Socks up, spirits high: Cardinals pitcher finds fun and victory after rain delay
Sonny Gray would be among the first to acknowledge that he’s particular about his routine.
The bevy of weather delays, then, which have beset the St. Louis Cardinals’ ace this season have posed a real challenge. When a pop-up storm flooded parts of Busch Stadium on Sunday night and another delay set in, Gray found himself seeking to simplify.
He settled into his chair. He watched golf on the clubhouse television with his teammates. He took a wardrobe suggestion to heart. And then he went out and spun seven innings on Sunday Night Baseball, earning a series victory over the Chicago Cubs and a new appreciation for a new mindset.
“At first I feel like I let [delays] kind of like consume me and be like, ‘this is messed up,’” Gray acknowledged. “You know, it’s raining. Then it was like, the more I started being able to do it and the more it happened, I was like, ‘well, I can’t control this. Might as well find a way that works.’”
His ways work for him, and the Cardinals have been more than willing to accommodate over his two seasons in St. Louis. His first bullpen session in his first spring training was almost jarring in its volume, listening to Gray not only call out pitches and fire them with an assortment of grunts and groans, but also praising his catcher and chastising himself.
Watch any of his starts, and you’ll see long parallel lines drawn in the mound dirt from the edges of the rubber down the slope of the mound; Gray digs them in with his foot, marking a proper landing zone.
He prefers not to pitch the first game of a series on the road in order to adjust to his new environment. He is not shy about alerting his manager when he feels he’s running out of gas. He has more than a dozen years in the big leagues and knows what he is and isn’t about, and there’s work done to shape the universe to fit him.
It was jarring, then, that he was spotted warming up on Sunday – and then pitching seven innings – with his socks pulled up high and faux stirrups revealed. It was so stunning, in fact, that it necessitated a post-start debrief, and even he had to acknowledge that it was a relevant part of his evening.
“Miles [Mikolas] told me that when it’s hot, to wear your socks up, because it keeps cooler,” Gray explained, clearly still somewhat skeptical of the rationale behind his fellow starter’s advice. “Then I just kept saying that it was taking me back to my roots … I wore my socks up when I was a kid, I wore my socks up all through high school, I wore my socks up all through college.
“I feel like that makes me feel like a baseball player, not a pitcher, you know what I’m sayin’? So I was like, I’m a baseball player right now, just making baseball plays.”
Getting past the hump of consistency and into a zone of familiar discomfort might seem like a small thing, but it also might’ve made all the difference. If the delays and the dragging nights were wearing him down, who’s to say that a little shift couldn’t lighten some of Gray’s load? Catcher Pedro Pagés gave voice to thing that everyone knows but is sometimes shy to say, acknowledging that he plays a “kids’ game” for a living. And sometimes, it’s OK to play.
“It’s definitely hard, man,” Pagés said. “We take our job very seriously, we go out there and want to compete every day…If we could simplify that and just keep going out there and having fun with it, we’re going to be in a good place.”
The Cardinals opened their series hosting the Colorado Rockies just three and a half games back of the last Wild Card slot, with only the Cincinnati Reds between them and the currently-holding-on New York Mets. They’re hovering around .500 and sold off pieces at the deadline, the front office fully signaling expectations to come in for a soft landing ahead of another long winter of building and rebuilding to come.
It will be difficult to track down the postseason. The Cardinals lost a series to the historically atrocious Rockies last month; there are no wins guaranteed, even against the worst team in the big leagues which is challenging to be the worst team ever in the big leagues.
There’s no harm, though, in giving it a shot. One way to do that would be to stay wound up, high strung, dialed in on routines, tightly coiled through the tension of what’s most likely shaping up to be a third consecutive season out of the playoffs. Or, they could allow themselves to relax and pursue success in parallel with fun, giving in to some of that childlike whimsy.
None of that necessarily comes from how they wear their socks, but it didn’t hurt.
“We have fun,” Pagés said. “We just hang out, put some music on, play some cards, play some ping pong. Whatever we can just to keep our body loose and our mind relaxed. Because once that game starts, it’s full go.”
