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Baltimore Orioles closer Craig Kimbrel, now in his 15th season, reached another milestone in his storied baseball career when he closed out the team’s 9-7 win on Saturday night.
It was his 422nd career save, tying Billy Wagner for seventh on the all-time list, putting him just two behind John Franco at 424 for sixth on the list.
Unfortunately for rookie outfielder Colton Cowser, he wasn’t aware that it was a significant game for Kimbrel, until it was too late.
For you see, the final out of the game was recorded when Kimbrel induced Royals catcher Salvador Perez into flying out to Cowser, who had come into the game to replace Orioles’ left fielder Austin Hays in the bottom of the seventh inning.
That’s when Colton Cowser decided to flip that ball up over his head into the fountains at Kauffman Stadium before running in to celebrate the win.
“I just yeeted it behind me … Right when I threw it, I said, ‘Craig has a lot of saves, that one might have been important,’” Cowser told MLB.com after the game. “I literally told [center fielder Cedric Mullins] right whenever, ‘I might have messed up.’ And it turns out I did. We got the ball back, though.”
#Orioles’ Colton Cowser: “Right when I threw it, I said, ‘Craig has a lot of saves, that one might have been important.’ I literally told Ced right whenever, ‘I might have messed up.’ And it turns out I did.”
Cowser later learned that balls sink in the fountain after 2 minutes. pic.twitter.com/2UYjEOffzV
— Jake Rill (@JakeDRill) April 21, 2024
After the game and the realization of what he had done, Cowser says he ran through the tunnel behind the third base dugout at Kauffman Stadium to see if he could retrieve the ball. That’s when he saw that he had “yeeted” the ball into a fountain.
Luckily for him, and Craig Kimbrel, there were only two baseballs in the fountain and one of them was obviously very old so a stadium employee was able to get the ball back.
“Every time I catch the ball and it’s a last out from him now, it’s staying in the glove,” Cowser said.
Kimbrel, for his part, wasn’t worried.
“It’s fine, it doesn’t bother me none. We’ll see what the authenticators think when we talk to them here in a little bit,” Kimbrel said, adding. “I could tell that he was a little distraught about it, and I told him not to worry about it too much and not to lose sleep.”