Larry Brown Sports

“Family Guy” may be a cartoon, but a lof of grown men and women — well, mostly men — enjoy it. In fact, I wouldn’t recommend letting children watch is unless your 10-year-old is a fan of crude humor like I was at that age. That’s a story for another day.

It would appear that Reds pitcher Mat Latos is a “Family Guy” fan as evidenced by the tattoo he has on his lower right leg. Latos is not the first professional athlete we have seen proudly displaying their love for the show. Remember that awesome haircut Tracy Porter had a couple years back? Considering Latos’ Stewie and Brian tribute is permanent and Porter’s wasn’t, we’ll go out on a limb and assume the hurler is the bigger fan.

H/T Lob Shots via SI Hot Clicks

Pitchers Mat Latos and Derek Lowe opposed each other for the second time in a week, and much like their last game, a controversy ensued.

The Indians beat the Reds 10-9 on Monday in the first of a three-game series in Cleveland, and Latos thinks some funny business was going on.

The Reds starter got hammered for seven runs including three home runs over four innings, and he implied after the game that Indians base runners were relaying signs from second to the batter.

“I was a little up in the zone. I thought I made some good pitches that they spit on with a runner on second base. I suppose it was kind of ironic. We changed up the signs, for the last hitter unfortunately,” Latos told the media, unprompted, according to Jordan Bastian of MLB.com. “The outcome changed when we changed up the signs today.

“I’m going to go back and look at video. A couple [times with] runners on second base, they put better swings on the ball than they did most of the time without a runner on second base. [Shin-Soo] Choo hit that double and then [Asdrubal] Cabrera was up [in the fourth]. Me and [catcher Ryan] Hanigan changed the signs up. He called for a slider. We were going with a certain call. That certain call we were going with beforehand was a curveball. I threw a slider and he was looking breaking ball and was jammed on a slider. That to me shows me a little something. Other than that, I was up in the zone. I made a couple of bad mistakes and they hit them.”

When pressed about his implication that the Indians were relaying signs from second, Latos didn’t back down.

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Baseball players must be made of paper mache because they keep getting hurt in the strangest of ways. We’ve already seen our share of injuries that occurred as a result of celebrations gone wrong, but now we can add to our growing list of weird sports injuries. For some reason, the common thread is that three of the four strange injuries happened to pitchers. Maybe they’re just soft as we’ve pointed out before.

The first strange injury occurred last week when Russell Branyan hurt his toe. How did it happen? A coffee table landed on it and cut his foot. Or something like that. Thanks to SI Hot Clicks for the heads up on that injury.

The next weird sports injury was probably the most embarrassing. Padres young stud pitcher Mat Latos landed on the 15-day disabled list after straining his side holding back a sneeze. No joke. He says he learned the lesson that he should just let it fly next time. We sure hope he does. Somewhere Sammy Sosa is saying “I told ya.”

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