Major League Baseball

Brett Phillips' mound debut for the Rays highlights this week in MLB Good Times

Updated Jul. 30, 2021 8:18 a.m. ET

By Jake Mintz
FOX Sports MLB Writer

Welcome to Good Times.

Every week, we focus on three things from the previous week in baseball — fans, managers, players, teams, cities, fan bases or mascots — for which the times were good.

Here we go.

Brett Phillips

Losing sucks. Whether it’s a game of backgammon with the family or Game 7 of the World Series, losing stings. It’s not fun, especially in the moment. We’ve all been there, with the pit in your stomach when it really sinks in that you are about to lose and lose hard.

But this week we learned ⁠— courtesy of Tampa Bay Rays outfielder, airplane mimetics expert and smile blaster Brett Phillips ⁠— that losing doesn’t always have to suck.

On Friday, Phillips and his Rays were getting their lunch handed to them in Buffalo by the nomadic Blue Jays. Heading into the seventh inning, Tampa Bay was trailing by a hefty 10-0 margin. With the game clearly out of hand, Rays skipper Kevin Cash sent Phillips from the dugout to the bullpen to warm up for a traditional "position player pitching, let's save the bullpen" situation.

Fortunately, there was nothing traditional about Phillips’ pitching performance. Before he even got into the game, we saw some video of him getting loose in the pen. And by "getting loose," I really mean "acting like a complete and total goofball."

Once Phillips got on the mound, he looked to be all business, and with his very first pitch, he unleashed a steamy, 94 mph heater. Ninety-four! That’s above the MLB average! For a guy who claimed he hadn’t seriously thrown a pitch off a mound since he was 14, that’s a pretty incredible achievement.

After that first fastball, our hurling hero seriously slowed things down and spent the rest of the outing looping 50 mph lollipops up to the plate, hoping for the best. The most notable feature might have been Phillips’ pitching motion, which is unlike anything I’ve seen before. He lines up from the windup, toes pointed toward home plate, but instead of swiveling his back foot 90 degrees to push off of it, he keeps it pointed at the hitter and just ... kinda throws the ball? I dunno.

After two quick outs, Phillips got knocked around a tad, walking a pair and allowing a run on an RBI single by Teoscar Hernández.

He also performed one of the goofiest and most bizarre balks in recent memory when he simply dropped the baseball while trying to come set.

This is the most fun anyone has ever had in an 11-1 loss. The serious baseball crowd might shake their fists at the nearest cloud and call this whole thing a mockery, but you know what? Sometimes, this overly serious sport could use a little mockery. This was a mockery in the best way.

Usually, the vibe in the dugout during a blowout loss — at any level of baseball, at any point of the season — can get really funeral-like. Professional athletes take winning and losing extremely seriously. That’s part of what makes them professional athletes. But even the good baseball teams lose 50-60 games every season. Not every regular-season loss in June needs to be treated like Game 7 of the World Series.

Phillips had the audacity to enjoy himself while playing a kid’s game. And guess what? Everyone loved it. All of the Blue Jays were cracking up at the plate, the Rays’ dugout seemed to be chortling along with Phillips’ antics, and I’m sure it made for a memorable late night at the ballyard for anyone who hung around.

At the end of the day, sport is entertainment, and thankfully, Phillips is quite the entertainer. So cheers to a man who can have a good time even when the score might suggest otherwise.

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Jake Burger

Jake Burger was the 11th overall pick of the 2017 MLB Draft. A polished and accomplished college slugger, the big corner infielder was expected to rocket up the minors and contribute to the Chicago White Sox sooner rather than later. Things went to plan in his first professional season, and Burger secured an invitation to big-league spring training in 2018.

But on Feb. 26 of that camp, disaster struck. Burger ruptured his Achilles tendon while running out of the batter's box. He then rehabbed from that, missing the entire 2018 season, and seemed ready to roll for 2019 before he tore the exact same tendon for the second time. That meant curtains for his 2019 campaign. Then, because of the pandemic, Burger didn’t play in a minor-league game in 2020.

That’s three full years without a single live plate appearance. But Burger showed up this year and absolutely mashed to the tune of a .322/.368/.596 slash line in Triple-A, earning him a well-deserved call-up to the big-league club. On Friday, in his MLB debut with the White Sox, Burger went 2-for-4 with a double.

Whenever a baseballer gets injured, there’s a heartfelt outpouring of support from fans in the days following said injury. Then our attention usually moves on to the next thing. But after we’ve pushed a devastating injury such as Burger’s to the back of our minds, the player is still out there in the world every day, working his butt off trying to return to game action.

That’s the part of the iceberg below the surface that we never get to see. But whenever that type of grind pays off, as it clearly has in Burger’s case, we can begin to understand the difficulty of the journey through the emotional fulfillment at the end.

Kudos to Burger for fighting his way back, and kudos to his parents for some top-notch parenting. This is a truly great story that was a long time coming.

Gwen Goldman

When she was 10 years old during the iconic baseball summer of 1961, Gwen Goldman wrote a letter to her beloved New York Yankees asking to be a batgirl for a game. Unfortunately, the Yankees' general manager at the time, Roy Hamey, responded to her letter by denying her request with a thick helping of misogyny on the side, writing that "a young lady such as yourself would feel out of place in a dugout."

Sixty years later, the Yankees tried to right that wrong by inviting Goldman to Yankee Stadium to be an honorary batgirl and throw out the first pitch.

Girls belonged in the dugout in 1961, as they do today and always. One gracious gesture by the Yankees in 2021 by no means ameliorates the incredibly deep-seated misogyny that still exists in baseball culture today. No number of shareable social media videos will change the stark reality that many women still don’t feel comfortable, supported or empowered around our game today.

But let’s focus for a minute on Goldman’s joy, because her joy is genuine, and it is enduring. There is something undeniably beautiful about seeing a 70-year-old woman in full uniform with her love for the game clearly as bright as it was in 1961. That’s a childhood dream smile right there, beaming with the same amount of wonder, awe and verve as she probably had while following Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle chase Babe Ruth's single-season home run record six decades ago.

Baseball, at its best, is a vehicle for purpose and meaning, and I’m so glad that Goldman got to live out those feelings in their truest form on Monday at Yankee Stadium.

Jake Mintz is the louder half of @CespedesBBQ and a baseball analyst for FOX Sports. He’s an Orioles fan living in New York City, and thus, he leads a lonely existence most Octobers. If he’s not watching baseball, he’s almost certainly riding his bike. You can follow him on Twitter @Jake_Mintz.