Three days after Carlos Correa mouthed “It’s my time” toward the Houston Astros dugout after a Game 1 home run, Boston Red Sox pitcher Eduardo Rodriguez responded with a wrist tap of his own on Monday. Manager Alex Cora wasn’t happy about it at first.
Rodriguez induced a ground ball from Correa that ended the sixth inning, and as he walked back to the Red Sox’s dugout, he touched his index finger just above the glove on his right hand. From the dugout, Cora immediately waved his hand and shouted, “Hey, no. No.”
“We just show up, we play, and we move on, and he knows,” Cora said, via ESPN, after the Red Sox won Game 3, 12-3, to take a 2-1 ALCS lead. “I let him know. We don’t have to do that. If we’re looking for motivation outside of what we’re trying to accomplish, we’re in the wrong business.
“The only motivation we have is to win four games against them and move on to the next round.”
After Correa snapped a tie with two outs in the seventh inning of Game 1, blasting a 2-2 pitch over the left-field fence, he tossed his bat from the batter’s box and repeatedly tapped his wrist — mouthing “It’s my time” and pounding his chest as he started his home run trot. He said after the game that the motion was directed toward his Houston teammates, not Red Sox pitcher Hansel Robles.
“When the playoffs start, they always tell me it’s your time now,” Correa said. “To go out there, hit homers, this and that.”
On Monday, Correa was the final batter that Rodriguez faced in his third postseason start, and Rodriguez picked up his second win of the 2021 playoffs by scattering three runs and five hits while striking out seven Houston batters. After recording four hits in the previous pair of ALCS games, Correa went 0-for-4 with a strikeout, and the Astros didn’t record a hit — and had just two baserunners — after Boston turned to its bullpen for the final three innings.
Rodriguez said postgame that the mimic of Correa’s gesture was “part of the moment,” according to ESPN, and that he’d apologize to Correa if the two crossed paths in-person because “that’s not something I normally do.” But Correa, when asked, said that he thought that’s how the game of baseball should trend in the future. It was “kind of cool,” he said.
“We talk about baseball growing and more people coming to watch the sport, you need to have more things like that,” Correa said. “You need to let people have fun, and the game should move in that direction, where you can show emotions and be yourself and keep it real.”
The Red Sox defeated Houston 12-3 in Game 3 of the ALCS, and the pair of teams continue their series on Tuesday night — with Nick Pivetta and Zack Greinke serving as their projected starters, respectively — as Boston aims to take a 3-1 lead, inching closer to its first World Series since 2018.
