Braves Manager Wellman Out-acts Meryl Streep in the Performance of a Lifetime

Posted on June 7th, 2007 in Humor, In The News, Sports

As some of you may have seen, this last Friday — June 1, 2007 — was a day that will live in baseball infamy. Phillip Wellman, the manager of the Mississippi Braves (a minor league baseball team), went on a major tirade after being ejected from Friday night’s game.

The Wellman Show started after one ball in the bottom of the third. He burst out of the third-base dugout, flunge his hat and proceeded to get right in the face of homeplate umpire Brent Rice. And while the Braves are a minor league team, this was no minor league rant.

After having his say in a nose-to-nose conversation with the homeplate umpire, Wellman moved on to homeplate and started kicking dirt on it. Unsatisfied with his work, he then dropped to the ground, scooped a mound of dirt onto the plate and outlined a new, bigger home plate in the dirt!

Then giving his goodbyes to the homeplate ump, Wellman walked down to third base and gave the third base ump, Rusty Barrett, a good talking to before kicking and ripping the base from the ground. He continued his performance by marching towards second base, when in a moment of brilliance tossed third base into center field.

That looked like it could be the end. And many would have been satisfied. But fortunately for us Wellman was unrelenting.

In a truly spectacular encore performance, Wellman began crawling from mid-infield to the pitchers mound (around 1:12 in the video). Once there on his hands and knees, Wellman took the pitchers’ rosin bag and lopped it toward the homeplate ump as if it were a grenade.

After a poof of rosin rose around the home umpires feet, Wellman went back to second base, pulled it from the ground, grabbed third base from the outfield and headed toward the clubhouse at the back of the stadium.

Before concluding the festivities for the night, Wellman waved to the crowd before leaving.

A few thoughts come to mind, but the first was that Major League Baseball needs a few more good men like this! Wait, I’m a Chicagoan – we already have two: Chicago Cubs manager Lou Pinellia and Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillan. Anyway, I’m still all for bring him up to the Majors!

Need More Baseball (or perhaps grenade paraphernalia). Check these out!