Last week, the Arizona Diamondbacks and Los Angeles Dodgers were on hold because of a swarm of bees that had taken hold on the net at Chase Field. The whole fiasco postponed play for two hours and required a pest control technician, Matt Hilton, to depart his son’s tee-ball and humanely remove them all as “Holding Out for a Hero” played in the background and fans cheered him on. Everything ended with him throwing out the ceremonial first pitch and becoming a legend in the annals of baseball lore.
That has to rank high as one of the strangest delays to an MLB game I have ever seen. It’s a fever dream, a weird instance where the status of a nightly NL West match-up was decided by a regular dude doing his regular job in a very irregular locale. The least bizarre part about it was the bees themselves.
Bees and baseball games have mingled on more than a few occasions. On the one hand, I get it. You’re playing in an outdoor ballpark with grass on the field and, depending on the stadium, other plants dotted around. There are going to be bees that wander into a game. What’s surprising is how often swarms have led to delays. This is not an “If I had a nickel for every time bees halted a baseball game, I’d have two nickels,” situation. Spring Training in Arizona, for example, is especially vulnerable to the black and yellow buzzkills. I’d like to specifically focus on one day in the past few years when the bees again reigned supreme over baseball.
May 6. The year of our lord 2019. The Cincinnati Reds are hosting the San Francisco Giants in what will ultimately be a relatively pointless early season matchup between two kind of bad but not terrible teams that will finish well shy of the postseason. None of that matters at this time, though, as hope is still alive and these two are ready to play ba… and there’s a swarm of bees.
Just as the Reds began running onto the field, bees had converged around home plate, making play too treacherous in their presence. Then-Reds catcher Tucker Barnhart and then-Reds pitcher Anthony DeSclafani waited back while some of their teammates took their positions mostly unaware of what was happening until they looked back and saw the chaos unfolding. Unlike the Dodgers-Diamondbacks game, the bugs begin swarming everywhere. On the Reds broadcast, the commentators are left to marvel at the bees flying in every direction as they spread around the dugouts. Fans behind home plate start heading for the hills amid the infestation and, at one point, Thom Brennaman comments that they’re beginning to reach the press box too. All the players, fans, and everyone else could do was stand by and watch as their ballpark was briefly taken over.
Do you remember that episode of The Simpsons where a swarm of Africanized bees takes over Mr. Burns’s brand-new basketball stadium? That’s what comes to mind for me when looking at scenes from the Reds-Giants game. They’re not violently stinging or quickly erecting honeycombs on the outfield wall, but it certainly looks like a hostile takeover. There was no hope of a Matt Hilton saving the day either. The bees were simply too scattered and too erratic to stop. Likely, they had a hive that was getting overcrowded somewhere in the ballpark and they began swarming on their way out to find a potential new home. It would take 18 minutes for play to resume.
This wasn’t even the first time the Reds dealt with bees. Heck, it wasn’t the first time the Reds and Giants handled bees together. On April 17, 1976, the two teams would again be beset by a swarm of around 5,000 to 10,000 per the New York Times that took 35 minutes to resolve and left over a dozen people with stings. Descriptions of the event mimic the 2019 delay, with the black and yellow brigade spreading around the stadium as everyone waited to start. Sadly, it didn’t end well for the bees (or the Giants, for that matter) as the insects were sprayed to make way for an 11-0 drubbing by the Reds.
One thing that the 1976 team, which landed in the middle of Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine era, didn’t have on their side with their bee encounter, however, was Derek Dietrich. The moment of the whole 2019 debacle that I remember most was Dietrich coming out in the middle of the swarm in a makeshift beekeeper get-up including Nick Senzel’s white button-down shirt and a sprayer he happened to find in the mascot closet to “help” the umpires by “calming down” the bees. His little heroic act involved jogging around in front of the dugout with the sprayer wand in hand and unbuttoning his shirt for the umpire to show off his bling.
2019 Derek Dietrich is a special player. For one month, he transformed into Barry Bonds with a .304/.400/.841 slash line, a 202 wRC+, and 12 home runs in May after an already solid April. That one white-hot stretch accounts for over 1/8 of his career longballs (84). He fundamentally reinvented himself from the steady hitter with unremarkable power that he’d been to that point.
He also had more sauce than ANYONE in baseball in the early going. He’d pimp his homers, stare at them as they sailed into the distance, and keep his top button undone for peak stud energy. This bee-forsaken game feels like a moment where he helped thrust himself into the spotlight as one of baseball’s main characters for a brief time. He had just hit four home runs through the first three games of the Giants series and strutting out as dollar store pest control to entertain the fans in a game where he wasn’t even in the lineup was his victory lap.
Between the ever-spreading swarm right at the start of the game and Dietrich’s performance, it was a day to remember (and another day to forget for the Giants who got stung 12-4) for how strange it was. I know I’ll have a growing nostalgia for this era of baseball as I grow older and this is a story that I know will have me abuzz whenever I reminisce on the late 2010s.
Bunting For Power 