When the news arrived late the afternoon of April 7, it became imperative Twins staffers immediately find Joey Gallo.
Several minutes later, Gallo — who is expected to be activated off the injured list for Wednesday’s game at Boston — was surrounded in the cafeteria by manager Rocco Baldelli, bench coach Jayce Tingler and the team’s vice president of communications, Dustin Morse.
Eight days after they argued a case to league scoring officials backed by 100-plus seasons of statistical evidence, Major League Baseball delivered the ruling for which Gallo waited. MLB determined Gallo’s groundball to right field in his first plate appearance of the season March 30, a play originally determined to be an error, was instead now a base hit.
When he heard the news, Gallo, who’d been animated whenever discussing the play the previous week, excitedly said, “F— yeah.”
“People don’t understand, every hit is f—ing vital,” Gallo said. “Every hit. You fight your life out for every hit. That’s why you see guys, when they hit a dribbler, sprinting down the line because, if it’s a hit, you want a hit.”
The push for the overturned result is what the Twins hope will be the first small victory in a much larger battle for Gallo. He’s with the Twins as a result of the worst season of his career, a campaign in which he batted .160/.280/.357 with 19 home runs in 410 plate appearances for the Yankees and Dodgers.
Whereas before the 2021 trade deadline, it appeared Gallo was headed for a massive free-agency payday this past offseason, he instead settled for a one-year deal worth $11 million with the Twins.
The team’s pitch centered on Minnesota as a good landing spot for Gallo because of an opportunity to work with hitting coach David Popkins and the slugger’s familiarity with Tingler and general manager Thad Levine, both of whom were with him in Texas.
Essentially, the Twins are making a concerted effort to keep Gallo in a good place, and pushing MLB to change the March 30 ruling was another prong. What largely made Gallo passionate about the case is, symbolically, it was another instance in which he’d had a hit taken away by shift, a play that isn’t supposed to occur after MLB banned shifts starting this season.
“It’s good for him to get off to a good start and not get that hit taken away,” Tingler said. “Especially with, you think the shifts are going to get eliminated … so the way it came up.”
Gallo has hit a single in a lower percentage of his career plate appearances than any active player in baseball. Yet earlier this month, Gallo collected a single while on the IL.
Gallo originally expected to be awarded the hit in the second inning March 30.
He pulled a hard grounder past the second baseman and into the outfield grass, where Royals right fielder MJ Melendez was standing, about 30 feet closer in than normal. Or roughly where many MLB teams chose to play second basemen against left-handed sluggers last season, before the new shift rules banned the practice.
Melendez scooped up the grounder, drew back his arm to make the throw to first base and dropped the ball as Gallo sprinted through the bag. He was safe, but just moments later the official scorer in Kansas City ruled it an error. Gallo was 0-for-1 on the play, the same as if he’d struck out.
It had no real effect on the game whatsoever, but it just didn’t sit right with anyone.
“It’s terrible for the game if they just let that slide,” Gallo said. “And that’s not just because it was me. If a ball goes to the outfield, I don’t care where the outfielder is playing, it’s a hit. It doesn’t matter if you move him in or not.”
“I remember him coming into the dugout and complaining,” outfielder Max Kepler said. “He would have beat that out regardless of whether he fielded it or not, cleanly.”
Instantly, the Twins put together a case to present to the MLB office on Gallo’s behalf, believing it could also serve as a precedent for future plays that could become a lot more prevalent with the new shift limitations’ forcing teams to get creative.
In need of help researching the history of similar plays, the Twins turned to Hans Van Slooten, who literally built the Baseball Reference Play Index, now known as Stathead, without question the sport’s most amazing data source and research tool.
As luck would have it, he also works for the team.
Van Slooten joined the Twins in 2018 to help build out their internal data and research tools, among other things, as a senior data engineer. Along with assistant director of baseball operations Nick Beauchamp, Van Slooten and several other members of the Twins front office found that an error had never been called on a groundball fielded by a right fielder in modern MLB history.
And yet Gallo wasn’t shocked when he heard that seemingly incredible fact.
“I figured it would be me,” Gallo said. “Weird things happen with my career.”
Indeed, it takes a special kind of hitter — and a career filled with weirdness — to motivate other teams to invent ways to get around MLB’s new shift limitations just to be able to get an extra body in short right field. Or deep second base, depending on your point of view.
“He’s been one of the guys that’s been hurt the most by the way that the game has progressed over the last five or 10 years,” Baldelli said. “His numbers, and a few of these left-handed hitters’ numbers, look less than where they simply would have at any other time in the history of baseball.”
MLB reversed the call April 7, announcing that the error on Melendez had been changed to a single by Gallo. There was nothing routine about a 9-3 putout.
Baldelli couldn’t hold back a smile recalling the look on Gallo’s face when a few members of the coaching staff told him the news, which raised his batting average from .222 to .278. From bad to good, without anything actually changing.
“I was excited about going and finding him, and telling him,” Baldelli said. “We chased him down.”
“They were very in on it,” Gallo said. “Like, ‘that’s bulls—, that’s a hit.’ They care about their guys. So they were just as excited about it as I was to get a hit.”
And that carries extra meaning for Gallo after a 2022 season in which he was frequently booed at home by Yankees fans.
“If you get a few hits early in the year, there’s a little bit more of a comfort level,” Gallo said. “There are a lot of different stats. That’s the thing. It’s hard if you focus on it. You can really get caught up in the ups and downs of it.”
Now, next time he looks up at the scoreboard, he’ll be a hit away from .300 instead of a strikeout away from .200, and that can make a huge difference for a hitter who experienced failure for much of last season, losing confidence.
“It matters,” Gallo said. “I really don’t like to pay too much attention to it. I don’t like to look at the scoreboard at all. A lot of guys will tell you, it scares you a little bit. Sometimes you think you’re playing better than you are, then you look up and you’re like, ‘Wow, I’m not playing good.’”
For one day at least, Gallo batted 1.000. Or more accurately, infinity. One hit, no outs and not even an at-bat.
“They all matter, they all count,” Gallo said. “And it’s always exciting to show up and win an appeal, because you usually never win appeals against MLB.”
(Photo of Joey Gallo on March 30: Jay Biggerstaff / USA Today)
