The Texas Rangers found an excellent way to lose a baseball game Sunday night. Or, if they didn't find it or invent it, they at least deserve recognition for having iterated this delightful method. They were tied at two runs apiece with the San Francisco Giants in the bottom of the ninth inning, in what had been a somewhat choppy and frustrating game for both teams. Heliot Ramos of the Giants squibbed a first-pitch slider from Rangers reliever Luke Jackson; the ball left Ramos's bat at 58.7 miles per hour and traveled maybe 50 feet onto the left side of the infield grass. This is not what you want from whoever is leading off a late inning, but to Ramos's credit, he at least tore ass up the first-base line, forcing Jackson to attempt a quick and athletic play.
This is where things first went bad. Jackson, whose pitching motion has him falling off the mound toward first base, raced back the other way to field the ball on the move. Ramos was chugging. A wiser fielder might've pocketed this baseball and lived to fight another day. Jackson felt the pressure to make a play. He grabbed the ball bare-handed, rolled his throwing shoulder under his upper body, and almost blindly fired the ball to first, against his momentum and while crashing onto his back. It would've been an incredible, highlight out, except that Jackson's throw was really nowhere close, sailing up the field and well out of the reach of first-baseman Jake Burger. The ball bounced at the edge of the outfield and rolled away. Disaster!
For reasons that may never be explained outside of a manager's office, no Rangers player appears to have made a very serious effort to back up the play. Ramos scampered toward second base; Burger, who'd laid out for Jackson's throw, was left to clamber back to his feet and to chase the ball into the large foul area beyond the first-base line. Ramos, arriving at second base and evidently surprised by Texas's slow recovery, first paused as if to end his journey around the bases. Noticing that the unsecured ball was still a solid half-a-football-field away from the next available base, Ramos resumed running, but that moment's hesitation put Burger in a tough spot: Had Ramos not slowed, there would have been no point in Burger attempting a play at third. This is genuinely a throw that first basemen never make, but if there is a chance of keeping the winning run from reaching third in this scenario, Burger almost has to take it. Sophisticated math far beyond the comprehension of non-Mentats—or, anyway, this one website—tells me that a runner on third with no outs is overwhelmingly likely to score.
"I keep running it back in my head," Burger said of what happened next, per the Dallas Morning News. "And I’m not sure I would do it any differently. That is the winning run. And if he gets to third base with no outs, he’s got a great chance to score. So I was trying to be as aggressive as I could without looking like my hair is on fire."
Burger chucked it, God bless him. God bless the Rangers! For most of every baseball season I forget they exist. Truly, a blessing upon them for finding this incredibly fun way of causing me to go oh right, the Rangers!
Burger's throw sailed wide, of course. Ramos, kissed by the cosmos, scampered homeward. The ball could not be secured in time for a throw, and Ramos bellyflopped onto the plate for the winning run. The crowd was in ecstasy. Big things have small beginnings! The final scoring: An infield single and three bases worth of errors, the ultra rare walk-off little-league home run.
This was not as fun an ending for the Rangers as it was for the neutral viewer. It was a frustrating game most of the way for the visitors, even before the hysterical disaster of a final sequence. The Rangers scored their only two runs on a single in the first inning, and then spent the rest of the night searching for a timely hit or a breakthrough sequence of at-bats, a continuation of an unhappy pattern for a would-be contender currently sporting the seventh-worst OPS in the majors. Meanwhile their starting pitcher, Jack Leiter, was on a strict 75-pitch limit, and was forced out of the game in the fourth inning, leaving the team's excellent bullpen to string together a bunch of shutdown innings. And they largely did the job! That is, until that one final pitch, and mess.
Jackson, whose ill-aimed and ill-advised throw started it all, called his hilariously brief appearance "quite literally Lemony Snicket’s series of unfortunate events." The poor guy had barely touched the field at all and suddenly he'd triggered only the second instance in baseball history, per Stathead, of a regular-season game ending with a bases-empty single. "I threw one pitch," lamented Jackson, "spent most of my time on the field on my back, and we lost." What a blow: Jackson made a great pitch and induced a pathetic chopped grounder traveling at sub-highway speeds, and moments later he and his team had been walked off.
"We didn't swing the bats well early and after that no so good either," said Bob Melvin, manager of the victorious Giants. "But we hung around long enough to find a way to win a game. And that’s kind of a new way." Well, not exactly new, but certainly rare enough, at least at the professional level.
