About 10 minutes before the first pitch at Chase Field on Tuesday night, the ballpark’s vice president of operations, Mike Rock, received a call from a colleague.
The wrong kind of buzz had overtaken the stadium.
“Bees are landing on the net right behind home plate.”
“How many?” he asked.
‘Hundreds. No wait, thousands!”
Rock immediately took action.
“I knew we had a problem,” he said.
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With a swarm of bees surrounding the top of the protective screen behind home plate, the start of Tuesday’s game between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the visiting Dodgers was indeed delayed by nearly two hours, as Rock and his staff rushed to conduct a bee removal to switch. expert to the stadium.
Their knight in polyester armor: Matt Hilton, the Phoenix branch manager for Blue Sky Pest Control, the team’s favorite stadium pest company.
Hilton was across town at his six-year-old son’s T-ball game when he got a call about the bee problem. As a 15-year Blue Sky employee, he quickly jumped into his car, made the half-hour drive to downtown Phoenix and removed the bees just in time to avoid the game’s postponement.
“It’s certainly been discussed,” Rock said, noting that he and the game officials were in contact with the MLB league office. “It was very close.”
Instead, Rock arrived to a hero’s welcome, serenaded with cheers – as well as the playing of Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out for a Hero” – as he was wheeled to home plate and hoisted by a mechanical device to the top of the 30-foot screen . scissor lift.
“We know this was really important to get these games going,” Hilton said. “So when we heard there was a bee problem at the Diamondbacks stadium, we tried to address it right away.”
“There was no traffic,” he added with a relieved smile. ‘Happy.’
Wearing a protective suit and a large mesh head covering, Hilton sprayed the bee colony with a “non-pesticide solution” before humanely vacuuming them up and bringing them outside.
“It was a little nerve-wracking, I’m not going to lie,” Hilton said. “There was a lot of pressure to get this match going. But I was happy to come and sort it out.”
While some 30,000 fans watched him, Hilton did not shy away from the spotlight.
As the elevator returned to the ground, he pumped up the crowd by waving his arms, prompting chants of “MVP” in response from the crowd. Then, shortly before the 8:35 p.m. first pitch — which came 1 hour and 55 minutes after the originally scheduled 6:40 p.m. start time — Hilton was invited to throw out the ceremonial first pitch, with his headgear on the mound before making a theatrical tear. it out, almost pro-wrestling style.
“I kind of ate it for a while,” he said, laughing. “It was a nice time.”
Before Hilton arrived, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts told SportsNet LA that the teams considered starting the game before the bees were removed but were too wary of potential safety issues.
“If a foul ball hits the screen,” Roberts said, “what happens to the bees?”
Thanks to Hilton, no one had to find out.
“People were pretty excited,” Hilton said in an interview with the Diamondbacks broadcast. “It was pretty cool.”
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
