Credit: Fox Sports
By Sam Neumann on

May 28, 2016, was not a great day for large, beloved figures being taken out before their time.

Not only did Harambe — the 17-year-old western lowland gorilla whose death at the Cincinnati Zoo would consume the internet for the better part of a year — meet his end that afternoon, but Noah Syndergaard was ejected from a baseball game for throwing a 99-mile-per-hour fastball eight inches behind Chase Utley’s back.

To fully appreciate what happened that evening at Citi Field, you need to understand what Terry Collins was carrying into that ballpark. Collins had been managing the Mets since 2011, shepherding a roster through four consecutive losing seasons before the young arms arrived and everything changed at once. By May 2016, he was 67 years old — he had literally turned 67 the day before this game, on May 27 — and he had survived long enough in one of the more psychologically demanding jobs in professional sports to watch his team go to the World Series the previous fall. He was a man who had paid his dues twice over. He’d been fired by the Astros, more or less run out of Anaheim, spent years bouncing through coaching jobs and managing in Japan and working as the Mets’ minor league coordinator before finally getting another shot at the big chair.

This is the man who came charging out of the Mets’ dugout in the third inning of a game against the Dodgers, and you should understand that his fury was not a performance.

On Oct. 10, 2015, in Game 2 of the National League Division Series at Dodger Stadium, Dodgers infielder Chase Utley executed a takeout slide into second base in the seventh inning that snapped Mets shortstop Ruben Tejada’s right fibula clean. Utley was initially suspended for two games but appealed, which, under the league’s own rules, allowed him to keep playing while the process ran its course. Then the league, citing precedent and bending under the weight of its own inconsistency, dropped the suspension entirely. The official explanation was that similar slides had not been punished in the past, which was true, and which meant the league had essentially decided that the established tradition of breaking infielders’ legs was too entrenched to interrupt now.

The Mets won the series anyway — they took the Dodgers in five games — but the injustice of it had lodged somewhere in the collective chest cavity of the organization and stayed there, unresolved, throughout an entire winter and a World Series loss to the Royals and all of spring training and the early weeks of 2016.

When the Dodgers came to town that May, Collins gathered his pitchers and told them, essentially, to be smart about it.

“We’re not going to say to them, ‘Don’t do anything,’ but you’ve got to understand that we don’t need anybody hurt and we don’t need anybody retaliated against,” Collins said. “I don’t need anybody hurt, and I don’t need anybody suspended for stuff.”

Collins also knew his guys, and specifically he knew Noah Syndergaard, who was 23 years old and built like someone had asked a sculptor to render the concept of “strikeout” in human form, and who had already spent the better part of a World Series postgame press conference explaining that his first-pitch fastball to Alcides Escobar — which sailed over Escobar’s head and into the backstop on the very first pitch of Game 3 — was exactly what it looked like.

“My intent on that pitch was to make them uncomfortable, and I feel like I did just that,” Syndergaard had said. “If they have a problem with me throwing inside, then they can meet me 60 feet, 6 inches away.”

This was not a man known for letting things go. So when Syndergaard wound up in the third inning with Utley at the plate and fired a 99-mile-per-hour fastball eight inches behind his back, the sequence of events that followed had a certain inevitability to it.

Syndergaard’s response to being ejected by home plate umpire Adam Hamari was to turn his palms upward and stare, while telling crew chief Tom Hallion that he was “just trying to throw a f*cking fastball.”

“That ain’t gonna happen,” Hallion told him. “I knew you were gonna say that, but that ain’t gonna happen. I mean, that’s the wrong time to do it, that’s all… Our ass is in the jackpot if we don’t do something there, I’m just telling you that.”

It was the most collegial — and unique — possible way to tell someone that their alibi wasn’t going to work.

Then, Terry Collins came out of the dugout.

What Hallion did next is, genuinely, one of the more underappreciated pieces of in-game umpiring in recent baseball history. He saw Collins coming, and he made an instantaneous calculation that the correct move was to physically intercept him before he reached Hamari, who was relatively young and who did not need to be the target of whatever was about to come out of Collins’ mouth. Hallion essentially stepped in front of Collins and said, “Talk to me. Terry, talk to me,” and absorbed it.

Collins informed the assembled umpires of his feelings about the ejection in terms that were, by the standards of these moments, operatic. He told Hamari he was a certain compound hyphenated noun. He told Hallion that the whole thing was a particular category of “f*cking bullsh*t” and that the Mets deserved “a shot.”

“Tommy, you gotta give us a shot,” he said, over and over, as if repetition might achieve what logic could not. “You gotta give us a shot, Tom!” And what he meant, underneath all of it, was: Chase Utley broke our guy’s leg and faced no real consequences, and now MY pitcher gets run immediately for a pitch that missed? We are owed something here. Give us something.

“I can’t control that, Terry,” Hallion said, at one point. “You know as well as I do where I stand on the whole f*cking-ing situation.”

“Terry — listen — I’m telling you, our ass is in the jackpot now, OK? I’m just tellin’ ya.”

The game itself continued without either Syndergaard or Collins, and the universe, which has a flair for the dramatic, arranged for Chase Utley to hit two home runs in the Mets’ 9-1 loss. The man whose takeout slide had broken Ruben Tejada’s leg seven months earlier faced no real suspension, and then stood in against a 99-mile-per-hour fastball fired eight inches behind his back and walked out of Citi Field that night as the story’s protagonist.

The reason the video endures, a decade removed from the third inning of a meaningless May game, is not the injustice at its center. It’s because of Tom Hallion. Hallion is extraordinary in it, operating on multiple levels simultaneously, acting as a crew chief, a diplomat, a therapist, and some kind of philosophical interlocutor all at once. He lets Collins talk. He engages seriously with the argument and clearly explains why it doesn’t change the outcome. He doesn’t escalate; he doesn’t back down, because if he had, his ass would really be in the jackpot.

Thank goodness Hallion chose to wear the microphone for Fox on that day, which is how all of this got leaked 18 months later.

A phrase coined in a small town in upstate New York, passed down from a mother to her tardy son through the mouths of siblings on bicycles, somehow found its way onto a baseball field in Queens and lodged itself permanently into the lexicon of the sport. Everyone’s ass has been in the jackpot ever since.

About Sam Neumann

Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.

View all posts by Sam Neumann