OK, look: If you write about baseball professionally and you make a statement like the one I am about to make, someone inevitably crawls out of the woodwork to question your baseball-writing credentials and tell you why you are wrong and stupid.
And I’m here to say, before I get on with this, that I just don’t care. I am 34 years old, and by my own conservative estimate, I have watched, played or umped at least 3,000 baseball games. Add in all the time I’ve spent watching highlights, reading about baseball, and thinking about baseball, and I’m pretty certain I have spent about 3-5% of my entire life interacting with baseball in some capacity. That’s more time than I have spent eating, and I eat a lot, and more time, certainly, than I have spent working in any particular job. And it’s probably more time than I’ve spent interacting with my wife, whom I love very much, and more time than I’ve spent doing anything on this earth besides sleeping and sitting in classrooms. I’ve seen plenty of baseball.
And across all the thousands of hours I have dedicated to baseball, with all the heartbreak and triumph and laughter and anxiety that have come with them, I have never seen anything like the seventh inning of the Blue Jays’ Game 5 win over the Rangers on Wednesday night.
(PHOTO: Dan Hamilton/USA TODAY Sports Images)
Holy hell. Baseball!
I know I have seen catchers hit batters with return throws before, because I remember Shane Victorino getting doinked in the helmet. But though at least 100 of those 3,000 games I watched included the ever-yippy Mackey Sasser behind the plate, I am not sure I have ever seen a catcher’s errant return throw result in a big run — not in Little League, not in high-school games, and certainly not in a tie game in the seventh inning of a postseason elimination game.
But that exact thing happened Wednesday, when Russell Martin — one of the best non-Molina defensive catchers of his generation, no less — banked a throw off Shin-Soo Choo’s bat, allowing Rougned Odor to score from third and put the Rangers up, 3-2.
(PHOTO: Dan Hamilton/USA TODAY Sports Images)
That play alone would have made for an astonishing outcome to any baseball game — again, not just any series-deciding, postseason baseball game. But then in the bottom half of the same damn inning, the Rangers endured a complete defensive meltdown to allow the Blue Jays to tie the game at three and set up Jose Bautista to hit a mammoth, defiant, glorious and ultimately game-winning three-run homer.
For real. Even in a meaningless late-August game between two last-place teams, that series have events all coming in the course of a single inning would likely have been enough to force everyone watching to question everything they thought they knew about baseball and life and everything. But — one last time — it wasn’t a meaningless game; it was the final game of a wild playoff series that saw the Blue Jays lose the first two games in their home park then come back to win three straight and advance to the ALCS.
It all reminded me of something Astros outfielder George Springer said after his team’s Game 2 loss to the Royals in Kansas City, a quote that should resonate with anyone who has spent as much time as I have watching baseball:
This is a game where the craziest thing can happen, and then, next thing you know, you see something crazier.
So, yeah. That.
People seem to feel to draw broad conclusions from practically everything that happens in a sporting event, and so you may have already read and heard scorching takes about the accurately enforced MLB rule — which, somehow, existed — that allowed Odor to score in the top half of the inning, or whatever the heck it was that went wrong for the Rangers in the bottom half, or even about Jose Bautista somehow disrespecting the game for watching his moonshot and flipping his bat away in indignant exultation.
(Darren Calabrese/The Canadian Press via AP)
Disrespecting a game in which all that stuff just took place? No. No, no. Of course not. Bautista’s reaction represented only a man who just watched his team fall behind on one of the most bizarre plays in postseason history only to battle back on a similarly weird series of three consecutive misplays, who then concluded the baffling and ineffable sequence with about the most concrete and conclusive thing anyone can do on a baseball field.
Giving that homer a moment or two to sink in, to me, stands as about the most respectful thing a ballplayer could ever do for baseball. Bautista put the exclamation point on a profound and sublime inning, then provided everyone a second or two to exhale and try to process what they just witnessed.
Beyond that, there are no decisive conclusions to draw from that inning besides the damning one: Everything you thought you knew is probably wrong. If you were religious before investing in that inning, you came out of it a skeptic, and if you entered the frame an atheist, you’re now considering the existence of a higher power.
In the end, it’s only baseball. Astonishing, awesome, weird, weird baseball. It can be so freaking cool sometimes.
(PHOTO: Darren Calabrese/The Canadian Press via AP)
