject the grounds crew. “I just didn’t want all of them behind the tarp, especially with the infield in,” he said, crossing his Ts in before a call from the notoriously powerful grounds crew union. But we’re not going to let semantics stand between us and baseball history:
This is the first grounds crew ejected in the live-ball era. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.
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