MLB RAW
Pete Alonso says he could easily “put someone in the hospital” after getting reverse Dom Zimmer'd by Stubby Clapp
ICYMI, things got weird in St. Louis on Wednesday. A night after hitting Pete Alonso in the head—the second time the Mets’ slugger has been drilled in the dome this year—the Cardinals came back and plunked JD Davis on the foot. Though innocuous on its own, the Mets, who have been hit by 19 pitches this season, the most in the majors by a massive margin, reached their breaking point. Down five in the bottom of the 8th, reliever Yoan Lopez sent one up and in on the Cardinals’ Nolan Arenado. Lopez said it wasn’t intentional. The Mets swore up and down they were still trying make a comeback. But the Cardinals, self-appointed arbiters of baseball ethics, did not care for the taste of their own medicine one bit, and quickly emptied the dugout and bullpen.
At first glance, it appeared to be mostly jawing with a pinch of chest-bumping for flavor, but tangled within the mass of limbs, a fascinating sub-plot emerged. Around the 24 second mark of the above video, you can see Cardinals first-base coach Stubby Clapp appear to suplex back-to-back Home Run Derby champion/car crash survivor/lumberjack mountain man Pete Alonso into the Busch Stadium dirt. The fact that it was the 49-year-old Clapp doing the ass whooping—a reverse Dom Zimmer situation, if you will—immediately drew headlines across Major League Baseball.
If you're Alonso, you have to know better than to pick a fight with a guy rocking this sunglasses-goatee combo. His entire life has been leading to this moment. When he wakes up, he trains for it. When he goes to sleep, he dreams about it. He doesn't read books. He doesn't eat sushi. This is his reason for being and you simply cannot match that intensity.
Tactical errors aside, after the game Alonso was asked what it felt like to get his butt kicked by an old man, and his response was just as glorious as the violence that preceded it.
First of all, it doesn’t sound like Clapp squared up to Alonso and took him down mano-y-mano. It doesn’t even really sound like Alonso was trying to fight and then suddenly some guy named Stubby was draped all over him like a new set of curtains. As Alonso tells it, Genesis Cabrera grabbed him by the back of the collar (that’s a 15-yarder in the NFL, kiddos). Then, when he was off balance, Clapp table topped him and took him to the ground. Not a great look for the Cards if true, but Alonso, like any big kid on the playground who just got touched up in front of his classmates, made sure to let everyone know he could have beat him up if he wanted to.
“I’m a big, strong guy,” Alonso told reporters, putting on one of the best angry-guy-acting-calm performances we’ve seen in ages. “They don’t know my temper, they don’t know what I can do. If I wanted to put someone in the hospital, I easily could, but I was just out there trying to protect my guys.”
Whoooooeeee. Just excellent stuff across the board, and the best part of all of this macho man-child idiocy? It’s not even close to done. The Cardinals head to Flushing for a four-game series on May 16th. Watch ya neck, Stubby. Alonso might forgive, but Queens never forgets.