There are 30 Major League Baseball teams, and every summer they play a combined 2,430 games. There is baseball on every day all the time. Someone is always hitting a ground ball into a 6-4-3 double play, or going on an eight-game losing streak, or smashing a home run deep into center field. These are all interesting things, but you will see them each a zillion times in your life. But here, Wednesday, was something new. Or rather, somewhere new for a baseball to go.
Up 5-4 against the Texas Rangers in the top of the ninth, the Pirates’ Oneil Cruz came up to bat with runners on first and second. He took a strike at the top of the zone, smoothed out the dirt in the box in front of him with his foot, and calmly waited. Here came an 80 mph cutter right down he middle of the zone: a mistake or a present depending on your perspective.
Cruz, his hands so fast and his bat so flat, twisted his body through the ball and there it went at 116.9 mph off the bat, the hardest hit home run of the season so far. The ball screeched into right field, looping every second a little more toward the foul line. Would it stay fair? In the box, Cruz watched the ball swerve, maybe prayed for it to stay fair. And his prayers were answered by the thinnest of margins.
The ball! It hit the very tippy top of the foul pole! Bonk! It ricocheted off the flat of the pole, way up there into the top deck where fans never hope to see a baseball. Four-hundred-thirty-two feet in distance and who knows how many in height!
What are the odds?! They must be so low! A rarity. A strange little gift on an April night.
It is nice, in a baseball game, to have a little extra security in the form of runs that you do not need. But it is even nicer to see something memorable and dumb and rare and fun. What a silly home run! Bonk!
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