Go to a baseball park on any day you choose and you’re almost always going to see something you’ve never seen before.
Like Saturday in a Conference USA game in Ruston when the Sam Houston catcher had apparently tied the game at 5-5 after he hit a ball way, way over the fence in left with two out in the eighth inning and then — was credited with only a triple, and was called out, and saw the inning end …
… because he failed to touch home plate.
A “homer” that would have tied the game ends as a triple with a mythical “ghost runner” forever stranded at third. Louisiana Tech held its 5-4 lead in the ninth to win.
The catcher is Walker Janek, by all accounts one of the best all-around dudes on the Sam Houston team and one of the best players in the college game. A junior, he’s expected to be one of the first catchers chosen in the big-league draft.
But he missed home, the only base with an extra side, five instead of four. The most critical of all your bases.
Doesn’t matter that he just barely missed it, stepping over the plate to celebrate with a waiting teammate, missing the plate’s front edge by, as replays showed, the smallest of margins.
Had he been wearing a size 13 instead of a 12-and-a-half, the game would have been tied.
Happens to the best of us.
Such a rule almost seems to go against the spirit of things. He did, after all, hit it way, WAY out. BUT …
Rules is rules. Brings to mind a phrase so familiar that it’s part of the American lexicon: “You gotta touch all the bases” or “Touch ’em all” or “Let’s touch base on this later.”
If a guy forgets to do one thing, he “forgot to touch all the bases.”
It’s the little things, especially so it seems in baseball.
If Glinda the Good Witch of the North had been there, and had this been Oz and not Ruston, maybe Janek could have tapped his cleats together three times and been given a do-over.
But such is sports. And life. Break a rule, break a heart.
Garrett Belding knows a thing or two about touching home. He played high school ball around Dallas, was a middle infielder for Eastfield College in Mesquite, then came to Tech to be an equipment manager and is now the program’s Director of Player Development, part of a Bulldog support staff second to none.
Why he came back to Tech? Home. Where his daddy grew up and where his granddaddy, Billy “Doc” Belding, served as Tech’s athletic trainer during football’s national championship days of the early 1970s. Lots of tears shed and smiles of precious memories shared last spring when Doc passed away.
Garrett Belding knows about home. He was a little boy in Ruston. Knew his way around campus and around the old Love Field and Aillet Stadium and the field house.
For this stage of his career, he’s home where he knew he belonged.
So it should have come as no surprise that Saturday as Janek rounded third, Belding, leaning on the dugout rail by Tech coach Lane Burroughs, was looking closely when Janek made a little hop over the plate and …
“In that split second,” Belding said, “I’m thinking, ‘He didn’t touch home. For whatever reason, he didn’t touch it.’ And then I start losing my mind…”
And then Burroughs gets in on it and the players erupt and then the home fans start yelling and standing (as if EVERYONE saw it!, and imagine me typing a laughing face here) and Tech made the proper appeal and the home plate umpire, who pictures reveal was looking right at the plate as Janek crossed, signaled “Out.”
Replays proved him right.
“I didn’t expect that, but I saw it,” Belding said, “and then it’s disbelief, and then you start to try to re-convince yourself you saw it, and then I decided that this is the hill I’d die on, because I was SURE he didn’t touch it.”
Within the next half minute, the Bulldogs were successfully appealing the play, and the ump’s fist was in the air. Tech still held the lead. They’d end the weekend series in first place in CUSA.
“I wasn’t really looking for it, and I wouldn’t say I was the only one who saw it, but I know this,” said Belding, a future coach as sure as sunrise. “However long I’m in the game, however long I’m a coach, I will never NOT watch a guy run the bases, and I’ll always make sure they step on home plate. Always.”
Tech’s designated hitter and ace reliever Ethan “Toolbox” Bates (he’s got ’em all, every baseball tool you need, plus he can fix your four-wheeler), got the save that afternoon after pitching a scoreless ninth and leads the college game with 14 this season, and he leads all active players in career saves with 24.
But the unofficial save Saturday, a big one, went to Garrett Belding.
And Sunday afternoon, when Tech leftfielder Adarius Myers hit a three-run walk-off homer for a 12-9 win and the series sweep, you can guess which base his celebrating teammates gave him plenty of room to touch.
Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu
