Jonathan Herrera took a silent, unasked-for curtain call after his final major league hit. Nate Orf, on the other hand, took a very-asked-for curtain call after his first major league hit:
Two things make Orf’s curtain call, from 2018, interesting. The first is that he had to be carried onto the field by his teammates. Before Jesús Aguilar and Manny Piña hoisted him, he was utterly failing at it.
The curtain call & response seems simple enough. The crowd won’t stop cheering, so the player comes out for a wave. Then we all move on, a bit happier. But, like most social interactions, there’s actually some ambiguity.
For example: In 2015, the Cardinals traded for Jason Heyward. He slumped a bit coming out of the gate. But in the 10th game of the season he hit his first home run as a Cardinal. The crowd wouldn’t stop cheering! And, if we’re to believe the Associated Press, Heyward didn’t know what to do.
The curtain call concept was new to him.
“A couple guys in the dugout said, ‘They want you to go back out there,’” Heyward said. “So I did. It was a good feeling.”
I don’t quite buy the way the AP characterizes it, as though Heyward was totally unfamiliar with curtain calls. (It was his sixth major league season!) But I do believe that even a veteran and All-Star like Heyward needed his teammates’ “nudges” to seize the spotlight and claim his shine. The nudges provided an unofficial permission structure.
But it wasn’t just unofficial permission he needed. According to the Cardinals’ manager, Mike Matheny, players in the curtain call zone also seek official permission, from the boss: “They usually look down to my end of the dugout to see if it’s appropriate or not,” Matheny said in his post-game press conference that day. “Yeah, I just—[Makes pointing motion]—yeah. It’s all pretty simple.” But it’s actually not.
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