Baseball, an every day game

Baseball is an every day game. One has to see it every day, day after day to admire it at its deepest level. It is a narrative, as each game it tells a story unto itself. A weekend of games is a series. A season full of games tells the story of a Summer and a year. As once upon a time in Brooklyn, and to this day in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and Queens, the story of a franchise tells part of the story of a place.

But it to appreciate the baseball narrative, the long story, the slowly woven tapestry that it is, one must begin with the day to day and the realization that each and every day at the ballpark offers the opportunity for something entirely new and unseen. And so it was Wednesday in the Major Leagues. Fans at one game saw something that no one had witnessed during an MLB game in fifty-five years. Those at another game saw a scoring oddity that the Clarion Content's sports editor, before that evening, for all of his advanced years and hours whiled away watching baseball, could not ever recall seeing.

First, the event last seen performed in the same game in 1955, done then by one Ted Kazanski of the Philadelphia Phillies: hit an inside the park home run and participate in a triple play defensively. Mr. Kazanski once renown as "the Phillies $100,000 bonus shortstop," has been joined in the annuals by New York Mets centerfielder Angel Pagan. Whom Wednesday night in St. Louis, hit his inside the park home-run in the top of the fourth inning to give the Mets a 1-0 lead. Then in the bottom of the fifth, Pagan participated in a bizarre triple play in which he caught a sinking linedrive in center, and runners on both first and second base were doubled-off thinking that Pagan had trapped the ball. Replays showed that it was indeed a sweet catch. The wild play would have been scored 8-2-6-3, centerfielder to catcher to shortstop to first. Now you don't see that often, let alone by a guy who hit an inside-the-parker in the same game.

The second anecdote from Wednesday night also revolves around a bizarre scoring oddity in a game between the New York Yankees and Tampa Bay Rays. It was first pointed out by ESPN's announcer for the game, the venerable Chris Berman. It was so rare that we had to tweet about it. The Rays had achieved 1st and 3rd with two out, five batters had been to the plate, but nary an official at-bat had been recorded by those scoring the game. Come again? In the top of the Tampa Bay third inning this sequence of plate appearances led to the rare five guys up in a row without recording at at-bat: former Durham Bull, Reid Brignac led off with a walk, Jason Bartlett bunted, sacrificing Brignac to second, Yankees pitcher A.J. Burnett hit Carl Crawford with a pitch, then walked Ben Zobrist to load the bases, the Rays clean-up hitter, all-star third-baseman, Evan Longoria hit a sacrifice fly and bam! Five up, two down, one in and no ABs. Sure hadn't seen that one before...

And so it goes at the old ballpark, where every day holds the promise of something new, something not seen in fifty years. Father's will be telling sons what they saw on the baseball diamond Wednesday into the distant future. Each day's game writes its own story, which is why baseball lives on in the cultural memory of our unfurling American tapestry.