Why Did the Pirates and White Sox Benches Clear? 6-Foot-7 Oneil Cruz Was Ready to Go
Nothing ends a baseball fight faster than a 6-foot-7 outfielder walking into the middle of it.
That is what the Chicago White Sox got Wednesday at Rate Field when Oneil Cruz came strolling into a seventh-inning scrum between his Pittsburgh Pirates and the home team. Cruz did not throw a punch. He did not need to.
The whole thing started on a slide. White Sox second baseman Sam Antonacci came into second base with his elbow up and caught Pirates second baseman Brandon Lowe. Lowe did not appreciate it, the two started jawing, and within seconds both dugouts and both bullpens were emptying onto the infield.
Standard baseball choreography from there. Lots of pointing, lots of shoving, plenty of guys grabbing teammates who did not particularly want to be let go.
Then Cruz arrived.
He pushed into the middle of the pile and just stood there, calm, letting everyone around him do the math. A member of the White Sox held him back, which is a generous description of what was happening. Antonacci kept barking at Lowe, but he was clearly picking his spots, and Cruz was not one of them.
Antonacci is listed at 5-foot-11. Cruz has eight inches and a significant weight advantage on him. Whatever anybody was thinking about doing in that moment, the presence of the tallest position player in the sport almost certainly talked them out of it.
Order got restored quickly. No ejections, no punches landed, nobody left the field bleeding.
That is usually how these things go, and it is worth being honest about that. Baseball bench-clearing incidents are mostly theater. Two guys exchange words, everyone jogs out to show solidarity, coaches and umpires separate the parties, and the game resumes. The real fights are rare enough that people still talk about them years later.
This one had an extra element, though, and it is why the video traveled. Cruz is a true physical outlier in a sport full of normal-sized humans. When he steps into a crowd of baseball players, the scale looks wrong. He towers over the scrum in a way that makes the whole confrontation feel a little silly.
Cruz has been must-watch for exactly this reason since he arrived in Pittsburgh. He has hit some of the hardest-tracked balls in Statcast history and thrown some of the fastest recorded throws from the infield. Now he has added crowd control to the resume.
The Pirates won the game 4-2, and they did it in unusual fashion. Pittsburgh used relievers exclusively on the mound, a full bullpen game, and still came out on top on the road.
For a Pirates club that has spent the season looking for reasons to feel good about itself, a bullpen-game win plus a viral moment from your biggest star is a decent Wednesday.
The White Sox, meanwhile, are left with a slide that accomplished nothing and a reminder that starting something with Pittsburgh means eventually dealing with Cruz.
Nobody wanted that. Smart of them.
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.
