Elly De La Cruz added a job title on Sunday afternoon at Great American Ball Park.
The Reds shortstop noticed an injured bird stranded on the field during the fourth inning against Milwaukee. The bird appeared unable to fly, having hurt a wing, and it was sitting in play with nobody willing to touch it.
De La Cruz was serving as designated hitter, so he was not even on the field. He came out of the dugout anyway, walked past several hesitant teammates and coaches, and picked the bird up with his bare hand.
Nobody else wanted the job
The video the Reds posted tells the whole story. A group of professional athletes stood around a small injured animal doing the universal body language of “someone else should handle this.”
Ballplayers and birds have a complicated history. Randy Johnson famously obliterated one with a fastball in spring training. A bird landed on Zac Gallen mid-throwing session a couple years back. The general rule in a big league dugout is that if wildlife enters the field of play, you wait for a groundskeeper.
De La Cruz did not wait. He picked it up, carried it off, and got a warm ovation from the crowd for it.
Then he went and hit
The rest of the afternoon went well for him. De La Cruz homered and drove in four runs as Cincinnati beat Milwaukee 12-8.
Four RBIs against the team with the best record in baseball is a good day at the office. Doing it after handling animal control duties in the fourth inning is a better one.
Why this is worth writing about
Baseball has an image problem with younger audiences that a thousand pace-of-play committees have failed to solve. What actually works is players being visible, specific human beings instead of interchangeable uniforms.
De La Cruz is one of the handful of players in the sport who does that naturally. He is 6-foot-5, he runs like a track athlete, he hits balls 470 feet, and he stops mid-game to help a bird because nobody else will.
The Reds are not going to the playoffs this year. Their shortstop is still the most watchable player in the National League, and Sunday was a small demonstration of why.
No word on whether the bird received further medical attention. Given how the rest of De La Cruz’s day went, it probably had good luck coming.
Sources
- https://larrybrownsports.com/baseball/elly-de-la-cruz-rescues-injured-bird-on-the-field/769033
- https://x.com/Reds/status/2096648132582900124
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
