MiLB: Squirrels Entertainment Spreads Inside the Baselines

It wasn’t long after the “drag queens” finished smoothing the basepaths. It was after the great peanut race, where the peanut made it two wins in a row. Somewhere in between, there was a parade of hot dogs tossed to the waiting fans.

It was a typical Saturday night at the Diamond. A nice crowd of maybe 6,700 was enjoying the between-innings entertainment provided by the Richmond Flying Squirrels.

The new Double-A baseball team had promised an atmosphere where it was just fine to “go nuts.” And it’s always delivered since arriving in Richmond last season.

The baseball? Well, that would take care of itself. It certainly didn’t hurt that the parent club (San Francisco Giants) were winners of the 2010 World Series.

In that case, we may have been caught by surprise when Richmond manager Dave Machemer  delighted the crowd with a bit of showmanship himself.  The likes of Earl Weaver, Billy Martin and Lou Piniella would have been equally impressed.

Richmond and Altoona were tied  1-1 in the home half of the 10th inning. A double-play ball which wasn’t turned fast enough apparently left Richmond still alive with a man at first and two out.

But because the runner raised his hands sliding into second, interference was called and the inning was over.

Or so we thought.

Machemer had other ideas. The normally mild-mannered first-year Richmond skipper bounded out of the dugout in the direction of the accusing umpire. You see, rarely is a runner called for interference sliding into second on a force play.

“Once in a while you’ve got to rally the troops,” Machemer said later. “We weren’t trying to show up anybody, but evidently, I disagreed with the call."

“I wanted to vehemently display that,” he added, “If it was going to get me fired up, maybe it would get them (his players) fired up.”

Machemer displayed a variety of body language which excited the crowd. After about a five-minute tirade, he received the ejection he was looking for. Going quietly wasn’t in the cards.  Machemer’s antics caused him to slam his helmet to the ground before managing to get in an off-balance kick, which sent it some 20 feet towards second base.

The tirade, or some would say a “calculated risk,” paid off in the end.

“We went on to win the ballgame,” Machemer added. “It was a pretty good win for us.”

Confrontations between umpires and field managers are nothing new. Older fans recall Earl Weaver cussing out umpires at old Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. New York Yankees manager Billy Martin had quite an act himself, while more recently, Lou Piniella loved to kick dirt on umpires.

Perhaps the most amazing baseball tirade occurred when Mississippi Braves manager, Phil Wellman, was obviously auditioning for something. What it was, nobody knows.