There has been a lot of talk and a great deal more glowering and even a little bit of shouty shoving in recent months resulting from various big league teams’ vigilante enforcement of the game’s unwritten rules. All this, in the end, comes back to baseball’s starchier and more sourly coppish types defining Playing The Game The Right Way as something like “playing the game utterly without emotion.” Which might seem silly to those of us who are humans, but also is something big leaguers can work out per their own unwritten rules and in their own ways.
Koji Uehara, tender hugger
Nobody in baseball hugs like Koji Uehara hugs, which is a crying shame.
Ronald Martinez
But let’s take a moment to appreciate Boston Red Sox closer Koji Uehara, who has no time for that. Uehara has been dazzlingly great all year, and was fantastic en route to a five-out save in Game Five, but he has also been uniquely willing to experience his emotions on the outside -- witness, for instance, his extreme Motion Sickness Face in the dugout between the eighth and ninth innings of Game 5 of the ALCS. He is also, as has been noted, not afraid to be expressive in victory. And that is how the tenderest televised hug in baseball history came to be after Uehara retired Jose Iglesias to send the Red Sox back to Boston with two chances to win the AL pennant.
Strong men also cry.
h/t to @CJZero for the GIF
