You talkin’ about Cuba?
We’ve heard of the phrase ‘going to bat for someone’ but in a baseball game in Cuba on Monday night between Matanzas and Villa Clara, it seems that Demis Valdes took that old saying a bit too literally.
He stormed the mound after pitcher Freddy Alvarez (who had already hit another batter earlier in the game) hit Victor Mesa Jr., the son of manager Victor Mesa with a fastball, at which point Valdes decided that he’d had enough. He storms the mound, takes a swing with the bat at Alvarez’s head which luckily misses, and then all hell breaks loose.
As Ben Badler of Baseball America writes, there was plenty of talent involved in the brawl and not just a bunch of no hopers. Victor Mesa Jr.is one of the “top young players on the rise in Cuba”, while the pitcher, Alvarez, is the Cuban national team pitcher. The national team is, of course, managed by Victor Mesa, so we reckon that hitting the manager’s son with a fastball might not do his chances of selection any good.
Hat-tip to SB Nation for the video
