Major League Baseball has suspended both Boston Red Sox first baseman Willson Contreras and Washington Nationals pitcher Cade Cavalli after their benches-clearing incident on Tuesday at Fenway Park.
The two players each received a seven-game ban, the league announced Thursday. Nationals pitcher Miles Mikolas was also suspended five games, and Red Sox outfielder Nate Eaton got three games.
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The suspensions will begin Friday unless the players appeal, which would pause the suspension until the appeal process is complete. The players also received undisclosed fines.
Cade Cavalli and Willson Contreras spark incident
The incident took place in the bottom of the fourth inning of the Nationals’ 8-1 win over the Red Sox on Tuesday. Cavalli struck Contreras out looking and immediately started talking to Contreras as he walked to the dugout. Cavalli yelled, “Sit down, boy,” at Contreras, and suddenly, the benches cleared into the scrum.
Pushing and shoving ensued, and Contreras tried to throw his helmet at Cavalli in the pile of players. It took several teammates to pull Contreras back before things settled down.
Eventually, Contreras was ejected. Cavalli was not. Red Sox pitcher Nate Eaton and Nationals pitcher Miles Mikolas, neither of whom were playing in the game, were thrown out, too, as was interim Red Sox manager Chad Tracy.
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After the game, Cavalli said he “didn’t say anything” and “just looked at” Contreras before a “few words” were eventually said. He walked that back a bit on Wednesday and apologized for his use of the term “boy,” which can be disparaging for men of color and can have racist undertones.
“I’m extremely torn up about the way that things were perceived,” Cavalli said on Wednesday. “Obviously, there was no ill intention behind that. My teammates know me, my family knows me, this organization knows me. I couldn’t sleep because of it.
“It hurt my heart knowing that, if there’s a 13-year-old Black kid in DC that sees that, that looked up to me, thinks that he perceived it in a way that wasn’t intended in the way that it came out, that he’s not looking up to me anymore. That hurts my heart … You learn from that, and it’ll never happen again.”
Cavalli, whom the Nationals selected in the first round of the 2020 MLB Draft, holds a 3.69 ERA with 102 strikeouts through 90 1/3 innings this season. Contreras, 34, holds a .280 batting average with 18 home runs over 337 plate appearances.
“He struck me on a good pitch, I was walking back to the dugout, and then he did what he did, and the rest was history,” Contreras said after the game. “… He was like, instigating and I snapped.”
Tracy also blamed the incident on Cavalli’s words and wondered why he wasn’t thrown out of the game, too.
“I felt as though the comment made, ‘Sit down, boy’ at the top of your lungs was part of what caused that to happen,” Tracy said on Tuesday night. “And understood after everything that happened, the people that they chose that were gonna leave the game, I just felt like the other pitcher should have been one of them too.”
MLB wound up issuing significant suspensions for both sides, with Cavalli and Conteras receiving equal bans.
