Al Alburquerque Loves the Baseball

There are quite a few ways to show up the opposing team. You can hot dog down the first base line after hitting wall scraping home run. You can do the Jose Valverde dance. Brandon Phillips is possibly the best defensive shower upper (pretty sure that's not a term) with his inability to make a routine play, well, routine.

Last night during game 2 of the ALDS against the Oakland A's (Who seem to have remembered that they are, in fact, the Oakland A's), fans were witness to a little bit of showing up done by one Al Alburquerque.

Despite the fact that he needs to drop the "r" so that his name is spelled like the New Mexico city making it easier for my computer's spell checker to understand, Alburquerque has done quite well in the big leagues at the start of his career. After a very impressive 2011 campaign, young Al needed to have off season surgery that would force him to miss nearly all of 2012, and yes, I am avoiding typing out his last name.

Now back, and doing what he did last year, he's making up for some lost dance time with Jose Valverde by showing up hitters who hit come backers (Video here). Oh really? When asked about his make out session with a baseball, Al responded with:

 “I don’t know, I just do it,” Alburquerque said of kissing the ball. “It’s just emotions. What do you do? When you win, you feel happy. When you do something good, you feel happy. Everyone have a different emotion. It was emotions for me.”

That's one way to show your emotions I suppose. Just a guess, but you probably could have done a cartwheel before throwing to Prince Fielder, and that would have been more acceptable. But, it's not like Detroit Tigers players are new to the "showing up" game. Carlos Guillen did this last year, and who can forget what Prince Fielder did when he hit a Walk Off home run against the Giants in 2009. Although, I'm sure the whole "Atomic bomb explosion" reenactment at home plate would be more appreciated right now.

His cockiness was rewarded with the Tigers pulling out the win late, and since he doesn't have to hit, there's probably no chance for retaliation. Which is kind of too bad. It would be interesting to see if he could kiss a baseball while it's moving, not that I advocate throwing at someone's head or anything.