The Cardinals returned to Division Series form of past, building a 2-0 lead over San Diego. Now the Cardinals have two home games to try to close out the best-of-five series. Nothing special to report on that front, really.
Detroit today won its first playoff game in a time span just five days shy of 19 years. They last won against the Minnesota Twins on October 10, 1987. Now they go back to Detroit with a 1-1 tie in the series. Next up is Randy Johnson versus Kenny Rodgers. The battle of the ancients.
But most importantly, there was a double play in the Mets-Dodgers series that deserves special mention. Two players were tagged out at home by the same player without the ball being thrown around. What’s so special about that? Well, it happens in every baseball movie (or the catcher somehow manages to miss both players), the play where a slow player comes around third, followed by the fast player just a few feet behind, there’s a perfect throw and the catcher is able to nail both players at the plate, one after the other. It NEVER happens in reality. There was a famous play in the 80s involving Carleton Fisk, but that was a regular season game. And that’s it.
So what happened? Runners on first and second, no outs. After a clean-hit "should have been RBI" single, there were two outs, a man on second, and no runs scored. See, the man on second thought the ball was going to be caught, while the man on first expected a crazy carom off the wall. Man on second held up, jogged back to second to tag up, then had to run. Man on first just took off as hard as he could, expecting to score from first. The ball did not carom, it bounced right to the outfielder, who turned and fired to the cut-off man, who turned and fired a perfect relay throw to Paul Lo Duca at home. Slow-footed, slow-to-react Man on Second wasn’t fast enough to make it home from second, so the 3rd base coach was going to hold him at third. Except Man on First was about 10 feet behind, and there’s a funny rule in baseball that you can’t have two men on the same base. So he sends Man on Second home, and he’s predictably tagged out. Way out. But his momentum spins Lo Duca around, facing away from third base. Third Base Coach expected Man on First to hold at third, so was watching the train wreck at home when Man on First zooms by him. Just kept running. With Lo Duca spun around, Man on First was hoping to slip by unnoticed. Which he almost did, except something caught Lo Duca’s attention and he spun around to see what was going on, and happened to tag out Man on First at home.
How to score this? Batter hit a single. Double play. Batter-runner to second on the throw.
The best part? Third base coach was playing second base in 1985 in the game that Fisk tagged two men out at home.
