What’s the most bizarre reason anyone has missed a Major League Baseball game?
Usually, questions like that lead to atypical injuries, but let’s exclude those. That leaves out Vince Coleman getting eaten by a tarp, Glenallen Hill’s painful spider nightmare and Joel Zumaya’s fall from playing “Guitar Hero” to name a few infamous moments.
Among those who missed a game due to something other than an injury, Pascual Pérez being late to Fulton County Stadium in 1982 because he got lost driving alone in Atlanta for the first time ranks highly, and fondly, in history.
But just in the past few days, another strange moment occurred that was neither injury-related nor involuntary.
St. Louis Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina willingly and intentionally missed two games so he could travel home to Puerto Rico to attend the championship game of a pro basketball team that he owns — the Vaqueros de Bayamón, or Bayamón Cowboys. They won the National Superior Basketball title for the 16th time in club history, which goes back almost 100 years.
A hundred years is a long time, so the Vaqueros appear to be a big deal in Bayamón, which is a suburb of the capital city of San Juan. The team apparently carries a big tradition in the community, which loves basketball (perhaps more than anyone in the United States realized).
Still, it’s Yadi. A 10-time All-Star and nine-time Gold Glove winner. One of the most respected players of his generation. A possible (probable?) Hall of Famer someday. With his first-place team in a pennant race, in the middle of August, he took a weekend off. He missed a couple of MLB games, which the Cardinals won without him but — who knows? — they could have missed their backup catcher and lost those games.
It’s hard to imagine Molina going to Cardinals brass and saying: “I’m taking the weekend off in the middle of the season to tend to my basketball team. See ya on Monday!” And they answered: “OK!” It’s funny in a way, because Stan Musial and others of previous generations needed second jobs to make ends meet in the offseason, and here comes Molina with a second job that conflicts with the regular season.
It’s also a good thing that MLB has become progressive in recent years when it comes to players missing games for certain reasons. Concussions and other injuries seem to be taken with more gravitas. If a player’s wife is having a baby, the player can go be with his family. If somebody important to the player gets sick or dies, the player can see the arrangements in person. These are the kinds of options that we all should have in our work (but don’t necessarily).
A lot of non-ballplayer types also have the ability to take a personal day or two, which is exactly what Molina did. MLB teams use the Restricted List (seemingly more and more in recent years, and not just because of COVID-related absences) to account for personal days. A lot of times, players go on the Restricted List without the rest of us ever finding out why.
It’s different in Molina’s case because we know the reason. And it’s an … interesting one.
Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol said Molina’s absence was not a problem in any way. Nobody on the Cardinals roster, none of Molina’s teammates, have come out to challenge the propriety of Molina skipping out or the wisdom of the team being cool with it. At least not yet. Molina said he didn’t really talk to the guys in the clubhouse about leaving them for two games, but believes they “understand” where he’s coming from anyway. Perhaps they do, but can you imagine what that conversation would be like in reality?
“You’re doing what now?”
The Cardinals not complaining (to the public) is not surprising. Yadi is treated differently, by everyone within and without, than any other St. Louis player. Fans revere him like they do many other Cardinals greats. Of course, you could also say that Molina is taking advantage of his place in Cards lore. Molina announced a year ago that this would be his final season, and it’s been peppered with record-breaking moments and little tributes that (almost) nothing could tarnish. Cardinals management isn’t going to get upset (where we could see) about Molina taking a couple of days off, not with tickets to sell and Molina-themed giveaways to promote at Busch Stadium before his final game.
And it’s likely that if fellow club legends Adam Wainwright or Albert Pujols wanted to take time away from the team for what they thought was an important reason, Cardinals brass would let them and nobody would complain (where we could hear). It’s just difficult to imagine either of them actually doing it for a reason like Molina’s.
Owning a pro basketball team and attending its biggest game of the year, for someone in Molina’s position, seems more along the lines of “hobby” than a quality-of-life issue. It’s something that Charlie Sheen’s character in “Major League II” got into trouble for. But Molina’s absence is also understandable (possibly) from a community standpoint, as he seems to indicate. Basketball is not only a side business for Molina. It’s also true the Cardinals could get by without Molina for a couple of days. He’s not the player he used to be. But, as Pujols has been showing, age isn’t everything.
Pujols will be retiring soon, too, but he’s doing it with a pep in his step. At age 42, he is having his best individual season in more than a decade. Set to retire at the end of the 2022 season, Pujols finds himself just seven home runs short of 700 for his career, a place only Barry Bonds, Henry Aaron and Babe Ruth have gone in league history. A likely Hall of Famer in a few years, Pujols would be heading to Cooperstown on a bounce.
Molina is not having the best season of his career individually, which is a nice way of saying he’s having the worst season of his career individually. He made the All-Star team a year ago but, for most of the past four seasons, his production has been below average. He’s obviously ready to quit playing because he kind of quit over the weekend.
While Molina’s career isn’t as accomplished as that of Pujols, he also is ending things with a bounce — the bounce of a basketball.