Life is hard. You have to have a good time your dubs.
Andy Lugo, third baseman for the Excessive-A Greenville Drive, has a agency grasp of that idea — however a versatile grip on his bat. The 21-year-old Pink Sox prospect delivered a walk-off knock for the Drive on Saturday evening and instantly adopted it with an epic bat flip. He was joined by his teammates for one of many lengthiest and most exuberant celebrations you will ever see in a Minor League Baseball sport in April.
The hit to deep middle discipline ended a sport the Drive trailed the White Sox-affiliated Winston-Salem Sprint by a margin of 7-0 within the backside of the fifth inning, and Lugo’s capper — which put the sport within the books with a 10-9 rating within the twelfth — adopted his game-tying homer within the eighth.
The Greenville broadcast cuts from Lugo’s swing to a large shot monitoring the ball flying to middle, however one other projectile — Lugo’s bat — flies into orbit in the midst of the shot, capturing all the best way excessive of the video body earlier than tumbling again by way of to finish a monstrous arc.
Lugo’s teammates mobbed him and emptied two Gatorade coolers on him as he rounded first base, and within the ensuing mob scene he ripped off his jersey and flipped that prime into the air, flexing and pounding his chest as the remainder of the Drive group slapped him on the again and jumped up and down amidst hoots and hollers.
It had been a hotly contested affair. Each managers — the Drive’s Liam Carroll and the Sprint’s Pat Leyland — had been ejected over the course of the 3-hour, 38-minute marathon, as was Sprint first baseman Wes Kath.
The sport-ending liner to the deepest a part of the park was Lugo’s third hit of the sport, however it might have felt particularly satisfying as a result of he’d struck out on three pitches with runners on second and third in his most up-to-date at-bat, within the tenth.
Lugo signed with the Pink Sox out of the Dominican Republic in 2021 and slashed .271/.346/.392 with 25 stolen bases over 87 video games for Single-A Salem final 12 months earlier than getting promoted to Greenville for the ultimate 21 video games of the season. He has a .313 OBP with six extra-base hits by way of 12 video games this 12 months.
