Former MLB player calls out White Sox ballpark for ruining Yoshinobu Yamamoto's perfect game

Los Angeles Dodgers starting pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto was four outs away from the 25th perfect game in MLB history on Saturday at Rate Field. That’s when a routine grounder ticked off Mookie Betts’ glove and turned the perfect game bid into a no-hit bid. 

Dodgers fans know that it didn’t end up mattering, but that hasn’t stopped them, and the rest of baseball, from cycling through some of the grief stages. And, of course, a former big leaguer has shown up on a popular podcast with a new suspect. It’s not Mookie. It’s the infield dirt.

The White Sox infield, not Mookie Betts, is to blame for Dodgers' lack of perfection

The take comes from Trevor Plouffe, nine-year MLB infielder turned host of Jomboy Media's "Talkin' Baseball," and it’s an opinion he’s more qualified than most to make at least. When he says he’s “not the biggest fan of that infield,” it carries more weight than the average hot take.

On the show, he pointed to the dirt itself and even the color, to show how hard it is to pick up a ball on that surface. He says it happens there more than it should. To be fair, he didn’t fully let Betts off the hook, saying he has to make the play, but the gist was pretty clear. He was blaming the ground, not the guy.

Because Betts is a standup guy, he wasn’t having it. He refused every available excuse. He said it was just a routine grounder that he missed. He said he was fully aware of the situation and refused to say the situation got to him. There’s something almost comical about a podcast going to bat harder for the guy than he went for himself. Though maybe it would have been different if Yamamoto had finished the no-hitter. 

If you don’t remember, Chase Meidroth hit a 1-1 pitch on the ground to short. The ball glanced off Betts’ glove, and Santiago Espinal couldn’t recover the deflection in time. And so Meidroth was the first baserunner of the day, and it actually snapped a string of 45 straight batters retired dating back to his previous start. This is the true tragedy. He was just one out away from the longest streak in MLB history, which was held by Yusmeiro Petit with 46. He is tied with Mark Buehrle now for the second-longest streak in baseball history.

Plouffe has a point here. The detail that the last hop jumped higher than Betts expected gives his theory some teeth, and Rate Field’s infield doesn’t look great. It’s not like Betts is a bad defender. He was able to move from right field to arguably the hardest spot on the diamond, and he has looked better at shortstop than ever this season. This was one bad hop on one bad day in a really bad spot.

It can all be true at once. The infield’s tricky. The hop was tough. An elite defender makes that play probably 98 times out of 100. Plouffe’s handing Betts a softer landing than the moment probably deserves, and it’s certainly softer than Betts is willing to take. 

The punchline here is that none of it mattered. Yamamoto carried the no-hitter into the ninth when Tristan Peters ended it quickly with a home run to end the no-hitter and the shutout. So, whether you blame Betts, the field, or the ghosts of Petit or Buerhle, it was all gone by the time the dust settled anyway. What’s left is another outstanding outing for Yamamoto and a standing ovation in an opposing ballpark, which is pretty cool.

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