PHOENIX — When Matt Hilton was sitting at his 6-year-old son Levi’s tee ball game in Surprise on Tuesday night, he had no idea the game at Chase Field would bee delayed.
But he wound up getting the save.
A swarm of bees gathered atop the screen behind home plate just before the scheduled game time for the Dodgers and Arizona Diamondbacks.
“I got a call about five minutes before game time, from our senior manager of events. She doesn’t usually call me about that time, so I knew something was odd,” Diamondbacks vice president of ballpark operations Mike Rock said. “She said, ‘We have bees landing on the net right behind home plate.’ I said, ‘How many.’ She said, ‘Hundreds. No wait, thousands!’ And I knew we had a problem.”
Rock contacted Blue Sky Pest Control and Hilton, branch office manager, got his call to the big leagues.
“I think he (Levi) was probably a little bummed that I left a little early,” Hilton said of bugging out from the final game of his son’s season. “But I think he’s okay with it now.”
Having sat and waited for more than an hour, the crowd was buzzing for the exterminator’s arrival. As Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out for a Hero” and other thematic music blared from the stadium speakers, Hilton rode a scissors lift up to confront the enemy.
There’s no hiving in baseball. Using a “non-pesticidal solution” and a vacuum hose, he sucked up the bees, later to be humanely released – presumably at a farm in the country with a nice family and plenty of room to run around and play.
The Diamondbacks saluted “Bee Guy” on the scoreboard and then gave Hilton his honors, letting him throw out a ceremonial first pitch before the game finally got underway, one hour and 55 minutes late – leaving Hilton with a story that will absolutely kill at the next exterminators’ convention.
After such a long delay, the Diamondbacks scratched scheduled starter Jordan Montgomery and went with Plan Bee – a swarm of relievers. But it was Christian Walker who stung the Dodgers with a two-run walk-off home run in the 10th inning, giving the Diamondbacks a 4-3 victory over the Dodgers.
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After Hilton’s heroics, the Dodgers quickly went from bees to Ks. They went an entire game without striking out on Monday (the first time a Dodgers team had done that since 2006) but Mookie Betts struck out to start Tuesday’s game and six of the first 11 Dodgers batters went down on strikes.
But the Dodgers stung for “non-pesticidal” runs in the fifth (a bases-loaded wild pitch) and sixth innings (a run-scoring balk) to take a 2-1 lead.
Starter Landon Knack allowed just one run on a solo home run by Walker in the first five innings. The worker bees from the Dodgers’ bullpen took over from there.
Michael Grove stranded the bases loaded in the sixth. Joe Kelly stranded the tying run at third base in the seventh. But Daniel Hudson gave up the tying run on three hits in the eighth.
Will Smith cashed in the Dodgers’ free runner in the 10th inning to regain the lead. But the depleted bullpen was left with Nabil Crismatt to try and close things out. He did not, giving up the deciding homer to Walker leading off the bottom of the 10th.
More to come on this story.
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