Spring Training is here for MLB, which means that the baseball season is coming up quickly. It’s a time to get ready for the season and, as it turns out, remind your teammates they lost at fantasy football. Certainly, that last part is something the Toronto Blue Jays recently reminded Tim Mayza about.
Mayza lost the Blue Jays’ fantasy football league. So, for the first Spring Training game of the year against the Philadelphia Phillies, he needed to wear a uniform that had his losing record on the back while serving as the team’s bat boy.
You can watch Tim Mayza serve his punishment, here:
“And there’s Tim,” Dan Shulman, the Toronto play-by-play broadcaster said, clearly enjoying himself. Meanwhile, Buck Martinez joked that he’s gonna be known for his 4-10 fantasy football record for the rest of the season.
Shulman added that being a bat boy is “good motivation” to get in the lab and get a better team to avoid getting punished for a second season in a row.
Later in the game, the broadcast took the time to interview Tim Mayza about the punishment. While they did so, Mayza’s Blue Jays teammates threw gum and sunflower seeds at him.
During that interview, Mayza explained that he drafted Tyreek Hill in the first round of the draft. However, he ran into injuries and, admittedly, some mismanagement issues. So, even with an excellent first round pick, he ended up just 4-10 on the season.
Tim Mayza has spent his entire career as a relief pitcher for the Toronto Blue Jays, first getting to the majors in 2017. That makes him one of the longest tenured players on the team. Luckily, his career record of 20-7 is just a little bit better than his fantasy football mark.
This wasn’t the first time an MLB organization has used being a bat boy as a punishment for a bad fantasy football performance, either. Just last season, the San Francisco Giants sent Dave Flemming, the team’s broadcaster, onto the field during a regular season game to be a bat boy because of his own last place finish.
Tim Mayza was never going to play in this opening Spring Training game. Only a handful of MLB level players did play for either Toronto or Philadelphia. Mayza, who was being punished for his fantasy football team, wasn’t one of them. Instead, the Blue Jays used 11 other pitchers in a 14-13 loss.
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