



ANAHEIM, Calif. – By Wednesday afternoon, Jake Marisnick had spent 10 days in the public maelstrom that had stripped context and neutrality from a horrific baseball play that also was undeniably an accident.

For those 10 days he’d been eviscerated on social media, kicked around on television, heckled at the ballpark of his youth and suspended by his league’s office. Then he had a baseball heaved at his neck. It wasn’t over, either.

There remained time to serve as the guy who sent catcher Jonathan Lucroy to the hospital. Twice, if you were to include the ensuing surgery. It is Lucroy who suffers first and longest. It is Marisnick who roots hardest for his recovery.

View photos Jake Marisnick was prepared for retaliation from the Angels for a violent collision earlier this month with catcher Jonathan Lucroy. (Getty Images) More





The noise, the mess, the rage, the threatening language, all the trimmings of the new day, does sometimes come with the job.

The alternative view – not unlike the camera shot from behind Lucroy that should absolve Marisnick of malicious intent – is that the game, any game, will place people and objects and outcomes on the same patch of dirt at the same time, and that collisions of body and spirit are inevitable. What is not predictable when the world passes judgment, when the question is what to do next, is how one responds when cast as the villain.

Marisnick, a 28-year-old Houston Astros outfielder from nearby Riverside, California, an Angels fan almost before he was anything else, a .229 career hitter in 640 career major league games, and a newcomer to the maelstrom, chose dignity. And honesty. And regret. Not for his efforts but for the consequences of them. He chose calm. He sifted his words not through a public relations man, but gave them freely from his conscience. He had not intended to hurt a fellow player. He had not acted recklessly. In fact, he’d sought to avoid contact, only to discover he’d chosen incorrectly.

And so it has been quite the 10 days for a guy whose transgression was diving for the inside edge of home plate rather than the outside edge, a 17-inch miscalculation made in a split second that, first, injured Lucroy and, second, became Marisnick’s to explain.

He has been the adult in the room ever since, from the tenderness he showed Lucroy immediately after impact to the herding of angry teammates when the retaliation finally arrived. On Wednesday afternoon, by then well into Day 10, the latest news being the league’s disciplining of the Angels’ pitcher who’d hit him on the R in Marisnick the night before, Marisnick would say he’d had no plan to defend himself beyond the truth. See, he’d not been a villain before.

“Never before,” he said.

He’d certainly never been a villain in Anaheim.

“Never,” he said. “Never thought in a million years I would be. That’s the crazy part.”

And here he is.

“At the end of the day my teammates know me,” he said. “Guys I’ve played with know I would never have an intent to hurt another player like that.

“Things happen on the field you hate to see. I was raised to play hard and keep your nose down and stay out of trouble. I was never a troublemaker growing up. I’ve never had anything like this happen before, being at the center of a controversy. It’s a weird place to be. But that’s life. Things happen. You deal with them. Hopefully you move forward.”

He added, “I hate what happened.”

He’d apologized to Lucroy, but couldn’t say if he’d been forgiven.

“You gotta ask him about that,” he said. “I feel good with how I’ve explained myself in talking to him. I would definitely, once things kind of blow over, like to talk to him, sit down and have a longer conversation about the incident.”

View photos Angels catcher Jonathan Lucroy suffered a broken nose from his collision with the Astros' Jake Marisnick. (Getty Images) More

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