Hey there! Remember us? Your friends from Weird and Wild World HQ? Sorry we’ve been busy with a bunch of other stuff the past few weeks. But here’s the good news: It’s time to catch up on the more important stuff in life. By which we can only mean …
The Weirdest, Wildest stuff of the month! So … how weird (and wild) was it?
A hitter managed to make an out during his own intentional walk? Yep. … A first-place team lost a game to a team that was 78 games under .500? Of course. … And a reliever blew a save in a game he entered in the second inning? Hey, why not? It’s baseball!
But we begin with the Weirdest and Wildest game of the year …
The game that (almost) broke Baseball Reference
On Aug 26 … and June 26, Danny Jansen had a game unlike any other. (David Butler II / Imagn Images)
It’s two weeks since The Danny Jansen Game. And A) it still makes our hearts pound. But B) our favorite stats site, Baseball Reference, is miraculously still functioning. We don’t take either of those things for granted, just so you know.
Do we need to refresh your memory on what the heck The Danny Jansen Game was? Oh, all right. On Aug. 26, the Red Sox and Blue Jays finally resumed a June 26 game at Fenway Park that had been suspended by raindrops in the second inning.
What made that Our Kind of Game was: When it was halted in June, Jansen was batting for the Blue Jays. And when it resumed (one titanic trade-deadline transaction later), Jansen was catching for the Red Sox.
It left us with so much Weird and Wild wackiness, it makes columns like this not merely possible but also a vital part of baseball existence. So here are just a few of our favorite things that happened, all because Jansen switched teams while this game was in suspended animation:
The guy who was on first base when Jansen came to bat for the Blue Jays (Davis Schneider) then stole second base … on Danny Jansen the catcher!
All in the same at-bat, Jansen swung at a pitch as a Blue Jay and caught a pitch for the Red Sox!
As the brilliant multitasker he is, Jansen managed to come to bat for both teams in the top and bottom of the same inning (the second). If you’re wondering who else in history has done that, you should know that answer is … nobody!
Those two famed time travelers, Leo Jiménez and Will Wagner, both got to play in this game for the Blue Jays despite the slight technicality that they hadn’t made their big-league debuts when it started. So since history will record everything they did that day as having happened on June 26, that means they both debuted before their debut.
Joey Loperfido was playing for the Astros, in a game in Houston, on June 26. But now baseball will try to convince us he was also playing for the Blue Jays in Boston on June 26. So where was he actually playing that day? Yes!
And because the baseball gods are awesome, the last batter of this game could only have been one person: Danny Jansen, a man who caught the first pitch of the game for one team and then made the last out of the same game for the other team. Baseball!
So there you go. All of that happened. In real life. We saw it. Danny Jansen lived it. It was real, and it was sensational. There was only one slight problem:
Now this game had to make it from the emerald grass of Fenway to the highly skeptical computer hard drives at Baseball Reference without crashing the whole darned site.
So you think that was easy, huh? You think somebody just has to send a quick note to the computers that of course the impossible is possible, huh? Ha. Really? Let’s tell you what actually happened.
The man for this job was the amazing Kenny Jackelen, a great friend of this column and the resident baseball computer genius at Baseball Reference. He knew from the start this could be done. But he also knew, as early as a week before this game resumed, that if he didn’t get to work immediately, his site could be headed for a possible “catastrophic scenario.”
Translation of “catastrophic”: The computers rebel — and say, “C’mon, that can’t happen. We’re shutting down this whole frigging site until you come to your senses.”
Couldn’t take that chance. So Kenny dug in to figure this out. And all that took was 20 hours of his life.
He told us he started with, essentially, Fake Box Score News. He made up a fictional Danny Jansen Game, adding Jose Trevino’s name under both teams in a box score from a recent Yankees-Tigers game. The idea was just to try that “and see what broke.”
That went pretty much how you’d expect — with each attempt creating a flurry of new glitches. So he’d sit back, try a new trick, wait for the next box-score trainwreck and then try to fix it. It took hours and hours, and then more hours and hours. But by game time a week later, he was pretty sure he’d plugged enough holes to at least get this bizarre game to post on the site.
Except, of course, the computers still didn’t believe a lot of this happened.
So even after the game first appeared on Baseball Reference, there were, well, issues. At one point Jansen’s whole page disappeared entirely. So back to work he went.
No, he and his team told their computers, Jansen did not just go 1-for-4 for both teams. No, he did not start this game with the Red Sox and end it with the Blue Jays. It was one glitchfest after another. But fixing those things were minor, compared with trying to explain this to the computer:
One plus one equals …. One!
Wait. What? Oh, yeah. Here’s that deal. Jansen got credited with a game played for Toronto that day. He also got credited with a game played for Boston. But he did not get credited with two games played in the same game. Because that’s not possible.
Obviously, he played in only one game. But have you ever tried to tell a computer that one plus one isn’t necessarily two? It took some work!
There were literally over 100 wrinkles like that. Nearly every one of them had to be fixed individually. That took a while! But Baseball Reference sorted all of them out (they think). And once the hard labor was over with, Kenny actually went back and looked to see how many twisters he chased, simply to get this game to display on the site.
• He had to rewrite 100 different queries, he said. Those are basically data commands, all to make it possible for one man to appear for two teams in the same game.
• He added 10 new columns to the data-sorting program, so Jansen’s stats would be sorted by team, not games played.
• And he updated 20 table keys, just so the name “Jansen” could be displayed for two teams in the same box score.
So it took many, many, many more hours to code this game than it took to play this game. And that’s because every one of those changes came down to the same common theme:
Computers do not believe that a thing like this was possible. How naïve are they?
In this column, you see, we write about the strange but true things that happen in baseball all the time. And we’ve noticed, just by how much the readers enjoy them, that human beings are willing to accept that those strange but true things do happen.
But computers? They’re not buying it! So doesn’t that tell us that we humans are more advanced than computers? That’s our story, and we’re sticking to it.
“I’m with you,” Kenny Jackelen said. “Yeah, the computer only thinks what it thinks because a human told it to. So one thing we learned from this is that the computer can be convinced. It just needs a nudge from a human to get there.”
GO DEEPER
Danny Jansen could make history by playing for Red Sox and Blue Jays in the same game
The Wildest (and Weirdest) first inning ever
Mookie Betts’ Dodgers and Corbin Carroll’s D-Backs combined for a first-inning first. (Joe Camporeale / Imagn Images)
On Aug. 31, in beautiful downtown Phoenix, a baseball game started like no game has ever started before. At least that was my theory at the time. So did I go down that rabbit hole? What do you think?
In the top of the first inning, the Dodgers came to bat. And Shohei Ohtani happened.
HE DOES NOT STOP 🔥
Shohei Ohtani CRUSHES homer No. 44! pic.twitter.com/zV2LQ20I9y
— MLB (@MLB) September 1, 2024
Next up, a man named Mookie.
MOOKIE BETTS BACK-TO-BACK 🤯 pic.twitter.com/dEJ6lDvDei
— MLB (@MLB) September 1, 2024
One pitch later, Freddie Freeman did what?
SHOHEI, MOOKIE, FREDDIE
BACK-TO-BACK-TO-BACK 😮 pic.twitter.com/lcCAiCS6hN
— MLB (@MLB) September 1, 2024
So that’s back-to-back-to-back homers, to kick off the top of the first inning, in a span of four pitches. Those three men had never before homered in succession. Then they became the first Dodgers in history to launch a baseball game with back-to-back-to-back bombs. Why are the Dodgers so terrifying? That about sums it up.
But wait. I said my theory was that no baseball game had ever started like this before. And this was not the first game in history to begin with three straight homers. So what else was coming? This was coming.
An inside-the-park answerback from Corbin Carroll 🏃♂️ pic.twitter.com/IzcKVG2kfC
— MLB (@MLB) September 1, 2024
Corbin Carroll. Holy inside-the-park-arama. A leadoff inside-the-park home run to start the bottom of the first? That. Happened. Too.
So no way both of those things had ever happened before, right? I checked on that every way I knew how to check. I was 99.999 percent sure no game had ever started that way. But I had to be certain.
Fortunately, I know a guy who has more than 110 seasons worth of play-by-play data – and every home run in American League/National League history — on his computer. That man is the aforementioned Kenny Jackelen of Baseball Reference. He took an even deeper dive. Ready for what he found?
The heck with the first inning. The heck with home runs that started off an inning. He found no other half-innings — in AL/NL history — that included three homers or more in one half-inning and any kind of inside-the-park homer in the other half of that inning. Wow.
Baseball. It’s the best.
Sweet home Chicago?
Shota Imanaga and company ended a Cubs/Wrigley Field no-hitter drought of more than 50 years. (Kamil Krzaczynski / Imagn Images)
I love Wrigley Field. How could you not love Wrigley Field? It’s a special, sun-splashed combination of national historic monument and Murphy’s Bleachers Happy Hour, all in one ivy-covered brick bundle. However …
It’s time to address a critical question: Have you noticed that Wrigley has spent the last half-century as the most no-hitter-proof ballpark in our land? And why the heck is that anyway?
It’s an excellent time to ask, since just last week, Shota Imanaga and his bullpen buddies ended a Cubs/Wrigley no-hitter drought that had somehow lasted for 52 years. Even weirder (and wilder), only one visiting team or pitcher had thrown a no-hitter at Wrigley in those 52 years: Cole Hamels, in his last start as a Phillie, on July 25, 2015.
So one no-hitter … in half a century … and none by the home team? That’s bizarre. I took a look at this, with my friends from STATS Perform.
How many teams have gone 50 years or more without a no-hitter in any home park? Only two. The Cubs are one. The Pirates — who never threw a no-hitter in 60 years at Forbes Field — are the other.
How many other teams have even gone 40 years without a no-hitter in a home park? There are only three of those: the Mets at Shea Stadium (44 years), the Cardinals at Sportsman’s Park (42) and the Tigers at Tiger Stadium (40).
But how about ballparks that went 40 years (or more) without anyone throwing a no-hitter? Only one park in history has that claim to fame, STATS found. Guess where? Wrigley.
So how can we explain that? I knew just the man to consult: noted North Side drought expert Jim Deshaies, who can be heard nightly breaking down Cubs happenings for Marquee Sports Network. Good choice. Turns out he had diagnosed this problem long ago.
It’s a simple allergy issue, my friends: Pitchers are allergic to ivy! Obviously. Medical science just hasn’t diagnosed it yet.
“That would explain why Carlos Zambrano threw a “home” no-hitter in Milwaukee (due to hurricane issues),” Dr. Deshaies said. “And Cole Hamels threw one at Wrigley as a Phillie but not as a Cub.”
Voila! We’d better get the word out, we decided. We just need to determine what to call this malady in our important upcoming dissertation for the North Side Medical Journal. As always, Jim Deshaies had the answer.
“Not Swine Flu,” he said, “but Vine Flu.”
Speaking of no-hitters
Bowden Francis! Where do we even start?
He’s a modern-day Dave Stieb — Twice in his past four starts, the Blue Jays’ dazzling rookie has taken a no-hitter into the ninth inning … and lost it on a leadoff home run. The Blue Jays franchise is now in its 48th season. In those 48 seasons, only two pitchers for any team have had two no-hit bids broken up in the ninth within four starts. One is Blue Jays icon Dave Stieb, in September 1988. The other: Bowden Francis.
He’s got some Nolan Ryan in him — We know Nolan Ryan as that guy who pitched seven no-hitters. But he also lost five others in the ninth inning. Thanks to the fantastic site Lost in the Ninth, we can report that only three other pitchers in the live-ball era (since 1920) are known to have experienced what Francis experienced Wednesday — by having two no-hitters busted up in the ninth, in the same season:
Nolan Ryan, 1989 Rangers
Dave Stieb, 1988 Blue Jays
Steve Barber, 1967 Orioles
But Barber also started a combined no-hitter. You know about Ryan. And Stieb eventually threw a no-hitter in 1990. So is Bowden Francis going to end up as the only pitcher in the last century whose no-hit memories will just be the no-no’s he lost? Stay tuned!
But actually, this was the Francisco Lindor Game
Francisco Lindor broke up the no-no with a leadoff homer in the ninth, but the Mets were just getting started. (Nick Turchiaro / Imagn Images)
Except somehow, almost impossibly, Bowden Francis’ lost no-hitter turned out to be not even the biggest story in this game … because the Mets rolled into the ninth with no hits … and won … by scoring six runs.
So what’s so Weird and Wild about that? Let’s discuss!
Before that inning, the Mets hadn’t scored six runs (or more) in any of their last 126 innings, and had scored six runs total in their previous 37 innings combined … and then scored six in one inning after getting no-hit into the ninth? Right.
Before that inning, the Blue Jays hadn’t allowed six runs in any of their previous 248 innings … and then gave up six after holding that same lineup hitless into the ninth? OK then.
Down 1-0 and hitless entering the ninth and won? According to another friend of the column, baseball research genius Eric Orns, history had dropped a few hints that teams in this mess aren’t super likely to win. In the Retrosheet/Baseball Reference play-by-play era (mostly complete back to 1912), those teams had an “all-time” record of 11-425 … before the Mets came along!
No hits for eight innings, score six in the ninth? You don’t see that much. By which I mean never! According to the Elias Sports Bureau, via the great Sarah Langs of MLB.com, no team had ever scored that many runs in the ninth inning after getting zero hits for eight innings.
Two homers, two sac flies plus three walks = six runs? How weird (and wild) an inning was that? According to Orns, there had been only one previous inning in the last century in which any team scored six runs or more with that weird combo. And that was the Rangers, in the middle of a madcap 16-run inning, in a 26-7 win over the Orioles on April 19, 1996. But clearly, they had more than zero hits before that inning busted out.
So how the heck did this game happen? Oh, that’s right. It’s …
Baseball!
Does Geico sell scoreboard insurance?
Do the Astros have a grudge against scoreboards? I hate to jump to conclusions. But just consider the evidence, with insight from Astros broadcast-witticist Geoff Blum.
Aug. 13 in Tampa Bay — One minute, the always-menacing Yordan Alvarez was mashing SpaceX launches all over Tropicana Field. The next, the Trop scoreboard looked like the Rays forgot to pay their DirecTV bill.
Looks like Yordan Alvarez has broken another scoreboard during BP 😂
📸: @brianmctaggart pic.twitter.com/8lHkfhxlWC
— FOX Sports: MLB (@MLBONFOX) August 13, 2024
Blum’s theory: Is Yordan ticked off that he hasn’t been invited to a Home Run Derby? He’d already blown out the power to the previously unreachable scoreboard in Houston with a gargantuan 2019 home run. And now this?
“It could be,” Blum said, “that he has broken two scoreboards to prove that it would be a waste of his time (to invite him to a Derby) to prove his prodigious power.”
Aug. 16 in Houston: Then, a mere three days later, Jose Altuve didn’t just hit a double off the left-field scoreboard in Minute Maid Park. He smoked a baseball through the scoreboard.
Jose Altuve hit a ball that went through the scoreboard, leaving a hole where the Yankees’ 4th inning score would be 💥
🎥 @SpaceCityHN | H/T @brianmctaggart pic.twitter.com/TCm5zPjtWC
— The Athletic (@TheAthletic) August 17, 2024
Blum’s theory: “He actually knocked a scoring tile off the line score of the New York Yankees,” Blum said. “Thus proving his ability to knock the Yankees out yet again.”
Author’s note: New Yorkers can address all their unhappiness with this quip to Geoff Blum. He said it! The Weird and Wild column reminds you that we are just the messenger here.
More White Sox Weirdness and Wildness
Elsewhere on The Athletic, we’re presenting a Weird and Wild special on the White Sox — the Cleveland Spiders of the 21st century. But does our Weird and Wild White Sox coverage stop there? How the heck can it? The nutty White Sox facts just keep on coming!
Grady’s Super-Sized Ejection! If you managed the White Sox, you’d want to get ejected, too, we’re thinking. So who can blame their interim manager, Grady Sizemore, for getting booted from Attractive Loss No. 109 last week?
I don’t know what you thought after that ejection. But here’s what we were thinking at Weird and Wild World HQ: Has any manager ever gotten ejected from his team’s 109th loss of the season before? And what’s the record for that sort of thing anyway?
So Retrosheet president Tom Thress graciously agreed to take the case, since he’s one of the caretakers of the Society for American Baseball Research’s hallowed ejections database. We can’t be certain it includes every ejection in AL/NL history. But hey, close enough. Here’s what Tom found:
First prize — 113th loss: Bill McKechnie got bounced in loss No. 113 by the apparently struggling 1935 Boston Braves. Upbeat note for Grady Sizemore: McKechnie was managing in the World Series only four years later, with the 1939 Reds!
Second prize — 109th loss: Grady, you set the American League record. So there’s that.
Third prize — 107th loss: Casey Stengel broke his own personal record here, after getting tossed from the 1962 Mets’ 106th defeat the year before. But Stengel still only moved into a tie for third place on this list. Harry Smith also got the gong from a 107th loss, for the hapless 1909 Boston Doves.
Is that a distinguished leaderboard, or what? But on a cheerier note …
Worst beats first! The very next day after that ejection, another historic thing happened in White Sox Land: A team that was 78 games under .500 (31-109) won a game … against a team that was in first place heading into that game (the Orioles). So yep, that sent me down another absurd rabbit hole.
Turns out the ’62 Mets never beat a team in first place when they were that far under .500. And even those 1899 Cleveland Spiders never did. On one hand, the Spiders had some chances over their next few weeks, on the road to 112 under (20-132). On the other hand, they weren’t that interested in beating anybody. After they reached 78 under, they went 1-38!
So it turns out only two teams, 78 under or worse, in AL/NL history have ever beaten a team that was in first place:
• The 1916 A’s (83 under) swept a doubleheader from the Red Sox on the last day of the season. The losing pitcher in Game 2: Some guy named Babe Ruth!
• The 2003 Tigers (78 under) beat the Twins, who were resting pretty much everybody after clinching, in the final weekend of that season. And that’s it!
This Month in Useless Info
ARE YOU READY FOR SOME FOOTBALL? On the last Sunday before the NFL hijacked Sunday afternoons, three baseball teams — the Cardinals, Cubs and Diamondbacks — scored exactly 14 points … er, I mean runs.
Last time that happened on any day: 25 years earlier, almost to the exact date, on Aug. 31, 1999.
One of those games this year was Cardinals 14, Yankees 3, at Yankee Stadium. Did you know the previous Yankee Stadium hosted more than 300 NFL games in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. But how many of them ended with a score of 14-3? Right you are. That would be none.
WYATT’S TRIFECTA — Rangers rookie Wyatt Langford hasn’t even played 120 games in the big leagues yet. But he’s done some stuff to remember.
Already this year, he’s had …
A cycle.
An inside-the-park homer.
And a walk-off slam (last week against the Yankees).
Just to put that in perspective … here’s one guy who has never done any of those things: A fellow named Aaron Judge!
Oh, and one more little burst of perspective: Only one other player in history has done all three of those things in the same season, according to ESPN Stats and Info. That was a guy named … Jackie Robinson (in 1948).
A photo of Alex Jackson — homering! — in July. (Matt Pendleton / Imagn Images)
EASY AS .1223 — It may be the Year of the Jackson. But with apologies to Jackson Merrill, Chourio and Holliday, the most historic Jackson of them all might be sweet-swinging Rays catcher Alex Jackson.
He got designated for assignment this week … possibly because his batting average for the year was a “pitcher-esque” .1223, with 53 strikeouts and 17 hits. So what’s so historically Weird and Wild about that?
The Tampa Bay Times’ Marc Topkin reports that if Jackson doesn’t resurface in the big leagues, he’s going to finish this season with the worst batting average in the modern era, among players who got at least 150 plate appearances in that season. The previous record holder, Frank O’Rourke, has been sitting on his .1224 average for 112 years.
Only four hitters in the last 50 years have even come within 15 points of that .1223 average. And one of them was a guy named … Alex Jackson! (He hit .137 in 2021.)
IT’S ALL CYCLICAL — Mike Schmidt, Dick Allen, Chase Utley, Jimmy Rollins and Bryce Harper never hit for the cycle as a Phillie. But you know who did last month? Rookie utilityman Weston Wilson, because of course he did. But that isn’t even the Weird and Wild part.
Since it was the Phillies’ first cycle at Citizens Bank Park since 2004, it meant they have now found a way to string together 20-year cycle droughts (or longer) in four different home parks: Baker Bowl, Connie Mack Stadium, the Vet and the Bank. So how weird (and wild) is that?
According to STATS Perform, if we include the postseason, only one other franchise has had a 20-year cycle drought in more than two home parks. That would be the Braves — at Fulton County Stadium in Atlanta, and Braves Field and the South End Grounds in Boston.
THE GREATEST SHOH ON EARTH — It’s time for the regularly scheduled Shohei Ohtani appearance in this column. So here’s a little tidbit that hasn’t gotten much attention:
Ohtani the base-stealing machine has now stolen 25 bases in a row without being caught by a catcher. Rickey Henderson’s longest streak at any point: 13 in a row!
DON’T JUDGE ME — While we were away, a celebrated Yankees slugger had a three-homer game. But it wasn’t that big dude who leads the world in homers – that Aaron Judge dude. It was, instead, the guy who hits in front of that dude, Juan Soto.
So that got me thinking: How rare is it for the fellow who hits in front of the major-league home run champ to hit three home runs in a game? The awesome Katie Sharp, of Baseball Reference, delved into that one and came up with a fantastic list — finding eight other times since 1901 that a player had a three-homer game while hitting in front of the eventual MLB home run champ:
| HITTER | HR CHAMP | DATE |
|---|---|---|
|
Chris Davis |
Nelson Cruz |
5/20/2014 |
|
Barry Bonds |
Matt Williams |
8/2/1994 |
|
Dave Henderson |
Jose Canseco |
8/3/1991 |
|
Doug DeCinces |
Reggie Jackson |
twice, 1982 |
|
Ben Oglivie |
Gorman Thomas |
6/20/1982 |
|
Lee Walls |
Ernie Banks |
4/24/1958 |
|
Al Simmons |
Jimmie Foxx |
7/15/1932 |
HOT ENOUGH FOR YOU? – A truly Weird and Wild thing happened in the NL West last month. The Padres and Diamondbacks ran off a 20-game blitz in which each of them went 17-3 … at the same time. But did you know that wasn’t even the Weird and Wild part?
Here comes that part: How is it possible that two teams could do that, at the same time, in the same division … but neither of them was even in first place (or reached first place at any point in the streak)? If you’re thinking that can’t ever have happened, you think a lot like I think.
And also … you’re right! Kenny Jackelen found only one other time when two teams in the same division had 17-3 streaks (or better) in 20-game spans that included any date in the same calendar month. That was when the Angels and A’s of the 2002 AL West did it, but it didn’t help them catch the sizzling first-place Mariners.
Except those two streaks in 2002 didn’t have a single day when they overlapped. So what the Padres and D-Backs did was a Weird and Wild all-timer.
BEWARE OF ZOMBIES — Zombie Runners have roamed the baseball earth for five seasons now. And no matter what else you think of them, they’re the gift that keeps on giving to this column.
So how ’bout the latest Zombie apocalypse, last Friday night in Oakland. The Tigers and A’s played a 13-inning game that night in which seven Zombie Runners scored in extra innings. Which meant the scoring in this game broke down this way:
33 runners who reached base by doing something* — 6 runs scored
Seven Zombies who reached base without even batting — 7 runs scored
(*reached by hit, walk or HBP)
That seems wrong. Still, it turned into the first game in history in which seven Zombie Runners scored. Which came as quite a thrill to all those who witnessed it. (There might have been more Zombie Runners than fans by the end, but whatever!)
“I’ve watched more Walking Dead score than a necrophiliac!” dulcet A’s analyst Dallas Braden told us.
This Month in Strange But Trueness
Kyle Schwarber and the A’s Lawrence Butler each hit the HR trifecta twice in two months. (Jay Biggerstaff / USA Today)
What a Strange But True month it’s been. Did all this really happen? Heck, yeah, it did:
The Brewers called up … a Brewer! (Brewer Hicklen, to be precise.)
The A’s had a game (Aug. 29) in which one player (Lawrence Butler) hit three home runs and another player (JJ Bleday) went 5-for-5 … and they still lost. How many other teams have ever pulled that off? None, says STATS.
And not just the Butler did it … because it’s been a Strange But True year for long-ball trifectas in lots of ways. For two months (May 5 through July 4), all 30 teams combined for zero three-homer games. Then, over the next two months, Butler and Kyle Schwarber had two three-homer games apiece just by themselves.
The Cubs offense put up 14 runs or more in none of their first 129 games of the season. That same offense then had four games of 14 runs or more on the same road trip. (Hat tip: Chris Kamka.)
The Cardinals had gone 60 years without winning a game in any version of Yankee Stadium — since Game 5 of the 1964 World Series. When they finally broke that streak on Aug. 31, their winning pitcher was a guy named Gibson (Kyle). So who was the winning pitcher the last time the Cardinals won in the Bronx? Of course, it was another guy named Gibson (Bob).
Phillies pinch hitters until this week had more RBIs in countries not named the United States (two — one in England, one in Canada) than in the U.S. (one). The good news is, the USA pulled ahead this week, 3-2. The bad news is, those pinch hitters still have no RBIs in any American city not known as “Philadelphia.”
Cooper Criswell blew a save for the Red Sox last month in a game he entered in the second inning. He inherited a 2-0 lead in Baltimore on Aug. 16, in a game started by an opener (Brennan Bernardino). He then gave up six runs in the next 3 1/3 innings. And he got an official blown save out of it. Baseball!
The Pirates had won 1,192 games in a row when they took a seven-run lead (or larger) into the seventh inning. Then they blew a seven-run lead at Wrigley on Aug. 28 … in a game started by Paul Skenes.
Carlos Ruiz, beloved catcher for the glory-years Phillies, was honored before an Aug. 16 Phillies-Nationals game in Philadelphia. So wouldn’t you know that in the ninth inning that night, he got to see a pitcher named Carlos (Estevez) and a catcher named Ruiz (Keibert).
Spencer Torkelson just had his first four-hit game in the big leagues in almost exactly one year (Aug. 21, 2023-Aug. 20, 2024). The opposing starting pitcher in both games was … the same guy (Javier Assad).
The Marlins have trailed the Rockies by four runs in the ninth twice this year … and came back to win both games. How long had it been since any team did that twice in one season against the same team? Only 98 years — since Babe Ruth’s ’26 Yankees pulled it off versus the Tigers. Ohbytheway, in all other games, those same Marlins are 39 games under .500.
And remember Alex Jackson (aka., the worst hitter in the modern era)? Would you believe the first hitter in baseball to get two extra-base hits in the same game off Corbin Burnes this year was … Alex Jackson? We’re not making any of this stuff up. I promise.
DON’T WALK THIS WAY — Finally, who out there has ever heard of a hitter making an out on his own intentional walk? It seems impossible, right? Well, meet the Marlins’ Jesús Sánchez.
In the eighth inning of an Aug. 25 game against the Cubs, he was due up with runners on second and third in a one-run game. So …
What the Cubs did next: Put up four fingers.
What Sánchez did next: Walk back into the dugout (since he’d been told that Cristian Pache was going to pinch-run for him).
What the Cubs thought they did next: Appealed at first base, whereupon Pache was called out.
What the umpires did next: Said wait a second. Pache can’t be out. He was attempting to pinch-run for a guy who was never on base. So they called Sánchez out instead.
What the Elias Sports Bureau did next (the next day): Stepped in and ruled that not only was Sanchez (not Pache) the guy who was out. But also … his walk didn’t even count because he’d “refused” to go to first base. So guess how this one was scored, I dare you.
How about a “fly ball” to the catcher —so 2-unassisted — to end an at-bat in which a pitch was never thrown, to a hitter the other team was actually trying to walk. Seriously.
How can you not love …
Baseball!
GO DEEPER
The White Sox — 81 games under .500! — are piling up mind-blowing numbers for the ages
GO DEEPER
How Joey Votto knew it was time — ‘I’m expired’ — and what he thinks could be next
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Does a rough second half matter in October? Some World Series hopefuls might want to look away
(Top photo of Kevin Kiermaier failing to make the catch on Corbin Carroll’s inside-the-park home run: Christian Petersen / Getty Images)
