AL CHAMPIONSHIP SERIES: RANGERS VS ASTROS

October 20, 2023

James Hoye

Mike Hill

Globe Life Field

Postgame 5 Press Conference

Q. Talk about what you saw unfolding there.

JAMES HOYE: Yeah, so we felt the first pitch Abreu threw to García, we felt -- we saw the pitch, 99 miles an hour, hit him by the shoulder area. There was a little situation between García and Maldonado. The benches emptied on the field.

So after we cleared everybody, all the players, we separated the players, we had a conference among the six of us, and we decided that the pitch that Abreu threw was intentional on García, so he was ejected for that.

Subsequently García, we felt like after he was hit with the Maldonado situation, we felt like he was the aggressor there, García was trying to go through Marvin (Hudson, the home plate umpire) to get to Maldonado. And we felt like he was the aggressor and continued the dispute because he was aggressive. And so we ejected him for that reason, being an aggressor in that situation.

After we had cleared the teams and we had a discussion and we walked over to Dusty Baker, and we told Dusty that Abreu was ejected from the game. Obviously, by Dusty's reaction, he didn't feel like we should have ejected him. There was some back-and-forth between Dusty and us, and Dusty threw his hat. We ejected Dusty from the game for arguing the ejection.

And then we went over to the other three guys on the crew, told Bochy that García was ejected for being the aggressor in the situation. Bochy was fine with it.

And then we brought Pressly in the game. And then after that Dusty wouldn't leave the dugout. He felt that he was not going to leave. Marvin went over to talk to him, and then Joe (Espada) got him out of the dugout.

Q. Bochy was saying that the delay -- just to get the whole thing resolved. Did it take longer than you would expect when no punches were thrown?

JAMES HOYE: No. One of the things that I think we tried very hard in is because it's such a big game, we know it's the playoffs, we don't want to make a mistake in a situation like that. So we're going to make sure that everybody is on the same page, that we all felt the same way. And to a T, all of us felt like that pitch was intentional.

I think the biggest thing, too, is trying to get those guys off the field because there were so many people out there. We wanted to make sure before we dealt with any of the ejection or Abreu, we wanted to get those guys off the field so there wasn't any other issues.

We don't want to throw the starting pitcher out for tomorrow because he's the aggressor in that situation. We wanted to clear everybody off, get everybody settled and then deal with the situation at that point.

I think sometimes when we're on the field it feels like it's a long time. But I'd rather take that 20 or 30 seconds to make sure we're getting it right.

Q. Mr. Hill, any potential discipline that's coming from the situation?

MIKE HILL: We'll review everything. We'll try to review everything in a timely fashion and make a decision. I don't want to jump the gun on anything.