Dodgers News: Mike Bolsinger Lobbied To Remain In Game Following Delay

Originally scheduled to start Saturday’s game against the Washington Nationals, Los Angeles Dodgers right-hander Mike Bolsinger instead found himself on the mound at Nationals Park on Friday for the first of the Dodgers’ 10-game road trip.

With Bolsinger being bumped up to Friday, it provided an extra day of rest for Clayton Kershaw, who threw 22 pitches in the All-Star Game on Tuesday. While Bolsinger was still facing the same Nationals team, he couldn’t have prepared for the lighting malfunction that threw the game off course.

A bank of lights off the third base line went out in the bottom of the fourth after Bolsinger retired Ian Desmond. The outage caused a one-hour and 22-minute delay during which Bolsinger signed autographs as a means to stay loose, according to ESPN’s Mark Saxon:

I thought it was a good way to keep my arm loose,” he said. “They’re little kids, they were cool and that’s just me. I like to interact with the fans and meet people. It’s fun to talk to random people.”

Once the lights were back on Bolsinger surprisingly returned to the mound. He easily retired the two batters faced to end the inning, then was pinch-hit for in the fifth. The 27 year old acknowledged some difficulty associated with remaining in the game, but said it was something he asked for:

I begged them to go out there and finish that inning, but an hour and 20 minutes, that’s a long time to be sitting around doing nothing,” he said. “You start stiffening up. Me getting a little older nowadays, not being 21 years old, I can start to feel things.”

While the fourth-inning outage and two subsequent ones that followed prior to the start of the fifth and the sixth innings became the story of the night, Bolsinger managed to avoid injury after a spin and fall while fielding a slow grounder in the third inning.

Dodgers vice president of medical services Stan Conte came out to check on the right-hander as the incident brought back memories of a college injury, according to Andrew Simon of MLB.com:

Kind of lost my footing and twisted the knee a little bit,” he said. “I think I was more in panic mode, because back in college, that’s how I tore my meniscus, doing the exact same thing. So it’s more just me being worried at the time, but everything’s fine.”

Given that Bolsinger was removed after four innings, he wasn’t in line for a decision regardless of play being suspended after the fifth inning. The Dodgers and Nationals will resume play at 11:05 a.m. PT, then play Saturday’s originally scheduled game at 1:05 p.m. PT or 20 minutes after the first game ends, whichever is later.

Mike Bolsinger Takes Some Positives From Rough Outing