PHOENIX — Sometimes the cleanest ending to a messy baseball moment is a simple phone call.
That’s what happened after Monday night’s back-and-forth between the Diamondbacks and Cubs, according to The Athletic. Arizona manager Torey Lovullo reached out to Chicago manager Craig Counsell after a screaming match between coaches on both sides spilled onto the TV broadcast and then spread across social media. The dispute centered on whether Cubs third-base coach Quintin Berry was relaying information to hitters from his spot, a point that Diamondbacks starter Merrill Kelly pushed hard after Arizona’s 7-0 loss at Chase Field.
Kelly called the situation “a little bulls—” and “a little bush league,” The Athletic reported, and the tension only grew from there. But after further review, Lovullo said he got a satisfactory explanation from Michael Hill, Major League Baseball’s senior vice president of on-field operations, and that explanation apparently cleared the Cubs.
Lovullo didn’t leave much room for ambiguity when he spoke to reporters ahead of Tuesday’s game. “I stand corrected,” he said, according to The Athletic. He also said he called Counsell to apologize and told him the Diamondbacks were wrong and the Cubs were doing everything right. In Lovullo’s telling, it was the kind of moment that can flare up fast in the middle of an intense stretch of the season, when both teams are trying to protect their turf.
That’s the part of baseball that fans know well, even if they don’t always love it: a close game, a charged dugout, a quick accusation, and then the long cleanup afterward. What stands out here is not just the argument itself, but the way it was resolved. Lovullo’s apology, as reported by The Athletic, turned a public dustup into a private correction — and a reminder that sometimes the first read on a situation isn’t the final one.
For the Diamondbacks, the episode also put Merrill Kelly at the center of the conversation after his comments following the loss. For the Cubs, it ended with their manager getting the call and, at least in Lovullo’s words, an acknowledgment that Chicago had done nothing wrong. In a sport where every edge gets scrutinized, that kind of reset can matter just as much as the original flashpoint.
