Kenny Gajewski Explains His Ejection in Orlando

STILLWATER — As the umpire convened in the Cowgirls’ rubber match against UCF on Saturday, Kenny Gajewski said he turned to assistant coach Greg Bergeron.

“Bergie, are you ready to coach third?” Gajewski remembers saying.

After the umpires met, Gajewski went out and showed his displeasure with a call to the point where he got tossed in the fifth inning. OSU went on to win the game 4-3 in eight innings and returned to Stillwater with a Big 12 series win.

So, what happened?

It all spawned from a substitution error, which Gajewski said home plate umpire Shane Jackson admitted was his mistake.

“I made a substitution,” Gajewksi said Tuesday. “I believe I took (Lexi) McDonald out, and I put (Rachael) Hathoot in. So I went to the umpire and said, “No. 1 (Hathoot) is gonna enter for No. 31 (McDonald). She’s gonna go to left field. No. 9, Tia Warsop, is gonna move from left field to right field.’

“That was my subs. Two innings later, Megan Delgadillo catches a ball, an amazing catch, and crashes into the wall. Their coach walks out and has the lineup cards out, and I’m like, ‘I don’t even know what she could be talking about. It can’t be about us. I only have one sub in, and it’s the same sub we’ve been doing routinely.'”

As UCF coach Cindy Ball-Malone was talking with the umpires, Gajewski said he had assistant Vanessa Shippy-Fletcher look at his lineup card and said it looked good.

“Umpire walks over,” Gajewski said. “Shane is a good dude, walks over, and he goes, ‘Hey, we got a problem.’ He said, ‘Your centerfielder is not in the game.’ And I said, ‘Shane, you’ve messed this up.’ I said, ‘I never took 37 (Delgadillo) out, I took 31 (McDonald) out.’ I said, ‘I think you wrote it in the wrong spot,’ and he looked at me he said, ‘I did.’ And he goes, ‘Let me see what I can do.'”

That’s when Gajewski said he told Bergeron to get ready.

“Because he (the umpire) can’t change this because it’s on his card,” Gajewski said. “I knew that. I appreciate the fact that he knew he was wrong, so he came back and said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna have to go with what I’ve got on my card.’ I got ejected. …

“He knew he messed up, but, in my opinion whether you think it’s right or wrong, I couldn’t not stick up for my kids. The weird thing was they would not throw me out. They were trying to help me get out of my own way, and I just told them, ‘I’m not staying in this game. You’re gonna have to throw me out.’ The home plate umpire wouldn’t even throw me out. He was the one who messed it up. Crew chief, Chad (Stears), he threw me out. He told me if I don’t stop, I’ll get suspended, so I stopped. Then I went in and grabbed a trashcan, and I was gonna throw that on the field and tell them that they were trash. But I didn’t because somebody in there said no, so I threw it in the dugout. That was good, so I got good people around me.”

OSU pitcher Ruby Meylan got a front-row seat to the incident.

“I’m sitting there laughing, like this dude is crazy,” Meylan said. “I can see right through it. I knew. I was like, ‘He is just egging them on for no reason.’ Like, it’s not that big of a deal. I promise I’ll get the next two outs. They’re not gonna score. I think he just does that to fire us up a little bit. Whether he says it or not, I think that’s where he’s really coming from. So I was just laughing. I thought it was hilarious.”

Meylan got two strikeouts to get out of the inning. Then the Cowgirls plated two in the sixth and another two in the eighth to win the game and the series.

“I don’t subscribe to the fact that me getting kicked out helped us win,” Gajewski said. “It didn’t. They (the players) made it happen. Coach Holder told me my first year, after I got kicked out like the fourth time, he said, ‘I really don’t think this is helping your team. We’re paying you to be in a game, not out of it.'”

Gajewski called the incident an honest mistake. He said he saw Jackson, the home plate umpire, in the airport and went up and apologized for his language and has since also called the head of officials.

“I wouldn’t have been as much of a fool if they had just thrown me out over the first bad word,” Gajewski said. “I would’ve been OK with that. But they just kept letting me go, and I just kept getting more of a rage.”

Up Next

Opponent: Texas
Time: 7 p.m. Wednesday
Location: Cowgirl Stadium
TV: ESPNU