San Diego Padres pitcher Alex Torres took an important step for player safety in baseball Saturday by becoming the first player to wear a new protective hat.
Major League Baseball may need to take the next step by creating a more fashionable cap, because the southpaw has been mercilessly mocked for donning the oversized headgear.
Pitchers long have been helpless against line drives hit directly at them, including the life-threatening incident involving Brandon McCarthy in 2012. Torres saw first-hand how dangerous such plays can be last season, when Tampa Bay teammate Alex Cobb was drilled in the head with a liner.
“I came in after Alex Cobb was hit in the head,” Torres told CNN on Sunday. “That’s really an impression to me, how his head sounded from the bullpen. That was really bad. I was shaking. ‘Oh my God! Oh my God!’ I’m glad he’s alive.
“It’s a good idea they make this kind of hat to protect my head. You want to protect life. I don’t have a kid yet, but I want to see my kid grow up.”
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The 26-year-old Venezuelan entered Saturday’s game in the eighth inning, becoming the first pitcher to attempt to minimize such risks by wearing a hat, approved by MLB in January, which features energy-diffusing protective plates that expand the size of the hat. The new hats were tested to absorb impacts up to 90 miles per hour in the front and 85 mph on the sides.
After seeing what happened to Cobb, Torres couldn’t care less about how it looks.
“The difference between how this hat and the regular hat feels isn’t much,” Torres said. “I tried it before using it in the game, playing catch. It doesn’t feel really bad. It doesn’t feel like how it looks on my head.”
How it looks on his head prompted the full complement of Internet snark, along the lines of these Twitter references: