CODE WARRIOR:

He shouldn't have been playing that game. Not with his knees the way they were, and certainly not with that arm injury. But LeCroy didn't want to pass up the opportunity and Robinson had no choice. The Nationals were bad and, worse yet, they were banged up. Starting catcher Brian Schneider was on the disabled list. Backup Wiki Gonzalez was dealing with a mild concussion suffered two days prior.

That left LeCroy, who hadn't thrown out a baserunner all year. The Astros were well aware of his shortcomings, turning the late-May contest into a track meet. Seven steals, two throwing errors and a crowd of 24,733 anxiously wondering if the Nationals would indeed blow a six-run lead, forced Robinson into the unthinkable: he yanked LeCroy off the field in the middle of the inning.

Right there, in the top of the seventh, Robert Fick -- who hadn't caught a pitch in a big league game all season -- came on to relieve LeCroy and try to save the game. In a game of unwritten rules, the mid-inning switch was one that tugged at the conscience, with players admitting later that it was tough to watch and not feel bad for LeCroy.

But LeCroy wasn't upset. He was well aware he wasn't doing his job. What the South Carolina native wasn't aware of was how much the decision had torn up Robinson. LeCroy was in the weight room when media relations director John Dever sheepishly came in after the game. "Can you answer some questions tonight?" Dever asked LeCroy. "Frank got emotional."

LeCroy turned around. "What do you mean, Frank got emotional?"

Dever played back the post-game press conference. There he was: hard-nosed Hall of Famer Frank Robinson, crying. Not because the Nationals had won three games in a row for just the second time all season. No, Robinson wept at the thought of humiliating LeCroy, of disrespecting a fellow player and the game he loved so much.

"I hated that he got emotional, I told him I wasn't good enough for somebody to cry over," said LeCroy, who was blown away by the size of the scrum of reporters waiting at his locker when he arrived. "It was a crazy day. I didn't think much about the situation. Didn't realize that it was going to be such a big deal. That's when I said the daddy quote."

The exact, priceless line from LeCroy was, "If my daddy was managing this team, I'm sure he would have done the same thing." The snippet circulated the Internet along with the footage of Robinson, tears welled in the corner of his eyes and spilling out onto his cheeks.

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