The Louisville Bourbons’ 5 most spectacular losses of the season

As Louisville’s most unsung baseball squad, the Louisville media often misses the team’s highlights of the year. And by highlights I mean lowlights. Here are 5 most devastating losses of 2025. In painstaking detail.

Game 1: April 19th vs. Peoria Corn Kings

Final Score: 8-7 (Corn Kings)

Bottom of the ninth, Bourbons trailing 8-7, bases loaded, two outs. Cleanup hitter Rodney “Big Sauce” Plunkett crushed a line drive to deep right-center that looked destined to clear the bases and win the game. The Corn Kings’ center fielder, a 42-year-old former appliance salesman named Gil Wentz, turned and ran. He ran past the warning track. He ran into the chain-link fence. He ran through the chain-link fence, which had been improperly installed and gave way like a curtain. Gil disappeared into the adjacent cornfield, emerged four seconds later with the ball in his glove, and was ruled to have made the catch. The umpires consulted for eleven minutes. The ruling stood.

Big Sauce stood at second base for the entire deliberation, refusing to believe what had happened. He had to be physically escorted off the field by Pickle Skaggs.

The Bourbons were playing with only seven eligible position players because six teammates had eaten gas station sushi from a Conoco outside Bloomington the night before. The afflicted players spent the game in a single portable toilet behind the visitor’s dugout, taking turns in what witnesses described as “a rotating nightmare.”

Pickle was forced to use starting pitcher Elvin Musgrave in right field, where he misjudged two fly balls and got hit in the chest by a third. Batch Thibodeaux, watching from the stands because his lawn chair hadn’t arrived on the equipment truck, was heard yelling “I’m not paying workman’s comp for sushi” at nobody in particular.

The gas station has since closed.

Game 2: May 31st vs. Duluth Shipwrecks

Final Score: 12-11 (Shipwrecks, 11 innings)

Top of the eleventh inning, Shipwrecks with a runner on second, two outs. Duluth’s DH, a large man named Brick Johansson who looked like he’d been carved from frozen Lake Superior, hit a towering pop fly to shallow left field. Bourbons shortstop Manny Escovedo drifted back. Left fielder Denny Shoop drifted in. They called for it simultaneously. Then neither called for it. Then both called for it again.

What happened next has been described by witnesses as “a nature documentary about confused birds.” Escovedo and Shoop circled each other three times, the ball descending toward them like a judgment from above. At the last moment, Escovedo dove. Shoop jumped. They collided at full force, and the ball landed softly on Shoop’s back, rolled down his jersey, and settled in the grass. By the time anyone picked it up, Brick Johansson had rounded third and scored standing up, despite running with the speed and grace of a refrigerator on a dolly.

A tornado warning had been issued for the county at 6:45 PM, approximately fifteen minutes before first pitch. The umpires suggested postponing the game. Batch Thibodeaux, who had driven the equipment truck himself because the usual driver quit, refused.

“I didn’t haul this truck nine hours to not play baseball,” Batch reportedly said. “The tornado can wait.”

The tornado did not come, but the winds reached 45 miles per hour by the seventh inning. Fly balls moved sideways. A hot dog wrapper struck the home plate umpire in the face during an at-bat. The Shipwrecks, being from Duluth, were apparently accustomed to hostile weather and treated the conditions as “pleasant.” The Bourbons, already a shaky defensive team, made six errors, four of which were directly wind-related.

The grounds crew spent two hours after the game retrieving equipment from neighboring yards. One batting helmet was found the next morning in a Wendy’s parking lot three blocks away.

Game 3: June 28th vs. Fort Wayne Foundrymen

Final Score: 6-5 (Foundrymen)

Bottom of the eighth, game tied 5-5, Foundrymen with runners on first and third, one out. Fort Wayne’s batter hit a sharp grounder to third baseman Nestor Caldwell. It was a tailor-made double play ball—step on third, throw to first, inning over. Caldwell fielded it cleanly. He stepped on third base. He turned to throw to first.

The ball never left his hand.

Caldwell stood frozen, arm cocked, for what witnesses estimate was three full seconds. First baseman Percy Tolliver stood waiting, glove outstretched, screaming “THROW IT, NESTOR.” Caldwell did not throw it. The runner from first reached second. The runner who had been on third, who had retreated to the bag on the initial play, suddenly realized no one was covering home plate and broke for it. Caldwell, snapping out of whatever trance had seized him, finally threw the ball—to the pitcher, who was not expecting it and was not near home plate. The run scored. The Foundrymen led 6-5. That was the final score.

After the game, Caldwell explained that he had “heard a voice” telling him not to throw the ball. When pressed on whose voice, he said, “I don’t know. It was calm. It felt right at the time.”

He was required to attend a session with a sports psychologist the following week. The psychologist quit the profession two months later, citing “unrelated reasons.”

Starting catcher Wendell Frick did not play because he was in Louisville appearing as a contestant on a local television program called “Derby City’s Best Chili,” a competition he had apparently entered months earlier and forgotten about. He won third place. His brisket chili was praised for its “smoky depth” but criticized for “insufficient bean presence.”

Backup catcher Lonnie Stroud, pressed into duty, had not caught a live game in six weeks. He allowed four passed balls and was crossed up on signs so frequently that pitcher Terrance Goad eventually stopped using signs altogether and just threw whatever he wanted. This resulted in two hit batters, one of whom charged the mound before being calmed down by his own teammates, who reminded him that attacking a Bourbons player wasn’t worth the suspension.

Frick’s chili trophy now sits in the Bourbons’ clubhouse. No one has ever congratulated him on it.

Game 4: August 15th vs. Sandusky Walleyes

Final Score: 3-0 (Walleyes)

This game had no thrilling plays. It had the opposite of thrilling plays. It was, by all accounts, the most boring baseball game ever played in the Super Great Lakes Baseball League, and somehow that made the loss worse.

The Bourbons managed one hit—a second-inning single by Manny Escovedo that was immediately erased on a double play. They struck out fourteen times. They hit into three double plays. Denny Shoop was picked off first base in the seventh inning despite no throw being made; he simply wandered too far off the bag and was tagged by the first baseman, who later admitted he “couldn’t believe it worked.”

The closest thing to excitement came in the fifth inning when a seagull landed on the pitcher’s mound and refused to move for two minutes. The Walleyes’ pitcher, visibly annoyed, eventually threw a rosin bag at it. The seagull left. The crowd, such as it was, applauded the seagull.

Why They Really Lost:

Eleven players—eleven—did not make the trip to Sandusky because Taylor Swift was performing in Cincinnati that night and they had purchased tickets months in advance. This was not a secret. The players had requested the day off repeatedly. Pickle Skaggs had submitted a formal request to the league to reschedule the game. The request was denied because, according to league commissioner Dennis Pfeiffer, “we cannot accommodate every concert.”

Batch Thibodeaux, faced with the choice of forfeiting or playing with a skeleton crew, chose to play. The Bourbons dressed fourteen players, three of whom were pulled from the stands. One of these, a man named Clifton who had come to the game to scout the Walleyes for his fantasy league, was inserted at second base in the sixth inning and made two errors in three innings, though he later insisted one of them “should have been ruled a hit.”

The eleven players who attended the concert reported that it was “incredible” and “absolutely worth it.” Denny Shoop, who did make the trip to Sandusky, reportedly did not speak to his teammates for a week.

Pickle’s only comment on the matter: “I get it. She puts on a good show. But we still gotta play the games.”

Game 5: September 12th vs. Terre Haute Railsplitters

Final Score: 14-13 (Railsplitters, 10 innings)

Bottom of the tenth inning. Bourbons down 14-13. Runner on second, two outs. Rodney “Big Sauce” Plunkett at the plate, representing the tying run. The count ran full. The Railsplitters’ closer, a junkballer named Deke Pruitt who threw nothing harder than 79 miles per hour, hung a curveball. Big Sauce swung.

The ball rocketed off his bat toward the gap in right-center field. The runner took off from second. The crowd—a generous term for the 94 people in attendance—rose to their feet. This was it. Redemption. A tie game, at minimum, with Big Sauce standing on second and the winning run at the plate.

The ball hit a pigeon.

Mid-flight, approximately 180 feet from home plate, the ball struck a pigeon that had chosen that precise moment to fly across the outfield. The ball deflected downward. The Railsplitters’ center fielder, who had been sprinting toward the wall, stopped, turned, and caught the deflected ball at his shoelaces. The game was over.

Big Sauce stood at first base, helmet in hand, staring at the sky. The pigeon, apparently unharmed, flew to the top of the scoreboard and remained there for the rest of the evening. Pickle Skaggs requested that the play be reviewed. The league does not have replay review. The request was denied.

“I hit that ball 350 feet,” Big Sauce said after the game. “I hit it perfect. And a bird—a bird—took it from me. I don’t know what I did to deserve this. I go to church.”

The game was played under protest by the Bourbons because the Railsplitters’ stadium, a converted high school field called Wabash Valley Diamond, had experienced a “partial lighting failure” before the game. Only two of the four light towers were operational, meaning the right side of the field was significantly darker than the left side.

The Railsplitters offered to postpone. Batch Thibodeaux, who had already paid for two nights at a Terre Haute motel and did not want to return for a makeup game, declined. “We’ll adjust,” he said.

They did not adjust. Bourbons right fielder Denny Shoop lost three fly balls in the darkness, resulting in two triples and a ground-rule double when one ball bounced off his head and over the fence. Opposing hitters figured out the situation by the third inning and began deliberately hitting to right field. The Railsplitters scored nine of their fourteen runs on balls hit to the dark side of the stadium.

After the game, Pickle Skaggs lodged a formal complaint with the league about the lighting conditions. Commissioner Dennis Pfeiffer responded that the Bourbons had been offered a postponement and declined, and therefore “assumed the risk of the lighting situation.”

Batch Thibodeaux was asked if, in retrospect, he regretted not postponing the game to save the motel cost.

“I regret a lot of things,” Batch said. “But I’m not made of money. That motel had a hot tub. You know how rare that is in Terre Haute?”

The motel’s hot tub was, according to later reports, out of service during the team’s stay.