NEWSLETTER
Pitchers: don’t punch stuff in frustration. And if you absolutely HAVE to do it, at least use your non-throwing hand.
That advice doesn’t help much if you’re punching immediately after a pitch, though, since your pitching hand is the only ungloved hand you have. Sometimes, you just want punch the stupid … mound:
That punch broke Plesac’s hand, and now the Cleveland Guardians will be without one of their starting pitchers for a long time.
I guess ballpark engineers should’ve really thought about placing a dangerous and hard and punchable surface right there where the pitcher is throwing. I kid, of course, because who punches the mound?
Remember, Plesac is also the guy who broke his thumb “aggressively ripping off his shirt” after a game. So he’s not a stranger to truly bizarre appendage breaking.
Plesac, 27, is set to be arbitration-eligible for the second time after this season, with two more arbitration years to follow. That tends to be the range where a team like the Guardians starts thinking about shopping a player, but I would suspect that this incident, together with the previous one, together with Plesac’s more pedestrian performance this year (4.39 ERA, 4.50 FIP; roughly matches what he did last year, too) aren’t going to make for much of a market.
Cubs fans probably also remember that Plesac was one of two Cleveland pitchers who violated pandemic protocols back in 2020 so they could go out in Chicago when the team was facing the Cubs.
