Locked On Mariners - Daily Podcast On the Seattle Mariners - 8-28-19 Locked on Mariners Episode 13: Let's talk about Keon Broxton's $7,000 glove toss

Episode Date: August 28, 2019

The Seattle Mariners dropped their last two to the New York Yankees, as poor pitching from the starters drowned them. Host Andy Patton talks about that and then goes into detail about Keon Broxton's hilariously unintentional batting glove toss, which happened to hit umpire Mandy Gonzalez in the face and resulted in an ejection and a somewhat undeserved two-game suspension for the center fielder. Finally, Patton finishes up detailing the two former Mariners who celebrated a birthday on Tuesday, including a three-time All-Star and the brother of a Hall of Famer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What is up Mariners fans? I'm Seattle Sports Media's utility infielder Andy Patton, and you're listening to the Lockdown Mariners podcast, part of the Lockdown Podcast Network. Technical difficulties meant there was no podcast yesterday, so I have two days' worth of material to cover for you all today. Leave it to the darn Yankees to knock this rag-dag Mariners team back to Earth. I'll recap the last two Seattle losses in segment one,

and then in segment two, I'll talk about the Keon-Brockston glove-throwing incident. Was it worthy of an ejection or a suspension? or was it just a freakish accident? Let's talk about it. Finally, there aren't any mariner birthdays to celebrate today, but we missed two yesterday, so we'll give them a shout-out. Stay tuned to find out who they are. The NFL season begins next week, which means crossover Wednesday will be back. For the entire regular NFL season, you'll get a special episode every Wednesday as the hosts from opposing sides meet up to preview the excitement of the games happening that week. Find your favorite team wherever you get your podcast,

and be sure not to miss the NFL listeners' favorite segment. Leave it to the Yankees to ruin a good thing, right? Mariner's had won their last four series, and then, of course, New York comes to town and takes two quick ones from them. They won on Monday 5 to 4, and what ended up being a pretty close game, which was a little surprising after seeing how disastrous Tommy Malone looked on the bump. But then, unfortunately, things really unraveled yesterday,

and the Yankees won a commanding – the Yankees took a commanding 7-to-nothing victory. There's a rough couple of games, for the Mariners, piggybacked by probably one of the most strange, fun, interesting things that I've seen happen in a while, the Keon-Brockston ejection, which we're going to get to that. But first we'll do a quick recap of the games. The first game, Whistler started for the Mariners again. He's looked really solid in that role as the starter. He threw one inning.

He had two strikeouts, didn't let anybody on base. But the team went with Tommy Malone, and they demoted Wade LeBlanc to a straight bullpen role to leave Tommy Malone in that kind of false starter role, and he hasn't been really any better than LeBlanc lately. He threw five innings. He gave up eight hits, five earned runs, walked two, only struck out one. He gave up three home runs,

one of them to Gleber Torres, and then two of them to Mike Ford, who used to be out, he was a rule five picked by the Mariners a couple years ago. They ended up returning him to New York, and now he's making him regret that. Yeah, Tommy Malone is just not, He started out the year pretty strong, but things have gotten real ugly lately, and this was another example of that.

The rest of the bullpen looked good. Like I said, Whistler looked good to start. Eric Swanson threw the seventh. He looked solid. Wade LeBlanc actually came out of the bullpen and looked pretty good. He threw two clean innings, had two strikeouts. He lowered his season ERA to 5.42, so clearly things still aren't going great there. But at least he looked good in his first bullpen outing.

That's a good sign. Malick Smith went deep, so did Dylan Moore. Mariners had an okay support on offense with full runs, but Tommy Malone just didn't get things done on the bump. My favorite part of this game, besides the Keon-Broxton thing, my favorite part of this game was Corey Gehrin. You all remember Corey Gehrin. He pitched most of the year with the Mariners,

but he came in and got one out for the Yankees after he got DFAed barely a week ago, I think, and the Yankees ended up picking him up and plugged him into their bullpen. But if you guys were guys, remember way back in May, when Gierin was on the bump, the A's came out and they challenged the little toe tap thing that he does with his front foot, they said that that's a

Bach. And there was some whole big discussion about it, and they ended up ruling, okay, no, it's not a Bach. Well, in his first game with the Yankees, which again was against the Mariners, the umpire came out in the seventh inning and they had this whole long discussion with Gieran and manager Aaron Boone, and then they made Gereen

throw a warm-up pitch to like check his mechanics and ended up determining that it wasn't a Bach, but when they ask Gereen about it afterwards, he seemed suspicious that maybe the Mariners were responsible. Maybe they tipped the umpires off that he had a delivery issue, which that is next level petty, if that actually happened. Now, to be clear, survey is denied it. He said, quote, we've certainly seen Corey throw a lot and Corey is not doing anything wrong.

Corey knows the rule. And we certainly dived into a bunch of time while he was here. We didn't say anything. He was doing the same thing he's done all year. So, of course, Surveus would say that. I do, I'm not saying that he's not telling the truth, but I really want to imagine a reality where he decided to challenge Giron right after that. That would be hilariously petty. I don't think there's any beef between Giron and the Mariners.

Not that I know of. But Giron did say that it was, quote, convenient timing when he was asked about it. He said, I don't know the conversations. That wasn't expressed to me by the umpires, but it was an interesting time for it to happen. I love drama, so I'm choosing to believe that that's what happened here, that the Mariners perhaps were like, well, you know, he's been challenged on it before, and maybe they knew that he was kind of getting away with something, and they thought, oh, let's challenge it. It may not be the case. Maybe I'm just making stuff up, because otherwise this was a relatively uninteresting five-to-four game, but we're going to go with that. We're going to say that that's what we think happened, because the Broxton saga is something we're going to get to a little bit later.

But why not have two fun storyline from one game? Anyway, yesterday's game was also a bit of a clunker. The Yankees won handily seven to nothing. They scored two in the first and three in the third, so this thing was over well before it even got started. Masahiro Tanaka looked great. He threw seven innings, only gave up three hits. Luis Sessa finished it out for them.

On the Mariners side, it was Yasei Kikuchi and just didn't have it. You know, he looked good in his last couple outings, kind of thought maybe he's turning a corner, maybe he's going to be back to being that guy we saw earlier in the year. Not so much here. Four innings pitched, five earned runs, three walks, one strikeout. He gave up two home runs. One of them was to Brett Gardner. One of them was to Aaron Judge. Just didn't have it, you know, wasn't locating well. Fastball wasn't up in the zone, which is where we think he needs to be locating it to be effective. That's where he lived when he had his complete game shutout. Yeah, it's kind of the same thing we've talked about with him before of consistency. He needs to, he doesn't have overpowering stuff.

He's got a good slider, but that's about it. So he needs to be pinpoint with his location and when he's not, he gets hammered around pretty good. Reggie McLean threw three solid innings and relief. Eric Swanson was good once again and Taylor Gilbo threw the ninth inning and he looked solid as well. So I don't know. It was just, you know, Tommy Malone and you say Kukuchi really didn't get things done. In this one, in particular, the Mariners' bats didn't do them any favors.

They didn't get their first hit until the fifth inning. They only finished with four hits total. Obviously didn't have any runs. Just, I mean, Tanaka's a good pitcher. Maybe it was just, you know, he was having a good day, but it's tough to see the Mariners' bats just completely disappear like that. But they got another win tonight. They got James Paxton on the bump against Justice Sheffield should be a really fun one. Hopefully the Mariners can avoid getting the sweep.

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but not a whole lot has changed in the last week, and I really, really wanted to dedicate some time to talk about one of the craziest things I've ever seen in the game. If you have not seen it, please go look it up, but it was Keon-Brockston's ejection from Monday's game. I'm going to explain it real quickly for those of you who did not see it. Keon-Brockston got called out on strikes in the second inning on Monday. The pitch was close. That's not really the debatable thing. A robot would have called it a strike.

I get why Broxton was upset. I also get why I was called a strike. I don't think that that's really the issue here. Broxton was frustrated. He kind of rolled his eyes. He took his helmet off and spiked it on the ground. He was not looking at the Empire when he did this. He did not, as far as I could tell, say any words to the Empire.

He just kind of spiked his helmet on the ground in frustration, which a lot of guys do. Then he took off his batting gloves, and with his right hand over his left shoulder directly behind him, again, not looking. He just threw it. and it sailed through the air and somehow managed to hit the home plate umpire who had just finished taking his mask off it just popped him right in the face and as soon as the glove hit him the umpire turned around and threw broxton out of the game and then they started you know they had a conversation after that it was i've watched the repeat in slow motion probably a hundred times and i suggest

you all do the same is very clearly an accident very clearly broxton did not intend to throw his batting glove at the umpire nobody even the umpire nobody's disputing that. I also think it's fairly clear from watching the video that the umpire was Mandy Gonzalez. He didn't know, he didn't know that he wasn't watching Broxton and saw that it was an accident and the net threw him out of the game. He was, he made the call. He'd kind of turned his head away. He was taking his mask off. And then all of a sudden he got hit by a batting glove. So I kind of understand the decision. I know this is a little bit unpopular. A lot of people think that the empire should be, uh, you should get in trouble, blah, blah, blah. I understand all of that.

but like I don't think that he like he really just he got hit in the face by equipment and when that happens you eject the guy it's kind of pretty much probably if it's not a direct rule it's at least like pretty clearly implied the way it sounds like the conversation after that actually I have a quote from broxton here this is what he said after the game he said quote I didn't know I hit him until I turned around and he told me I just heard the crowd after a couple seconds after I let the batting glove release I turned around and he said said, you hit me in the face, you're out. I was like, arg, I did not mean to do that at all. I can imagine that Keon-Brockston didn't say arg in that moment, but that's fine.

So I tend to believe that that's probably a pretty accurate turn of events. And a lot of people, well, the empire should blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, at that point, the empire got hit in the face by something and just immediately ran the guy. He can't go back on it. You know, if Brockton says, hey, man, I didn't mean to do that. And I think even if the empire knows, okay, he's clearly telling the truth. It was an accident. I can't be like, okay, just kidding, you're not ejected. Like, it doesn't work like that. You ejected him, he's ejected, it's over, it's done.

From my personal perspective, if you look at Keon Broxton's numbers, I don't think that him getting ejected from the game cost the Mariners anything. He's a great defensive center fielder, but man, he has been ugly at the plate, and the Mariners probably got some better at bats out of having him out of the game. But that's not the point. You can argue day or night whether he deserved to get ejected or not. But I will contest that while I can see both sides of the previous argument, him getting a two-game suspension feels pretty ridiculous to me. It is impossible to watch that video and not know that his actions were unintentional.

For a reference here, two games is how long Jake Mariznick got suspended when he lowered his shoulder and absolutely dropped Jonathan Lucroy of the Angels and put him out for, I think, over a month, at least a couple of weeks that Lucroy was out for, from sustaining a serious injury. Now, I also don't think that Mariznick was intentionally trying to hurt Jonathan Llequoy, but his actions were considerably more dangerous and had considerably more ramifications than Broxton happening to hit an umpire with a batting glove over his shoulder. I don't know. It's an interesting one of like, I'm okay with Broxton getting ejected. I really am.

I don't think that in a perfect world, it's decision they would have made, but it happens. The umpire was upset. he got hit in the face, he didn't see what happened, he ran a guy, that's fine. That's all fine with me. But the league reviewing this, they had time. They didn't have to make some kind of immediate reaction, you know, to this, whereas the Empire did. They reviewed the film. They watched the same video that you and I watched 100 times and thought, this merits a two-game suspension. And that does not feel right to me. A lot of conversation that has come up this year has been about umpires and are they taking too much control? Are they, you know, they have a Twitter account now. They've complained about things. I think they had, they went some big rant about a player showing them up.

And yeah, it's been an interesting year. I suspect that umpires are trying to, they maybe are trying to call more attention to themselves than in years past because there's so much talk about there being robot umson. We should just eliminate them completely and blah, blah, blah. And so maybe they're trying to kind of defend themselves in their own way. Now, having robot umpires is not going to eliminate umpires. They're not going to be out of a job.

obviously they're still going to need field umpires. They're still going to need some umpire behind the plate just to call home and safe calls at the plate. So I kind of feel like maybe the umpires are just kind of puffing their chest out a little bit. They want to be heard. They want to be seen. It's not like we have not had renegade umpires in the past who have made games about themselves. Cowboy Joe West. Like there have been a lot of umpires who have kind of tried to put themselves in the spotlight a little bit.

I don't know that that's exactly what Mandy Gonzalez was doing here. Some people say, oh, he was exaggerating it. He was holding his eye like it hurt him a lot more than it did. I don't buy any of that necessarily. I don't think that he was overacting or anything. I do think, exactly like I said, I think that he took his mask off and something hit him in the face, and he was upset by that, so he ejected the guy. And I don't have a huge problem with that.

I do have an issue with the league coming down with the suspension here. I don't think that that's right. Broxton is appealing. I have no idea if that's something that's going, if he's going to win that or not. Again, from a perspective, just looking at it from a baseball perspective, the Mariners are a non-contending team who are trying to play younger players, and Keon-Broxton is 29 and hitting under 200, well under 200. It's not a tremendous loss in that regard.

Broxton's not a part of the team's future. This will just be two games that they'll give them a chance to play more of Jake Freely or Tim Lopes. So it's not going to be that huge of a deal in that perspective, but it is going to cost Keon-Broxton two days of pay that I don't think justified. I had to share this Mike Cameron tweet. If you don't, if you were on Twitter and you don't follow Mike Cameron, you should. Obviously, all of you listening are Mariners fans, so you'll remember Mike Cameron, and he's a hilarious follow on Twitter. So this is what he said about the Keon-Broxton incident. I'm just going to quote him right here, he said, global warming kept the

glove in the air that long, otherwise the cool air of the late evening would have knocked it down. MLB, at MLB, we all know equipment stuff should be a fine only. We can get 10 players to try this from that distance, and it wouldn't even. even be close. That I believe, I fully believe that if they got a bunch of dudes to try to throw a glove over their shoulder and hit an umpire from that distance, they would never be able to replicate it. It was a fluky freak thing. Um, and Broxton was showing frustration with a call, but he was not in the umpire's face. He wasn't doing any of that. It's a, it's a funny thing that happened that kind of unfortunately had a negative response. Um, I think that had it just been, oh, he got a

jack from the game, people would still be laughing about how this weird thing happened that caused a guy to get ejected. But then when the league turns around and suspends him, it kind of just puts a downer on the whole thing, which that's no fun. All right. Our final segment of the day, as his custom, is to do our birthdays. So today is August 28th, and there are no Mariners' birthdays for today. But because we did not record a podcast yesterday, we get to celebrate yesterday's birthdays. There were two of them for the Mariners. The first one is Jose Vedro. Jose Vedro turned 45 yesterday. Most Mariners fans, I think, will remember Jose Vidro. Most baseball fans might remember Jose Vidro, although I doubt they remember him for

his Mariners career. Vedro started at age 22 in 1997. He played with the Montreal Expos until they were no longer the Montreal Expos, and he was with them for the first two years as the Washington Nationals. He was a three-time All-Star. He won a Silver Slugger in 2003. Then he came to the Mariners, and things didn't quite go as well. He actually had a really good first year in Seattle. He was with them in 2007. He hit 314 with a 381 on base percentage. That was across it in full season, but he only had six home runs. He had 59 RBIs. So hit pretty well, but kind of an empty batting average. Didn't do nearly as well the next year in 2008. He played 85 games for them. He only hit 234. He did have seven home runs, so a little bit, a little bit of a power bump. But that was it for him.

He never reached the big leagues again and still had a very accomplished 12-year career. So we wish him a happy 45th birthday. next up is mike maddox the brother of gregg maddox maddox is turning 58 or excuse me he turned 58 yesterday he also had a very lengthy career he played 15 years in the big leagues he was primarily a left-handed reliever played for a bunch of different teams you're kind of your prototypical bouncer on the league lugy type guy he made a quick pit stop in seattle it was not an exceptionally successful one he was with them in 1997 he only threw 10 and two-thirds innings he walked more more guys than he struck out.

He gave up more earned runs than he walked or struck out. That's definitely not good. He had a 10.13 ERA. Not a great stint for Mr. Maddox in Seattle. But again, lasted 15 years in the big leagues had a career 4.05 ERA. Nothing wrong with that. So yeah, happy 58th birthday to Mr. Mike Maddox. Coming up on Thursday, I'll recap tonight's epic pitching matchup between left-handers James Paxson.

of the Yankees and Justice Sheffield of the Mariners, and we'll have another fun topic for throwback Thursday. Once again, I'm Andy Patton. You can find me on Twitter at at Andy Patton, S-E-A. You can find the Lockdown Mariners podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening, and go Mariners.