The bizarre batting career of Santiago Casilla is the best anti-DH argument -

It’s possible that Santiago Casilla could have been a good hitter.

This isn’t based on his major-league career, although Casilla did finish with a higher on-base percentage than Tony Gwynn, Willie Mays, Joe Morgan and Joe DiMaggio. The possibility of secret genius is one that’s raised by his minor-league career. In 2002, a 21-year-old Casilla took 14 plate appearances for the Arizona League A’s. He was 6-for-13, with two doubles, a triple, five RBIs and a walk. He even stole a base. His final slash line: .462/.500/.769.

It’s possible that Santiago Casilla could have been an amazing hitter.

But there just aren’t enough opportunities for relievers to ply that particular trade. After that ’02 season, Casilla went to the bullpen and he didn’t get another plate appearance in the minors. It took nearly a decade for him to hold a baseball bat in a professional capacity again.

Giants fans are familiar with the Bumgarner Argument against the designated hitter, which posits that the 2.8-percent chance that Madison Bumgarner hits a baseball to the moon is worth all of the uninspiring pitcher at-bats you have to suffer though to get there. If the DH in the National League is really here to stay, though — and it looks like it might be — it’s not the Bumgarner Argument that sways me. It’s the Casilla Argument. Our pitcher-hitting hero got five plate appearances in the major leagues, and four of them were transcendent baseball experiences.

Taking these moments away from baseball fans is a way to make baseball less bizarre.

Baseball is the best sport precisely because of the bizarre.

Let us remember the moments of glory that Casilla gave us in four of his five plate appearances.

Plate appearance No. 1: Aug. 14, 2011

José Ceda was something of a Great Pumpkin for Cubs and Marlins fans. Even before the strikeout rate exploded, the right-handed reliever was putting up outrageous strikeout numbers in the minors. In 2008, he struck out 42 batters in 30 Double-A innings. The year of his showdown against Casilla, he struck out 52 batters in 39 Triple-A innings. He had a live arm and a nasty breaking ball; a perfect combo for a relief prospect. His only problem is that he couldn’t throw strikes.

If Ceda had a comp as a prospect, it was to a young Jairo Garcia. There was cosmic symmetry happening, apparently.

When Casilla stepped to the plate in the top of the ninth, the Giants held a three-run lead. Closer Brian Wilson was unavailable because he was dealing with a sore shoulder and had pitched the day before — he’d pitch just five more times in a Giants uniform over the next 13 months — so Bruce Bochy wanted to keep Casilla in the game. I’m sure there was a conversation in the dugout that went something like this:

“When’s the last time you hit?”

“Uh, 2002.”

“If you swing the bat, even as a joke, I will fill your locker with spiders. Angry ones.”

“Got it, Skip.”

Casilla did not swing. More than that, if he had turned around to the crowd, and announced, “I WILL NOT SWING THE BAT” while wearing a jersey that read “NOT GONNA SWING” instead of “Casilla,” it wouldn’t have been more obvious that he was not going to swing. My former colleague and current nemesis Jeff Sullivan described Casilla’s approach as being a “full Pedroia away from home plate,” which was about right.

And yet.

Casilla walked on four pitches in a plate appearance that ended with him looking around, wondering if he had just been pranked. It was pure magic, and it came in the ninth inning of an unremarkable game. It got the Jon Bois treatment several years later:

What did it cost to get here? Hundred of at-bats from pitchers who didn’t want to hit and acted like it. In 2011, Giants pitchers got 355 plate appearances and those led to 41 hits, 33 sacrifice bunts, 19 walks, one hit-by-pitch and one sacrifice fly. Which means that in 260 plate appearances, the pitchers did exactly what everyone was expecting, with 119 strikeouts included for good measure. If you figure 2.5 minutes per PA, you arrive at close to 11 hours of wasted time. I personally spent about 10 hours that year watching pitchers be useless at the plate. That was the cost and you shouldn’t minimize it. That’s a lot of boring.

It was worth it, though. And that’s what would really be taken away from the sport if at least one league doesn’t continue to let pitchers hit. Do you know what Casilla’s walk will be replaced by? A lot of fun things, generally. Large baseball men doing the baseball things they’re paid for, hitting the ball far and helping their teams win or lose. There will be brilliant DH moments to celebrate and eventually there will be an exceptionally silly baseball moment created by an NL DH. Someone will trip on their own batting helmet in the year 2034, assuming there’s still baseball, and it will become something that baseball fans won’t shut up about. It will be almost as perfect and silly as the Casilla plate appearance.

But it won’t be as perfect and silly. This PA stands alone as one of the most ridiculous things that can happen in professional sports. A pitcher who can’t throw a strike to another pitcher — a batter with a back foot that’s practically in his own dugout — has no analog. It’s like a basketball player forgetting how to dribble or a football player thinking that they get six points for going out of bounds.

I’ll miss it so much.

Plate appearance No. 2: May 21, 2012

Of all the million-plus words I’ve written over the last 20 years, only a few of my articles have had a shelf life of longer than five minutes. This recounting of Casilla’s plate appearance is, for whatever reason, one of the rare articles that readers still seem to remember and bring up years later. I’ve never really understood why.

Now, though, I realize that it’s the mythology of the first plate appearance that made this at-bat seem so important. In Andrew Baggarly’s recap of the previous at-bat for the Mercury News, he wrote that “Everyone had a good laugh — except Casilla,” and you can be sure that he was needled by his teammates incessantly for months. Casilla had likely developed a large chip on his shoulder about his batting prowess. And next to that chip was a cartoon devil with a pitchfork that whispered, “The next time you’re at the plate, you’ll show them. That’s right. You won’t be scared. You’ll show them.” Because Casilla swung the bat like someone who was desperate to prove he could swing a bat.

And, friends, it was even funnier.

I apologize for the 2012 technology that apparently forced me to make GIFs on a Commodore 64, but this will give you an idea of what I’m talking about.

I set up a page of these GIFs because they’re all delightful in different ways. It’s a swing that you or I would take. It has some of the basic ingredients of a baseball swing — the swing path is mostly level, and the front foot is going forward, or, at least not backward — and yet it’s clearly not the swing of a professional hitter. Or a hitter on any organized team after the age of 13 or so.

This at-bat was notable because it featured the swings of an elite athlete trying to salvage his wounded pride. It was like watching an actor being told that he can’t perform his own stunts and responding with, “OH, YEAH?” before falling two stories into an abandoned refrigerator and getting trapped.

Casilla’s career OBP dropped to .500 after he struck out, and it was hard to see him ever swinging a bat again.

Plate appearance No. 3: Sept. 14, 2012

The first time you should have realized that the Giants were going to win the World Series again was when Barry Zito threw a shutout in Coors Field. The second time you should have realized it was when Casilla got a danged hit with the bases loaded.

Casilla was told not to swing in his first career plate appearance, and it led to him getting roasted. He swung as hard as he possibly could in his second career plate appearance, and it led to him getting roasted. He came up with the bases loaded in a relatively close game (the Giants were leading, 5-1), and there was absolutely no way that he was going to avoid getting roasted. Absolutely no way, that is, unless he did something good.

Even designated chirper Jeremy Affeldt was impressed. “I tell ya, he had a flat bat. He’s got an RBI. He’s hitting 1.000. I tip my hat,” he told reporters after the game, but only after he lobbed several jabs and quips Casilla’s way. Doesn’t matter, though. The man who was mocked by nerds in two different viral articles in consecutive seasons had an RBI. You know who doesn’t have an RBI? Derek Holland, who’s started 38 games in the National League. Giants legend Kevin Gausman has started 27 games in the NL, getting 61 plate appearances, and he doesn’t have an RBI.

Santiago Casilla, though? He’s got one. Drove in Buster Posey, which is notable because that was his hitting guru. Kind of.

“Go the other way,” he said. “I try to be like Posey.”

The best part might be Jon Miller’s call, in which he is very aware of the possibility that the Diamondbacks have a chance to gun Casilla out at first. The only reason they didn’t was because Paul Goldschmidt was playing 30 feet in front of home plate, which he should have been. There was no way it was going to go farther than that.

And then it did. It went all the way into right field for a hit and an RBI, and I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a swing that was so saturated in vindication and redemption. You can keep your José Bautista bat flip; this was far more cathartic.

Three plate appearances, three hilarious, brilliant baseball moments. These were meteors lighting up baseball’s night sky, unexpectedly burning bright and going away just as quickly. Every Casilla plate appearance was an event. What could he possibly do for an encore?

Plate appearance No. 4: Sept. 17, 2012

Nothing of note.

Just three days after the RBI single, Casilla got a chance against the Rockies in the bottom of the eighth. There was a runner on first and two outs, and the Giants were up by just one run, 2-1. It was strange that Bochy wouldn’t pinch-hit for him in that situation and it was even stranger after Casilla faced just one batter in the ninth before he was pulled to play lefty-righty matchups.

It’s strange until you remember that Casilla had a .500 career average and .667 career OBP. Maybe he was exactly the right guy for the job. Maybe the Giants should have used him as a pinch-hitter, really.

Casilla saw four pitches in the at-bat, and he didn’t swing and miss at any of them. In fact, after that strikeout against the Brewers, he would see 13 pitches in the majors and swing at four of them, making contact every time.

Other than that, though? Just a harmless grounder to second. He retired the only batter he faced in the top of the ninth and the Giants held on to win.

It would appear that the hilarity was gone for good.

And then ….

Plate appearance No. 5: May 21, 2014

Why would Bochy tell Casilla not to swing in that first plate appearance, the one with four straight balls? Because you don’t want the pitcher to get hurt. You don’t want him leaning over the plate as a fastball runs into his pitching hand. You don’t want him tweaking his oblique with a rotten swing.

But most managers will let their pitchers swing, if only because those kinds of instances are rare. What you don’t see very often, though, are pitchers who run down the line like a hellhound is chasing them. Even the pitchers who can hit know that they shouldn’t do that.

Considering the Giants won the World Series this season with Casilla as their closer, we can laugh about this now. At the time, though, this was when the laughter stopped.

The Giants were leading, 5-1. There were two outs and nobody on. There was absolutely zero reason for anyone short of Billy Hamilton to bust it down the line in that situation. Posey wasn’t going to sprint those 90 feet. Because he needs those hamstrings for his day job, as do most baseball players.

After the game, according to his teammates (via Alex Pavlovic), Casilla was reportedly in great spirits and making fun of himself. But he’d miss a month with a Grade 4 hamstring strain and you can guarantee that Bochy wasn’t laughing along. One of his more reliable relievers blew up while trying to leg out a single with a four-run lead, and it cost him. The Giants would blow three saves before he came back, all of them coming in a single nightmare series against the Rockies in San Francisco. It’s that series that led Bochy to go with a closer-by-committee arrangement, which eventually turned into Casilla being the full-time closer.

Which means that without this play — this one, right here — Sergio Romo might have kept his job for a little longer. He was still an effective pitcher in 2014, after all, and that Rockies series was the exception, not the rule, to his season. If Casilla stays healthy, maybe he eases Romo’s workload in June, which allows him to get some of those Rockies hitters out and keep his job.

Remember that Casilla appeared in nine games that postseason, allowing exactly zero runs. If Romo is still the closer, what happens? The Giants had to scrap to even get that postseason slot, too, so even a late meltdown by Romo could have had dire consequences.

Is it possible that Casilla knew all this, and that’s why he busted it down the line?

Is he a warlock?

It certainly makes more sense than the current explanation, which is that a reliever ran as hard as he could in a meaningless spot because he felt like it. Feels like “warlock” is bordering on Occam’s Razor at this point.

Either way, it was the end of the Santiago Casilla batting extravaganza. And he’s the perfect example of why NL fans overwhelmingly, in poll after poll, have told Major League Baseball to stuff their DH. You would think the fans who have spent so many hours watching the worst of the worst would be eager to embrace the change. But they’re not. They’ve seen the weirdness, and it speaks to their soul.

Imagine that you’re in a Las Vegas casino. A billionaire stands next to you at the roulette table and about once an hour he hands you a chip. Sometimes he hands you a stack of chips. Every time, he says, “You can have this, with only one string attached: You have to put it on green zero.” You take the chip because it’s free money, and most of the time, it doesn’t pay off, just like you might expect.”

Every so often, though, green zero hits. And even if you’ve played one chip or a stack of them, you’re richer than you were before. You’re not worrying about the time you wasted watching the doomed spins of the roulette wheel. You’re just basking in the glory of an isolated, unexpected victory.

That’s what pitchers hitting is. The only cost is your time. There will eventually be a payoff, and you’ll be glad for it. And it makes the whole endeavor worthwhile.

Just consider the batting career of one Santiago Casilla. He made us laugh. He made us laugh even harder. He made us cheer. He made us gasp. He did more memorable things in five plate appearances than several Giants hitters did in their careers.

You’ll get used to the DH, and there will eventually be an unforgettable DH moment for the Giants. A player will win a game with a homer or he’ll triple into the gap and lumber around the bases as they clear, and you’ll be happy to watch him. But the weird will go away. We know this because the Giants enjoyed one of the strangest offensive careers the sport has ever seen.

Casilla might have been a terrific hitter if given a chance. Maybe, maybe not. But we know that he was an absolutely special one, for whatever reason, and stories like his will be missed.

(Photo: Christian Petersen / Getty Images)

ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57kHFvbnBhanxzfJFpZmluX2d%2FcMDHnmSboaqWv7OxjJuYrayZo7Rur8CrnJ6qXaSzbr%2FAp6uimZekeqSt0qKjpZldnsBuwMeeZJudo6l6orrTomSdoF2Wv6jBzJ6lrWc%3D