A bizarre situation played out in the top of the ninth inning between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Athletics on Thursday afternoon at Sutter Health Park, and A\u2019s broadcaster Dallas Braden couldn\u2019t believe what he was seeing.<\/p>\n
JJ Wetherholt \u2014 a highly regarded prospect who\u2019s having a terrific rookie season \u2014 was on deck for the Cardinals with Victor Scott II at the plate. While hitters drifting away from the designated on-deck circle is very common, Wetherholt took that to the extreme and wasn\u2019t too far away from the left-handed batter\u2019s box, where Scott stood.<\/p>\n
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Braden, a color commentator for NBC Sports California, called it out.<\/p>\n
\u201cI mean, at this point, Wetherholt is in the batter\u2019s box. My goodness,\u201d Braden said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I\u2019ll be honest,\u201d Braden continued. \u201cFrankly, I\u2019m surprised that nobody has said anything. Because that\u2019s egregious.\u201d<\/p>\n
Later in the Scott at-bat, Wetherholt was finally ordered to move closer to the on-deck circle, with first-base umpire Bill Miller delivering the request.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s about time,\u201d Braden said. \u201cIt\u2019s about time. My goodness. I mean, technically, he\u2019s got about eight at-bats today.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are a few reasons why that\u2019s indeed a pretty ridiculous tactic from Wetherholt.<\/p>\n
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For one, well, that\u2019s not a great place to stand for safety reasons! Sure, the kind of foul ball that it would take would be a very rare thing at that angle, but it\u2019s possible, and Wetherholt would have no time to react.<\/p>\n
Wetherholt is also able to time the pitcher, and from such a close distance and angle, making it a pretty unfair advantage ahead of his plate appearances. Additionally, while the average major-league pitcher tends to be very locked in mentally, seeing another player in full stance, timing each of your pitches near home plate, can be an added distraction. It\u2019s just an advantage that the opposition isn\u2019t supposed to be allowed to have.<\/p>\n
So, Braden\u2019s commentary was fair, and at least the umpiring crew eventually noticed the same thing.<\/p>\n
The post Dallas Braden calls out \u2018egregious\u2019 move by on-deck batter JJ Wetherholt<\/a> appeared first on Awful Announcing<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A bizarre situation played out in the top of the ninth inning between the St. Louis Cardinals and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":295937,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[107872,12729,102,107869,104,103,107870,34773,107871,107873],"class_list":["post-295936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-awful-announcing","tag-bill-miller","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-braden","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news","tag-jj-wetherholt","tag-st-louis-cardinals","tag-victor-scott","tag-wetherholt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295936"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295936\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/295937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}