Mound Visits: Derek Holland and Hunter Pence should wrestle at SummerSlam

Welcome to Mound Visits, your weekly recap of the best things you might have missed in baseball every week. This week brings us a Shohei Ohtani puppet, Hunter Pence, and Derek Holland going all out to get Brandon Belt to the All-Star Game, and a terrifying Mike Trout T-shirt night. Plus everything else you might have missed in baseball this week.

Have a favorite baseball moment from the week? Tweet it at me, and I’ll include it in next week’s column.

Just a week ago, we featured Tanner Roark for his mustache. His glorious, 70’s-style mustache that was easily mockable but also just plain magnificent. Only a few days later, he shaved it off and trimmed his hair for good measure. Not even the muttonchops survived.

Here, a wonderful all-star selection play in five acts.

Doolittle unfortunately won’t be able to pitch in the game since he was put on the disabled list shortly after the announcement. But congrats to the most online couple of all the baseball couples for these tweets.

Great news, Vlad Guerrero Jr. is just about back from injury. Even better, when he comes back he’s moving from the Double A New Hampshire Fisher Cats to the Triple A Buffalo Bison. Which means he is one step closer to getting a major league call up this year. It might be a few completely meaningless September games just to get a feel for playing for the Jays, but at this point who cares.

He’ll be healthy. He’ll be raking. He’ll be BACK.

As teams used all the social media strength they could muster to get fans to vote in the MLB All-Star Game Final Vote, one method stood out from the rest. Drastically. Let me introduce you to the “Ballot Brothers” AKA Hunter Pence and Derek Holland.

They are so committed, so fully in character, that you might not even know they were baseball players if you weren’t paying attention. Or, you know, if there wasn’t a baseball field in the background. Even better, they decided that one video wasn’t enough and they doubled down for another Ballot Brothers installment.

Brandon Belt didn’t end up winning the vote (that would be the Brewers’ Jesus Aguilar) but their above and beyond efforts did not go unnoticed. Can we get them into the SummerSlam lineup? Is it too late to try?

If they wanted to take this show on the road over the offseason, doing their best pro wrestler impressions and raising money for charity or something, I certainly would not object.

The Cleveland bullpen has been mostly atrocious this season. At this point we might even be able to drop the “mostly” from that statement. On Tuesday, Trevor Bauer threw eight scoreless innings. He had 12 strikeouts. Great outing!

His bullpen then completely failed him by letting up seven runs with two outs in the ninth to win 7-4. Later, it was revealed that part of that meltdown was due to an hilarious miscommunication.

Maybe use the phonetic alphabet next time, Indians.

You know how to make sure your bullpen has a minimal chance of blowing a game? Beating a team by 15 runs. It was 17-0 after the fourth inning. Pretty sure they had that one in the bag the whole time.

The Rockies couldn’t let the Indians enjoy the “scoring 18 runs or more in a game” spotlight all by themselves. They beat the Diamondbacks 18-2 on Wednesday, and had the game so in hand so early that Daniel Descalso was position player pitching in the fourth inning. The fourth inning. In the bottom of the fifth Diamondbacks pitcher German Marquez got a hit off of him, which means a pitcher got a hit off of a position player with a game barely half over.

Descalso pitched for three innings, and Alex Avila took over. Who, surprise, is also a position player pitching. He let up only one hit in two innings and had a four-pitch eighth.

Bless the roster decisions in this game.

Friend of the column Grant Brisbee broke this play down as only he can, but I had to include it so everyone can re-live the sheer improbability of this play all together. It’s Friday. You’re not doing work anyway.

Lucroy’s defense has been less than stellar this year (and I’m being forgiving), but this would have been at least salvageable if he limited it to the home plate bobble. But then the throw happened, and the walk off, and ... poor Lucroy. A comedy of errors that is funny for everyone but the A’s.

I still do not know who is truly responsible for this, or what Japanese TV show it is actually from, but with Shohei Ohtani back raking it’s only right that somewhere in the world a puppet mimicking his skills exist. Kneel before Ohtani Puppet, our new baseball overlord.

A Mike Trout T-shirt giveaway is a great way to market the best player in baseball, right? Especially when he’s been notoriously tough to promote?

Not like this, Angels. Not like this.

Ken Giles, who has been struggling on the mound as well as in the personality department lately, told Astros manager A.J. Hinch “F*** you man” when he got pulled from a game this week.

The Astros demoted him to Triple A the next day. That’ll do it!

You all know we love Bartolo Colon in these parts. This week, with him facing off against one of the best pitchers in the game in Chris Sale, there was a reason to love him even more. Bartolo has reached the point in his career when some fun facts seem near-impossible.

This is wild. This is just the blinking GIF as fun baseball fact. Bartolo will pitch forever and only have more and more facts like this associated with his career and I will love every single minute of it. Keep ‘em coming.

Have you ever seen more self-deprecating athlete engagement photos? Or someone be able to pull off overall shorts like this? If you didn’t like Kiké Hernandez before this, hopefully this remedies that. If you still don’t like Kiké Hernandez, then I’m not sure what to tell you. You might be beyond help.