BOSTON -- Both benches briefly cleared after the seventh inning of Saturday’s 7-3 Red Sox win over the Astros at Fenway Park after Houston reliever Héctor Neris exchanged words with Red Sox third-base coach Kyle Hudson.
“Something funny,” Neris said with a smile when asked what he said to Hudson. “It’s part of the game.”
When Carlos Narváez grounded out to shortstop for the final out of the seventh, Neris came off the mound and appeared to mouth something to Hudson as he crossed the field from the third-base coaching box towards the home dugout. Hudson kept running, but then stopped to yell something back to Neris as both benches -- and bullpens -- rushed the field.
The incident appeared to stem from a sequence in the bottom of the seventh, when Neris, with Boston shortstop Trevor Story at second base, intentionally balked Story to third base. Neris said he wanted to simply concentrate on the batter and not whether the runner could have been stealing pitch grips or pitch locations from second base.
“Maybe yes, maybe no, but I wanted to stay concentrated,” Neris said. “In this situation, I don’t think about it. I want to do what I’m feeling in the moment, and this is the reason I moved him to third.”
Neris had just given up an RBI double by Story that scored Rob Refsnyder, who was standing on second base at the time. That prompted a visit from pitching coach Joshua Miller.
Story tried to be coy when asked why the benches cleared.
“I’m not sure, you’d have to ask those guys,” he said. “I was just walking back to the dugout and just saw everyone come out at that point.”
The umpires quickly restored order and play continued without incident, but both organizations have been penalized for stealing signs in years past.
The Red Sox were penalized in 2017 for transmitting sign information from their replay review room to individuals in the dugout wearing smart watches. The Red Sox were fined, and Commissioner Rob Manfred then issued a memo to all MLB clubs stating that any future such violations would be taken “extremely seriously by my office” and that the general manager and field manager would be held accountable.
After a report surfaced in 2019 detailing a sign-stealing scheme the Astros used during parts of the 2017 season in which someone banged a trash can to alert hitters of which pitch was coming, the team was penalized, including a $5 million fine and loss of Draft picks.
What’s more, general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch were suspended by MLB and eventually fired by the Astros.
The sign-stealing scandal rocked baseball and stretched beyond the Astros. The Red Sox parted ways with manager Alex Cora, who was implicated as one of the masterminds of the sign-stealing scheme in the report when he was the Astros’ bench coach and suspended through the 2020 postseason. Cora was re-hired by the Red Sox prior to the 2021 season.