It’s not very often that you have an MLB player late to a game. It happens sometimes with last-minute call-ups, but almost never with rostered players, especially superstars. But that’s what happened this week with Angels pitcher/outfielder Shohei Ohtani.
It’s a really odd story that continues to develop and just seems to get funnier as time goes on. Ohtani was scratched from his start this week when he got caught in traffic on his way to play the A’s in Oakland. The entire Angels team reportedly got caught up in the traffic.
Angels’ manager Joe Maddon later explained what happened.
I guess there was an accident on the Bay Bridge, which caused Plan B, which meant they had to go back and take BART. And I guess there was an issue with the transfer on BART and that kept pushing him back. Shohei is pretty regimented and usually starts everything around 4 o’clock but he exceeded that by maybe an hour, so we started calling the audible to not pitch him tonight.
Funny enough, the BART Twitter account clapped back and said that they didn’t have anything running behind schedule. So it sounds like the Angels just made a little bit of an error in getting their guys to the game. They would go on to get dominated by the A’s and lose 5-0. Maybe next time call an Uber?
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