Gallo’s major league debut best ever by Las Vegan

Do you think one of the Texas Rangers beat writers will ask Adrian Beltre about Wally Pipp?

On July 2, 1925, before a game against the Washington Senators, Yankees first baseman Pipp complained of a headache. Miller Huggins told him to grab a couple of Bayer and to take the day off. Higgins inserted this kid named Gehrig — Lou Gehrig — into the lineup.

You probably know the rest of the story, or have seen the movie.

Fast forward to today’s high-definition Jumbotron era. Adrian Beltre has a thumb injury, and so the Rangers called up this kid Gallo — Joey Gallo — straight from Double A, via Bishop Gorman High and the Las Vegas youth baseball traveling circuit.

In his first major league at-bat Tuesday night against the White Sox and Jeff Samardzija, a pretty good pitcher (and also a pretty good wide receiver), Gallo hit a single with the bases loaded, knocking in two teammates.

In his second major league at-bat, also against Samardzija, he hit a towering 430-foot home run into the upper deck. Joey Gallo’s parents cheered, and when he returned to the dugout, Prince Fielder made him take a curtain call. Gallo did; he gave it one of those sheepish Roger Maris jobs.

Had he taken a deep bow, Samardzija probably would have hit him with a pitch the next time up, because baseball has silly unwritten rules against rookies taking deep bows and whatnot. So Samardzija pitched to Gallo, and Gallo hit one off the top of the wall for a double.

His last two times up, he struck out and walked.

Handsome Joey Gallo, Pride of the Rangers, only 21 years old, went 3-for-4 in his major league debut, with four RBIs and seven total bases. He and former Las Vegas 51 J.P. Arencibia and the Cubs’ Starlin Castro are the only active players to have totaled seven bases or more in their big league debuts.

Gallo is the third swatting sultan from Las Vegas to have recently made a major league debut heralded by trumpets.

On April 28, 2012, Bryce Harper went 1-for-3 with an RBI against the Dodgers. Harper was only 19 — this was before he had made a Gatorade commercial, and before he had started making the other players mad because of how he plays, which is hard, with a chip on his shoulder and an ambivalence for silly unwritten rules.

On April 17, Kris Bryant went to bat four times for the Cubs against the Padres. He went hitless and struck out three times. There ought to be an unwritten rule prohibiting James Shields from feeding an eager rookie slugger a steady diet of unhittable change-ups.

So Gallo’s debut was more spectacular than those of his fellow young swatting sultans, and it was a lot more ostentatious than Greg Maddux’s, too, and Maddux is in the Hall of Fame. It didn’t start out that way, though — on Sept. 12, 1986, Maddux pitched one inning for the Cubs against the Astros and served up a home run to Billy Hatcher and was tagged with the loss.

And how’s this for an asterisk: Maddux was pitching to his pal, fellow Las Vegan Mike Martin, who appeared in only eight major league games for Chicago, but that was one of ’em.

As for how some other Las Vegans fared in their MLB baptismals, Marty Barrett (Sept. 16, 1982) went 0-for-1; Tyler Houston (April 3, 1996) went 1-for-2 with a double his first time up; Marty Cordova (April 26, 1995) went 0-for-3 with two strikeouts on his way to being named American League Rookie of the Year; Chris Carter (Aug. 9, 2010), the Astros’ big home run bopper, went 0-for-3 and fanned twice.

Brad Thompson, who attended Cimarron-Memorial High, has been out of baseball since 2010.

But appearing for the first time as a big leaguer for the Cardinals on May 8, 2005, against the Padres, Thompson pitched three innings in relief and earned a save, which you hardly ever see 10 years later.

You never see what 17,157 paying customers at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum saw on June 11, 1978.

Just one week after graduating from Valley High School, 18-year-old Mike Morgan was the starting pitcher for the Oakland Athletics against the Baltimore Orioles. Morgan went the distance, losing 3-0 to Scott McGregor and the O’s.

Morgan did not go on to become an ace among aces, a la Maddux. But he would pitch for 12 big league clubs over 25 years, and he would pitch in the majors until he was 42 years old, becoming one of only 29 players to have his name appear in a major league box score in four different decades.

On the day Joey Gallo got called up, another Las Vegas kid with a major league pedigree posted on his Facebook timeline that the 2016 Home Run Derby may very well come down to a battle among the fence-busting firm of Harper, Bryant and Gallo.

Chad Hermansen’s first major league game was Sept. 7, 1999, against the Padres. Playing left field for the Pirates, he went 0-for-3 with two lineouts.

I’ll bet even the soft ground ball he hit to shortstop in the seventh inning off Sterling Hitchcock felt good, though.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.