San Francisco Giants: Buster Posey Channels His Inner Steph Curry

San Francisco Giants catcher Buster Posey showed off an accurate arm with a toss from behind the plate that landed perfectly in Jake Peavy’s glove, even as Peavy had his head turned and had no idea the throw was on its way.

In the Saturday afternoon game between the Arizona Diamondbacks and San Francisco Giants, Buster Posey proved once again that he is a superior human being. Jake Peavy had just thrown a pitch and both he and Posey were pointing at the third base umpire after the hitter checked his swing. Peavy then glanced at Posey for a second and Posey tossed the ball toward him, but Peavy turned his head back toward the ump and doesn’t see the ball coming. It landed perfectly, banking off Peavy’s chest and into his glove. You can see the play here:

As the Giants’ announcer said, “Peavy never even acknowledged that it hit him in the chest.” I guess when you’re Buster Posey’s teammate, you come to expect perfection.

This is not Posey’s first bizarre moment with tossed objects on the baseball diamond. Earlier this year, Posey had the bat slip from his hand and get stuck in the protective netting behind home plate. The bat was stuck so high up in the netting that it took a member of the grounds crew and a ladder to get it unstuck. The next night, he did it again. At least it wasn’t as high as the first time and the batboy was able to retrieve it.

There have been some other strange moments with thrown objects on the baseball field. Thirty-three years ago, the Yankees were playing the Toronto Blue Jays at Exhibition Stadium. The Yankees’ Dave Winfield was playing center field. As he completed his warm up tosses prior to the bottom of the fifth inning, one of his throws hit and killed a seagull that was on the turf.

Winfield claimed it was an accident, but some Toronto fans thought he’d done it on purpose. They booed him whenever he came to bat or made a play in the field and started to chant, “Winfield sucks!” A Toronto police officer who was working security for the game thought it was intentional. After the game, Winfield was charged with causing “unnecessary suffering to an animal.”

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For his part, Winfield remembers it differently. As he told the Toronto Star, “I didn’t just sit and take aim. It was thrown pretty quick, but it wasn’t like I sat there and took aim and fired just at the bird. It was on the ground, it had been there for a while between innings, it wasn’t like a malicious type of thing. Honestly I would have thought like anything else, sometimes birds scatter as an object comes toward them, whether it’s a car or a baseball . . . I would kind of liken it to, if you’re driving down the street and you see a squirrel or raccoon or something and you’re driving pretty quickly and you say, ‘Ah it will move,’ and you hear the thump and you say, ‘Oh man,’ and that’s kind of the way it unfolded. I didn’t expect to hit it, but I did.”

Apparently, Dave Winfield subscribes to the same theory as George Costanza (“We had a deal!”).

When Winfield was arrested, this became a huge story in Toronto. The Blue Jays upper management posted bail for Winfield, but his arrest delayed the Yankees’ departure from the airport. A wildlife pathologist got to work the next day and found five television crews waiting to ask him questions about the seagull.

The charges were dropped soon enough and Winfield was absolved of any wrongdoing. Officials said they couldn’t establish criminality or intent. Winfield was again a free man. In the offseason, Winfield was asked to attend a charity fundraiser in Toronto. He brought a nice painting that was auctioned for over $30,000, with the money going to Easter Seals.

Nine years after this international incident, Dave Winfield signed with Blue Jays as a free agent. At the age of 40, he hit .290/.377/.491 and finished fifth in the AL MVP race. The Blue Jays won the AL East, beat the Oakland Athletics in the playoffs, then won their first World Series against the Atlanta Braves. Dave Winfield drove in the winning run.

Winfield’s unfortunate incident with a seagull was the “baseball meets bird” incident of the 1980s. Nearly 20 years later, Randy Johnson would do him one better. During a spring training game on March 24, 2001, Johnson was facing Calvin Murray. The Big Unit fired one of his high-90s heaters and a dove with a very bad sense of space and timing was obliterated in an instant.

Watching the video is disorienting. Randy unleashes the pitch and there’s a puff of feathers that resemble a firework going off. For a second, you don’t really know what happened.

Next: White Sox turn third triple play of season

Johnson has never been thrilled with being known for annihilating a bird. Despite his intimidating presence on the pitcher’s mound, Randy Johnson is a kind and gentle soul who would never intentionally hit a bird with a 95 mph fastball. He’s probably just as nice a guy as Buster Posey. It’s just that Posey’s throw landed softly in Jake Peavy’s glove, while Randy’s met a different fate.