Framing the face of the umpire

Our baseball correspondent Jane sends us some more odd news:

The Mississippi Braves manager [Wellman] went wild Friday during his team's 7-6 loss at Chattanooga. His tirade took him on a tour of the diamond as he covered home plate with dirt, threw a base and crawled on his belly...Wellman came storming out of the dugout after the plate umpire ejected pitcher Kelvin Villa for apparently using a foreign substance.

Wellman threw his hat, then began shouting and framing the face of the umpire with his hands about 6 inches apart.

After that, he got down on one knee, piled dirt on home plate and used a finger to outline the shape of the plate. He stalked to third base, pulled up the bag and walked toward second, then tossed third base into the outfield.

Then he dropped on his belly and pantomimed a military crawl to the edge of pitcher's mound, where he picked up the rosin bag. He pretended it was a grenade, pulled an imaginary pin with his teeth and launched it toward the plate umpire, hitting his left foot.

Wellman motioned that he was ejecting the umpire, picked up second base, walked into the outfield and picked up the bag he'd tossed. He walked toward the outfield gate with both bases.

(The YouTube clip is pretty entertaining...)

Coming soon—an extract from a "baseballers behaving badly" book I wrote some years back!