I absolutely love the ridiculousness of professional baseball. It’s a sport, sure, but it is also a professional endeavor. It’s something that grown adults are partaking in so that they can make money, build a career, live their lives, etc. Yet, at the same time, professional baseball is home to events and happenings that are far from professional. I’m not talking any of the seedier stuff this time out, but rather the stuff that makes you go, “Really, this is a thing that just happened?”
While a recent incident involving Esmil Rogers wasn’t that high up on the baseball ridiculousness scale it did get me to thinking about this topic again. Rogers is currently pitching for the CTBC Brothers of the Chinese Professional Baseball League. He’s been in Taiwan for a couple of years now and has been fairly mediocre. This article isn’t about Rogers’ talents as a professional pitcher in the year 2021. Rather, it’s a quick aside about the game where Rogers threw 141 pitches.
You may be thinking, “what’s so ridiculous about a starter throwing 141 pitches in a game?” It’s not the 141 pitches on their own that are ridiculous. It’s the fact that Rogers threw them in a suspended and then finished game. What that means is he threw 27 pitches on July 31st before the game was suspended due to weather-related issues. Fast forward to August 19th and the game resumed with Rogers still on the mound and he would throw an additional 119 pitches on that day. 119 plus 27 equals 141, only on two separate days.
It is, to me at least, fairly ridiculous that I can sit here and write about someone throwing a massive number of pitches in the same game that took place months apart. The only thing that would have made this story better would be if Rogers had thrown something like 200+ pitches in the game. Maybe, just maybe, the Taiwanese weather can cooperate next season and that dream can become a reality. The professional sport of baseball is full of plenty of ridiculous and far-fetched occurrences just like that and, if we’re being honest, they help to make us love the sport as much as we do.
Lead photo courtesy of Unknown – CPBL Stats
