This is tough to watch. Giancarlo Stanton took an 88-mph fastball from Brewers pitcher Mike Fiers right to the face. The 0-1 pitch hit him flush on the cheek and he went down immediately, in obvious pain. Stanton, who was bleeding from his face, was put in a cart and taken to the hospital by ambulance. The Marlins said he was being treated for a facial laceration and will undergo x-rays and a CT scan.
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The ball clearly got away from Fiers, you can see from his reaction immediately after that he was really shaken up by it. In the ten minutes or so that it took them to stabilize Stanton in the cart, Fiers looked on in disbelief. Given his reaction, it's really no surprise that Fiers hit someone with his very next pitch.
This is where things veered to the absurd. The umpires ruled earlier that Stanton actually swung at the pitch that hit him. So rather than a hit-by-pitch and a new batter, Reed Johnson took over the at bat at 0-2. Fiers promptly caught him high and tight as well. The Marlins chirped at Fiers from the dugout and Fiers appeared to tell them to go fuck themselves if they thought he was trying to hit someone again. That's when the benches cleared.While all this was happening, the umpires ruled that Reed Johnson had also swung at the pitch that hit him. So Mike Fiers hit two guys in the same at bat and got a strikeout. Mercifully, he did not come back out for the fifth. Baseball is the weirdest.[MLB]