MLB’s Strange But True 2024: The workforce, sport, inning and homer of the 12 months — plus The Ohtani Game | USAEMALL.com

I swear this all happened in the Strange But True baseball year of 2024:

A man played for both teams in the same game. … Another guy made an out on his own intentional walk. … And history was made at Coors Field, all because a pitcher did not throw a pitch.

I mention all that because it’s time once again for the end-of-year extravaganza you’ve been waiting for — and we have enough material for three parts. Happy Strange But True Feats of the Year column to all who celebrate!

Clonehead of the Year — Danny Jansen

Danny Jansen takes the field with the Red Sox on Aug. 26 after starting the game — on June 26 — as a member of the Blue Jays. (Paul Rutherford / Getty Images)

Cloning technology isn’t roaring along at the same furious rate as, say, TikTok video technology. But in baseball, we have the next best thing to cloning — the suspended-game rule.

And how great is that rule — baseball’s special little world of suspended animation? So great that it gifted us with one of my favorite Strange But True Games of all time.

Presenting … The Danny Jansen Game.

Do we need to refresh your memory of what The Danny Jansen Game was? Let’s do that. On Aug. 26, the Red Sox and Blue Jays resumed a June 26 game at Fenway Park that had been suspended by many, many raindrops in the second inning.

What made that The Strange But True Game of the Year was this: When it was halted in June, Jansen was batting for the Blue Jays. And when it resumed (one awesome Sox-Jays trade-deadline extravaganza later), Jansen was catching for the Red Sox.

So what’s so Strange But True about that? Oh, only about a billion things like this:

Wanna play catch? It makes no logical sense that a player could get taken out of a game, and then, at the same exact moment, get subbed into that game for the other team — allowing him to start an actual big-league at-bat as the hitter and then finish it as the catcher. But hey, the suspended-game rule is inventive like that.

So who else has ever batted and caught in the same at-bat in a big-league game? Nobody. Obviously. But also …

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 would also be: Nobody!

And don’t check the video, because while we have plenty of video evidence that Jansen set foot in the batter’s box for the Blue Jays in this game … and was stuck there for the next seven weeks (not literally!) … he did not get credit for a plate appearance for the Blue Jays. What do you mean, you saw it with your own eyes? Who cares? It’s baseball!

And don’t do the math, because that’s also a problem. 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. So when does one plus one equal one? Only in … baseball!

And because the baseball gods are awesome, the last batter of this game could only have been one man: Danny Jansen, 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.

Well, there you go. All of that happened. In real life. We saw it. Danny Jansen lived it. It was real, and it was sensational.

So how, I asked him, would he explain to his grandkids someday that it was possible to play for both teams in the same game … in the major leagues?

“Baseball is incredible,” he said. “It’s always incredible. You can’t expect that anything in baseball can’t happen. Anything’s possible.

“This game,” said Jansen, “is nuts.”

Strangest But Truest Inning of the Year

Jazz Chisholm Jr. can’t handle Anthony Volpe’s throw as Kiké Hernández is safe at third in a nightmare fifth inning for New York. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Speaking of nuts, what do you say we relive the fifth inning of Game 5 of the World Series. (All you Yankees fans out there … you’re not eligible to reply to that question!) Of course, we need to relive it. It’s in the running for the Strangest But Truest postseason inning ever.

To refresh your memory …

• When that inning began, the Yankees were leading the Dodgers in this game, 5-0 …

• And their starting pitcher, a literally unhittable dude named Gerrit Cole, was out there launching Formula 1 speedballs clocked at 99 mph …

• And the Dodgers had used many more pitchers (four) than they had hits (none) …

Whereupon … stuff began happening … by which I mean stuff like this, which involved the Yankees making baseball look so much harder than we’d like to think it is …

• There was Aaron Judge clanking a routine fly ball in center field. That was one error — by a guy who has committed zero errors on any of the other 538 fly balls hit to him in the center-field portion of his career.

• There was the shortstop, Gold Glove finalist Anthony Volpe, making an unfortunate throw to third on an attempted forceout. That was two errors.

• And then, with Cole one pitch away from escaping a bases-loaded, no-out disaster, he forgot one slight detail after Mookie Betts bounced a spinning five-hopper to Anthony Rizzo at first — the detail that involves a pitcher’s brain reminding him he’s supposed to cover first base on balls like that.

Technically, there was no “error” charged to Cole for that gaffe. But the magic word there is “technically,” because a zero-run inning became a five-run inning after Cole neglected to cover first.

So an inning that started with a Gerrit Cole no-hitter watch turned into an almost incomprehensible five-run inning for that team he was no-hitting. And not just any five-run inning. A five-run inning in which all five runs were unearned.

Which meant the Dodgers would go on to win the World Series … by winning a game in which they trailed by five runs. And just so we’re clear, that’s a sentence that has never before been typed in the history of the World Series. But that’s not all, because …

How many other teams have ever had a game in which they …

• Blew a five-run lead (or larger)?

• Coughed up at least five unearned runs?

• Stuffed three errors into the box score?

• And included both a balk and catcher’s interference in those festivities?

How many teams have ever done that, you ask? According to our friends from STATS Perform, exactly one team has ever done that … at least since earned (and unearned) runs became an official stat in both leagues in 1913. And that team was …

The 2024 Yankees … in the game that ended this World Series.

But you should also know that … we’re not just talking about postseason games. The Yankees are the first team ever to do that in any game — postseason or regular season — in the past 112 seasons.

In other words, before that fateful evening on Oct. 30, you could have told us it was impossible to lose a World Series in a game like that, and who could have disputed it? But now … uh, never mind!

GO DEEPER

Inside the Yankees’ grisly fifth inning that proved one of the most costly in World Series history

Special Game 5 bonus note 

What’s it like to be me, the unofficial curator of Baseball Strange But Trueness, after a World Series game like that? Hey, it’s awesome, because Strange But True Max Chaos had just busted out. But also … it can take a little time to sort out just how Strange But True something actually was.

It takes so much time, in fact, that I didn’t send in my column on that game until 7:05 the next morning!

But that’s because it literally took all night for me — plus the great Sam Hovland and my friends from STATS — to research all that wackiness. There were so many wild research projects going on, it wasn’t until the next day — when my brain fog lifted — that I remembered something.

I forgot to include one of STATS’ best notes of the whole night! But thanks to the Strange But True Feats of the Year column, we can present that tidbit now. Here it comes.

It turns out that it’s not just hard for a team to lose a World Series game in which it took a no-hitter and a five-run lead (or larger) into the fifth inning. It’s hard to do that in any kind of game. It’s so hard, in fact, that the Yankees hadn’t even lost a regular-season game like that since …

Oct. 1, 1988!

A Tommy John no-hit bid went up in smoke that day. And that was nearly 6,000 games ago!

It was so long ago that 177 different pitchers have started a game for the Yankees since then … so long ago that 441 different Yankees have grabbed a bat and headed for the batter’s box since then … and so long ago that Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams and Jorge Posada alone combined to bat almost 30,000 times in between — and then spent another decade in retirement.

In other words, a loss like that never happened to Jeter, Posada or Bernie in any October baseball game, or any other kind of baseball game. But it somehow happened to the Yankees, in the last game of this World Series, because, as John Sterling would tell you — Susan, that’s …

Baseball!

GO DEEPER

Why Dodgers’ Game 5 win over Yankees was the craziest World Series clincher ever

Sneaky Pete’s Strangest But Truest Homer of the Year

Did you know that thanks to that Game 5 Yankees meltdown, this October set the all-time record for most lead changes in one postseason (with 30 of them)? My friend Katie Sharp of Baseball Reference went to way too much trouble to calculate that little nugget. So thanks, Katie!

That tidbit tells us there were far too many epic Strange But True October comebacks to fit into this column. But if I had to pick the Strangest But Truest of them all, I’m going with this one.

So what made that stunning swing of the bat by Pete Alonso so Strange But True? Thanks for asking!

Did that really happen? As the Mets came to bat in the ninth inning that night, in a winner-take-all Game 3 of their Wild Card Series in Milwaukee …

• They were trailing that game, 2-0, and were three outs from making tee-time reservations.

• None of their previous 17 hitters had gotten a hit! (They were 0-for-16, with one hit batter!)

• No Met but Francisco Lindor had gotten a hit since the seventh inning of Game 2! (His teammates were 0 for their last 29!)

• 105 Mets hitters had dug into the batter’s box in this series. They’d combined to hit zero home runs!

• Pete Alonso, who was about to bash that life-changing home run, was 5 for his past 41 (a .122 average) … and hadn’t had an extra-base hit since Sept. 19!

• The man on the mound, normally untouchable Brewers closer Devin Williams, hadn’t allowed a home run, to anyone, in 57 days — spanning 78 consecutive hitters. So since that last home run, the unfortunate humans who had to face him were batting .097, and “slugging” .153. And 36 of those 78 (46.2 percent) had struck out!

And then that closer served up a homer to that hitter in the ninth inning of that game, a winner-take-all October special? Whoa. But wait. It was even more improbable than that. Let’s talk more about …

The Devin Williams Factor — October is quite a month, isn’t it? You watch baseball, day after day, month after month, from April to September. You start to think you have a rough idea of what to expect. But if you’d spent any time watching Devin Williams, you would never have expected that.

• How many runs did the Brewers closer allow all season? That would be three, in 22 appearances. How many runs did he allow in the ninth inning of this game? That would be four. Granted, he was hurt for the first four months. But think about it. He gave up more runs in that inning than he’d given up all season? How Strange But True is that?

• This was the 116th time Williams had thrown a pitch in the ninth inning of any game, regular season or postseason, in his career. Want to guess how many times he’d allowed a lead-flipping (i.e., leading to trailing) home run in the ninth of any of those other 115 games? If you guessed “none,” you’re thinking right along with us here.

• Then there was that pitch. Until that wave of Alonso’s bat, Williams had thrown 190 of his killer changeups this season, according to Statcast. So how many of those 190 changeups had landed on the other side of the fence? Once again, “none” would be a great guess.

• And finally, there’s this: Think about how many pitchers have gone to the mound at least 150 times in the live-ball era. You know which of those pitchers had allowed the lowest slugging percentage in their whole career, when pitching with a lead? I think you do.

The answer, according to Baseball Reference/Stathead, was Devin Williams! Opposing hitters who found themselves in the position the Mets were in had “slugged” .254 against him. And then that happened.

With the odds stacked against him, Pete Alonso powered the Mets to a series-clinching win. (John Fisher / Getty Images)

Hey, but one more thing. Before we move on, you need to contemplate …

Where this fits on the list of iconic October moments – In Tim Britton’s sensational piece on this game in The Athletic, this Pete Alonso passage jumped out at me:

Did he understand Thursday night the magnitude of what he’d just achieved?

“Not right now,” he said with a smile, before a pause. “I don’t think I ever will.”

Or maybe he’ll stumble upon this edition of the Strange But True Feats of the Year column. What was the magnitude of this moment? Let’s fill him in on just how magnitudinous it really was.

A lead-flipping home run in the ninth inning of a winner-take-all game? OK, Pete. Take this in. The complete list of men who have ever hit one of those consists of … just you!

Yes, you read that right. No one in history had ever hit a home run, in the ninth inning of a winner-take-all postseason game, that turned a series loss into a series win until …

Pete Alonso hit That Homer off That Closer to leave Mets fans — and Strange But True fans — everywhere That Moment to remember him by. Amazin’.

GO DEEPER

Pete Alonso’s amazin’, improbable October home run and a Mets comeback for the ages

Strangest But Truest Team of the Year — the White Sox

Andrew Vaughn holds his head as the White Sox finish the final week of a brutal season. (Michael Reaves / Getty Images)

They lost more games than Choo Choo Coleman’s fabled 1962 Mets. Their fans tried to avoid recognition by hiding their faces under paper bags.

Their manager, Pedro Grifol, made it to 100 games under .500 (in less than two years), then got fired. They went nearly four weeks without winning a game. And when they finally won one, their stadium ran out of beer to wash it down with.

These were just the “highlights” of the Strange But True season of those 2024 Chicago White Sox. I promise I didn’t root for them to do any of this stuff. But I must admit that because they did, this portion of the column practically wrote itself.

How can there not be a major motion picture about this team? Out of the Money-ball. I’d watch it! Now here’s just some of what you’d see.

They knocked Casey Stengel out of the history books! Who said a team couldn’t lose more games than Stengel’s illustrious ’62 Mets (40-120), the longtime gold standard for futility? These White Sox proved it was totally possible. They even won five of their last six and still went 41-121.

How nuts was that? The Phillies won their 41st game on May 31. The White Sox won their 41st on the last day of the season … 121 days later!

They finished 41 games out of next-to-last place! Was 41 the ultimate White Sox magic number? The next-closest team in the AL Central (the Twins) finished 41 games ahead of them. And there was never a day all season when the White Sox were ahead of any team in their division.

The ’62 Mets only finished 18 games out of next-to-last place. The 119-loss 2003 Tigers only finished 20 games out of next-to-last. The worst team in the history of the planet, the 134-loss 1899 Cleveland Spiders, only finished 35 games out of next-to-last place. No team in the modern era had ever even finished 40 games out of next-to-last. But the White Sox were already 38 out of next-to-last before they even made it to September.

You didn’t need a web browser to find them in the standings. You needed a submarine.

They fell to 84 under .500! If you looked at the standings on Sept. 22, with a week to go in the season, I hope you wore your eclipse glasses — because the White Sox were an eyeball-shocking 84 games under .500 (36-120).

So how many other teams since 1900 have ever been 84 under at any point? None would be a good guess.

Only three other teams in the history of this sport reached 84 under — and it’s been a while: Those 1899 Spiders finished 114 under (20-134). … Kirtley Baker’s 1890 Pittsburgh Alleghenys finished 90 under (23-113). … And Toad Ramsey’s 1889 Louisville Colonels finished at exactly 84 under (27-111). Always great to walk with legends like those outfits.

They even caught Jeff Stone’s illustrious ’88 Orioles! What group of legendary losers didn’t the White Sox bring back to life this year? They even ran down the team with the longest losing streak in American League history, Jumpin’ Jeff Stone’s 1988 Orioles.

Those Orioles lost their first 21 games of the season, then spent the next three and a half decades in an orbit of their own. But here came the 2024 White Sox, to dredge up their own brand of 21-game losing-streak fun from July 10 to Aug. 5.

• You know how hard it is to go that long without winning? It’s so hard that 197 different pitchers won a game for the other 29 teams in that time when the White Sox were winning zero games. Yep, 197!

• It also takes a while to lose that many games. It took the White Sox so long that they used 38 different players during the streak. Yep, 38!

• One of those 38 was a rookie infielder named Brooks Baldwin. The really cool news was, he made his big-league debut for the White Sox on July 19. The not quite that cool news was, of the first 16 games he played in, his team lost all 16 of them.

• Oh, and one more thing: According to the Baseball Reference transactions page, since the trade deadline was going on during this run of ineptitude, an incredible 171 players got traded — all in that stretch when the White Sox never won a single freaking baseball game.

In other news, they also did all this!

• Would you believe the White Sox started the season by going 0-14 on games played on a Monday? Of course, they were 66 games under .500 on the other six days of the week, too.

• Would you believe they had a streak in the second half in which they went 1-27 at home? The Phillies only lost 26 games in Philadelphia the whole darned season. The White Sox lost 27 in their town in eight weeks.

• Would you believe that, in a related development, on Aug. 28-29, the Rangers won more games at Guaranteed Rate Field in 24 hours (three) than the White Sox had won in the previous 61 days and 13,660 hours (two)?

• Would you believe this team piled up so many losses, it was eliminated from any kind of playoff race on Aug. 17? That was Game 124, but who’s counting?

• Would you believe the White Sox were so good at losing, they lost more games before the end of August (106) than Michael Jordan’s Bulls lost in their six championship seasons combined (104)?

• And, finally, would you believe these White Sox went more than four months — from May 11 to Sept. 15 — without winning a series against a team from their own league? But what the heck? They only got to play 23 of those series in between!

These were your 2024 Chicago White Sox, chasing history — kind of in the way that “Daddy Day Camp” (Rotten Tomatoes score: 1) chased cinematic history.

GO DEEPER

An owner who ‘thinks he knows everything’ led the White Sox to historic disaster

The man from the Planet Ohtanus

Shohei Ohtani had 17 total bases on his historic night in Miami. (Chris Arjoon / Getty Images)

I got to spend a few weeks this October watching Shohei Ohtani play. Here was the best part about doing that: I learned something about this guy.

There are many things in life — and also in baseball — that we’ve always described as “impossible.” But the man from Planet Ohtanus has no idea why the rest of us even use that word.

The stuff we think of as impossible is stuff he looks at and thinks: Hey, maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and try to do that.

So that brings us to a performance we’ll dare to call The Ohtani Game. It might go down as the greatest game any baseball player has ever had. It’s also the game that most defied our ability to imagine what a human, a member of our species, could do over nine innings.

This was Sept. 19 in Miami — when Ohtani laid out this unfathomable Mission (Not) Impossible:

6-for-6

3 home runs

5 extra-base hits

2 stolen bases

10 RBIs …

And this box-score line never before witnessed in a major-league game:

6-4-6-10

Oh, yeah. And one more thing: It was in this game that he dropped all those feats on the day he became the first man ever to join the 50-Homer, 50-Steal Club.

Seriously!

So what are we to make of this performance of the Greatest Shoh on Earth? I’ve been thinking about that for three months. Here’s what:

Three homers, 10 RBIs and two stolen bases! Steven Kwan led off for the AL in the All-Star Game — and he never had a calendar month this year with three homers, 10 RBIs and two stolen bases. Neither did Bo Bichette. Neither did Javy Báez. But that was one day in the life of Shohei Ohtani. Unreal.

Six hits in one game. Does that seem like a lot? Let’s go with yes. Here are just some of the guys who never had a six-hit game: Ted Williams … Stan Musial … Derek Jeter … and the hit king, Pete Rose, who never did that once along the road to 4,256 hits.

Five extra-base hits in one game. Did you know that Babe Freaking Ruth never got five extra-base hits in one game? Neither did Albert Pujols. How ’bout Barry Bonds? Nope. Not him, either. And remember the artist formerly known as José Abreu? He didn’t even get five extra-base hits all season. But the amazing Shohei got five in three hours, because why the heck not?

Three homers in one game. I know it seems like lots of random dudes are running around hitting three bombs in a game these days. But just for perspective, you want to hear the names of a few guys who never had a three-homer game? Well, David Ortiz for one. And Fred McGriff. Not to mention Vladimir Guerrero — both of them.

10 RBIs in one game. I could go on for hours spitting out the names of guys who never drove in 10 runs in one game. But here are a few you may be familiar with: Willie Mays. Mickey Mantle. Henry Aaron. Ted Williams. And Miguel Cabrera.

10 RBIs and two stolen bases in one game. So … do you think anybody else ever had a game with that many RBIs and that many steals? Get a grip. Before Ohtani, only 15 players had ever had a game with just the 10-RBI part of that daily double. You know how many stolen bases those 15 men combined for in those games? That would be exactly … zero!

10 RBIs from the leadoff hitter? Richie Ashburn was a Hall of Fame leadoff man for the Phillies. In 1959, he got to the plate 427 times in the leadoff hole – and drove in a total of eight runs. Sixty-five years later, along came this superhero from Planet Ohtanus — and drove in 10 out of the leadoff hole in six trips to the plate? Yeah, he did. So how many other leadoff hitters have ever had a 10-RBI game in the 105 seasons since RBIs became an official stat? Once again, that answer would be … zero!

Yeah, but he did all of that! Let’s sum it all up. As my friends from STATS reminded us, in those same 105 seasons, only one player has had, during his entire career …

• A game with 10+ RBIs

• A game with 6+ hits

• A game with 5+ extra-base hits

• A game with 3+ home runs

• A game with 2+ stolen bases

 (That’s not necessarily in the same game. That’s in any combination of games.)

That one player? Shohei Ohtani.

Who did all of it in The Ohtani Game.

Welcome to one afternoon in the life of Shohei Ohtani, who ohbytheway also once started the All-Star Game as a pitcher and was the closer in the championship game of the World Baseball Classic. But as I was saying, nothing is impossible on Planet Ohtanus.

(Top photo Shohei Ohtani hitting his 50th home run of the season: Megan Briggs / Getty Images)