When Corey Dickerson commemorated Vladimir Guerrero

Boy, sometimes it sure is nice to have instant replay. Because in real-time, nobody in the booth or in the stands seems to have realized Friday night just how odd Corey DIckerson’s double really was ...

How fitting, though, on the same day that Vladimir Guerrero announced his official retirement. Guerrero was his era’s most most famous and successful “bad-ball hitter” and undoubtedly swung at hundreds of pitches in the dirt. I can’t find any evidence, but I have some vague memory of Guerrero actually hitting a home run off a pitch that bounced.

My memory’s probably faulty. But Guerrero did hit a bloop single off a bouncing pitch in 2009, and this grainy video seems to show Ichiro hitting a bouncing pitch while he was still playing in Japan. I’ve seen a few other players do it over the years. So it does happen. But doubling off a bouncing pitch? That’s pretty rare. Dickerson was lucky, real lucky. He’s also pretty good, batted .371 with Colorado Springs this season and is batting .300 on the nose as a rookie with the Rockies. We’ve now seen him do something interesting that he might never do again, but he’s worth watching for other reasons.