MILWAUKEE -- Tensions rose in the middle innings of the Brewers’ 8-5 loss to the Cardinals on Saturday at American Family Field.
It started in the bottom of the third inning, when Caleb Durbin hit a ground ball to third base. A routine throw over to St. Louis first baseman Willson Contreras retired Durbin, but after Contreras caught the ball and recorded the out, his back foot moved toward the baseline and brought him just enough into Durbin’s running lane to cause a collision.
Both players left the play without injury. Durbin shrugged off the play postgame, saying, “Happens, but luckily, no one got hurt.”
Added Contreras: “I wasn’t trying to get him hurt. He was running inside the line, I stayed there, and I have all the rights to stand on the bag. And I don’t think it was anybody’s fault, to be honest.”
However, Rhys Hoskins took issue with what occurred and said something to Contreras from the dugout. Contreras responded from near first base. Hoskins didn’t go into much detail about what exactly was said between the two, saying postgame, “We were just talking about playing first base.” He did confirm he had a problem with what happened at first, though.
“I think that was obvious,” Hoskins said.
An inning later, Hoskins stepped to the plate with two outs and the bases empty against Cardinals starter Andre Pallante. After swinging through a low slider for strike one, Hoskins appeared to be hit on the left hand by a 95 mph sinker and looked frustrated. Asked if he felt he was hit intentionally, he simply said, “No.”
But the tension between him and Contreras rose again once he got to first base (though it was apparently mostly one-sided).
“[Hoskins] didn’t say nothing to me,” Contreras said. “I was expecting him to say something, but he was looking away. I said, ‘Look at my face. Say it to my face, whatever you were saying from the dugout.’ He was looking away and said, ‘Get off the base.’ Then, I said, ‘Push me,’ and he didn’t, so it was all good.”
The frame ended one batter later, and then Contreras stepped to the plate with one out in the top of the fifth -- against his former teammate Jose Quintana. The first pitch was a changeup low and away, which Contreras took for a ball. Then, Quintana threw an 88.5 mph four-seamer inside, hitting Contreras around his left shoulder.
Quintana claimed it wasn’t intentional, noting he had thrown away from Contreras in his first two at-bats -- only one of nine pitches in those at-bats was inside -- and wanted to pitch him inside.
“We are really close,” Quintana added. “We played [together] for a long time in Chicago. He knows it wasn't on purpose.”
Contreras seemed to believe it was intentional, but he didn’t take issue with Quintana. He even ran to pick up the ball, placed it back into Quintana’s glove and tapped him on the arm.
“To be honest, I wasn’t expecting it from Quintana,” Contreras said. “I caught him for [four] years, I know him very well. He’s a great guy, great person and a great teammate. That’s probably why he stood up for his teammates. I have nothing but respect for Quintana. We’re nice. I got the ball to him, and I said, ‘We’re fine.’ We’re not going to have any beef about it, and it’s done.”
One more moment came in the top of the ninth, when Contreras extended the lead with a solo home run. As he rounded first base, he looked back into the Brewers’ dugout, keeping the stare going while he turned to trot toward second. His younger brother, Milwaukee catcher William, homered in the bottom half of the frame, marking just the second time a set of brothers homered in the same inning as opponents since 1900, joining Rick (Boston) and Wes Ferrell (Cleveland) from 1933, per Elias Sports.
Milwaukee mostly brushed off the incidents. Regarding the hit-by-pitches, specifically, manager Pat Murphy said he didn’t think anybody got hit on purpose during the game. However, he also noted that if that kind of thing were to happen, “That’s player stuff.”
“They work their own stuff out,” Murphy added. “I think that's the health of the game is that you let players, especially veterans like that, handle what they handle and react and do that kind of stuff the way they do. There's going to be tempers at games. That's all part of it. We just want to make sure everybody's safe. If we feel like somebody's throwing at us on purpose, the umpires will take care of it.”
Fortunately, the situation didn’t escalate past warnings being given out by the umpires. But these rivalry games tend to raise the tension.
“It's Cardinals-Brewers,” Murphy said. “There's always going to be high emotion. Players handle that stuff. That's the way it goes. We're not looking to fight, that's not our thing, but we're not going to be pushed around either.”