Why Kevin Kiermaier conveniently ‘forgot’ to cover himself in Vaseline, an investigation
He changed his mind last minute. Fair or suspicious?
Earlier today, news broke that to combat the cold weather in New York (where it snowed early Monday, delaying the Yankees’ home opener against the Rays, and is now hovering around a brisk 40 degrees) Kevin Kiermaier was planning on covering his entire body with a layer of Vaseline. That’s not an unusual thing to do,
He didn’t end up following through though, later tweeting that it was a “blown outta proportion comment” and that he “forgot to put it on” and that he’d be going for the usual compression shirt approach to stay warm while patrolling the outfield for Tampa Bay.
It was a strange series of events, but here’s what we know.
- It’s very cold in New York City.
- Early reports of Kiermaier Vaseline-ing up were tweeted around 1:45pm EST.
- At 2pm EST, Kiermaier was asked about his plan and he confirmed he was serious.
- At 3:15pm EST, approximately an hour before game time, Kiermaier walked it back.
That leaves a little over an hour for him to change his mind about slathering himself in petroleum jelly for upwards of four hours. So the question now is ... why?
An hour is more than enough time for Kiermaier to try and put Vaseline all over himself, either fail or decide it wasn’t worth the effort and the mess, and rinse it off before he had to be out on the field for national anthem. But he seemed pretty sincere about the idea, and it’s not like Vaseline being slightly messy is a surprise.
So did he get roasted by his teammates for being that worried about 40-degree weather? Did the clubhouse run out of Vaseline half way through the job being done? Is Kiermaier slightly allergic to Vaseline and didn’t know it until he needed to put it all over himself?
All of those are theoretically plausible, but we might never have the real answer. In the span of an hour we went from “hm, this is a weird but reasonable attempt to stay warm on the field” to “what happened that this guy didn’t want to cover himself in Vaseline anymore?”
The season is barely a week old and already we have a Vaseline-related mystery. Stay weird, baseball. The more Vaseline investigations we have to dig into the better, in my opinion.