The list of Psycho Rich moments is as lengthy as it is vulgar. Like the time he flung a container of Hi-Chew candies across the bench during the 2018 playoffs. Or the time he unleashed a string of invective against the Mets so profound that teammates fled from the dugout to the clubhouse so he couldn’t hear them laughing. Or all those bullpen sessions at spring training at Camelback Ranch, when his swearing colors the morning blue.Or the time when Diamondbacks reliever Archie Bradley pitched inside when Hill was trying to bunt. Hill put the pitch in play, and then did something Roberts had never seen before: He hollered at Bradley as he sprinted down the line, “Throw the fucking ball over the plate!”
Or the time the combination of on-field microphones and a nearly empty Tropicana Field picked up Hill’s reaction to a bunt hit against the shift. “Fuck!” he screamed. “Fuck! Fuck! Goddamnit!” Fellow pitcher Ross Stripling noted that Hill did not react when the next batter grounded into an out because of the shift. “We still wear him out for that one,” Stripling said.
Or the time he chucked his batting helmet and clipped veteran first baseman David Freese. The accident snapped Hill out of his frenzy.
“Oh, I’m so sorry, David!” Hill said.
“No, I love it,” Freese assured him.
His teammates understood the totality of his devotion. This was a man, after all, who urinated on his hand in an attempt to repair a nettlesome blister. “Whatever it takes,” Hill said.
Off the mound, his instincts otherwise lean toward benevolence. During the 2017 postseason, he fashioned a sign that read “Make Some Noise” and held it aloft from the dugout. A few weeks later in the World Series, he was so repulsed by Houston first baseman Yuli Gurriel’s racially-charged gestures toward Yu Darvish that he twice stepped off the mound at Dodger Stadium so fans could jeer Gurriel.
― mookieproof, Friday, 6 September 2019 02:12 (four years ago) link