Bengie Molina was my favorite guy for turning doubles into singles. Had no idea about that HR that he turned into a single
Posted by
JD (aka Jason Dean)
Apr 17 '20, 08:57
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Though in his defense, he had a bunch of help ;-)
For Krusty (well best I can)
The home run that broke Baseball-Reference was hit 12 years ago. But apparently, it’s still traveling.
The date was Sept. 26, 2008. Baseball’s most innovative Molina brother, Bengie, hit a home run for the Giants that day. He hasn’t crossed home plate yet. Seriously. So as far as we know, that makes him the only player in history to do something that should really be impossible:
A) Hit a home run, but …
B) Not even score a run on his own homer.
“I don’t know how that can happen,” says Molina’s manager, Bruce Bochy, all these years later. “But then again, I saw how it can happen.”
So how the heck did it happen? I’m happy to tell you how. I’m even happier to tell you how it caused computers across this land to basically say: “Wait. What? No, that’s not possible. We’re not putting that in our box score.”
But first, I need to answer another question you must be pondering: Why are we still writing (and laughing) about a ball that was hit 12 years ago? There are actually two answers:
1. This is the first of a series. People seem to enjoy those Strange But True Feats of the Year columns I write every December. So we decided it would be fun to pick out the Strangest But Truest games of the 21st century and take a deeper dive, so we could relive them in all their madness. In other words, there will be more insanity where this came from. And also …
2. It’s 12 years since Bengie Molina hit this wacky home run — and the Baseball-Reference.com box score still doesn’t have this right, because it says that Bengie scored that night. But there’s one more thing you ought to know: It doesn’t have it right on purpose!
Me to Forman: “You did have the option to go into this box score and take away Bengie Molina’s run (and make this accurate). Am I right?”
Forman: “With a little effort, we could have done that, yes … But we chose not to. I chose not to. (Laughs) When this article blows up and I get huge pressure on me, I may change that decision.”
So what the heck happened that day?
It’s a crazy story. One of the craziest. It was Dodgers-Giants at what was then AT&T Park in San Francisco. The Dodgers rolled into the sixth inning with a 2-0 lead. Pablo Sandoval singled. Then it happened.
Molina, who was in the midst of his best season as a Giant, lofted a fly ball to deep right field. It appeared to hit the top of the wall. And since he was Bengie Molina, as opposed to Usain Bolt, he pulled into first base and stopped right there.
It was then that everything went haywire. We’re still trying to sort it all out.
Here’s the short version: Rookie speedster Emmanuel Burriss loped out of the dugout to pinch-run for Molina at first base. But while that was transpiring, always-attentive infield magician Omar Vizquel was sidling over to his manager and informing him: “That ball wasn’t a single. That ball was a home run.”
So Bochy hopped onto the field and approached the home-plate ump, Bill Welke, to say: “You know, Bill, I know it’s hard to tell out there, but that’s a home run. It hit the metal (that sits above the right-field wall).”
Bochy then did something he had never done in 14 seasons as a big-league manager. He suggested that Welke and his friends take a test drive of this newfangled, modern invention baseball had just trotted out a few weeks earlier — replay! And whaddaya know, they did, thereby turning Molina’s single into a dramatic, game-tying, two-run homer.
So naturally, our home run hero, Bengie, emerged from his seat in the dugout to head back to first and finish his home run trot. Which seemed logical at the time — until Welke and the first-base ump, Chuck Meriwether, started waving their arms and saying: “No, no, no. You’re already out of the game. You can’t re-enter.”
Since this is the short version, we’ll fast-forward through the 12-minute delay, the ranting, the raving and Bochy announcing he was playing the game under protest … to this historic moment: Emmanuel Burriss then finished somebody else’s home run trot. And when he arrived at home plate, he’d just done something no one had ever done, or has done since, to the best of anyone’s knowledge:
He scored a run after a home run he definitely did not hit.
“I just remember seeing Bengie’s expression, as he was seeing Burriss run out the home run,” Vizquel says now, still laughing over every mind-boggling detail, “because he thought they were going to give Burriss his home run.”
https://streamable.com/jwn2c
A few fun details
All right, let’s rewind and take you behind the scenes, because the short version doesn’t do this extravaganza justice. This was nuts.
Omar’s ears: As everyone else was watching the baseball, you know what Omar Vizquel was doing? Listening. Because of course he was — since “that’s how I played,” he says. “I was aware of the little details. And (when a ball was hit to deep right field in that park) that’s one of the things I looked for.”
“That was amazing,” Bochy says. “I don’t know how he heard it. Bionic ears or something. … I didn’t hear anything.”
“No, I know that because I used to shag in right field during batting practice,” Vizquel says, “because I like to play that wall there — you know, the corner, the fences. It’s like a complicated thing, to play the ball off that wall. So I always used to hang out in right field, and I knew the difference of the ball hitting the (metal) roof and hitting the walls. … It’s like two completely different sounds, and I heard it perfectly.”
For the record, Vizquel played more than 25,000 innings of big-league baseball, if you count the postseason. He spent exactly one of those innings in right field. But because he thought it was cool to play ricochets off that right-field wall in San Francisco, he spent hours shagging out there. So it’s really the most Omar thing ever that it turned into, well, this.
Burriss’ adrenaline: A critical question: How did Bochy have time to go tell Burriss to pinch-run for Molina at first and have a conversation with Vizquel about where Molina’s ball hit and be able to make it out to the umpires in time to get them to review this mighty blast, especially considering this was his very first experience with replay?
Now it can be told: That’s not actually how it happened. Turned out, Bochy says, with one of his inimitable deep-throated chuckles, “I was a little too prepared.”
“I have to preface, before (Molina) goes up to the plate, what was going on,” he says. “I grabbed Manny, and I said, ‘Manny, if he hits a single and it’s first and third, you are gonna be the baserunner,’ because he was my best base-stealer, and we were down, 2-0, at the time. … And Manny, he was amped up. He just had a ton of energy. So he’s on the top step. I mean, he’s itching to get in this game.”
So you know that part of the fable in which Bochy tells Burriss to go pinch-run? Never happened.
“I never said, ‘Go, Manny,'” Bochy recounts. “No. He just bolted out there.”
The wrong guy trotted: Never, in the long, complicated annals of baseball, had any man ever been asked to complete another man’s replay-altered home run trot. But let the record show that on Sept. 26, 2008, it happened to Emmanuel Burriss.
(We should note that just three years earlier, on Sept. 14, 2005, there was a related development: Gabe Kapler, then playing for the Red Sox, blew out his Achilles and had to be pinch-run for in the middle of a Tony Graffanino home run trot. But it wasn’t his home run … so back to our story.)
As described back in 2008 by our good friend Andrew Baggarly, now of The Athletic but then writing for the San Jose Mercury News, first-base coach Roberto Kelly gave Burris a push to start rounding the bases.
“I was like, ‘All right, all right, I’ll take it,'” Burriss told Baggarly. “‘I’m not a home run hitter, so I’ll take the slowest trot in history.'”
“The funny thing was, he styled like he hit it,” Bochy says. “He convinced us, by the time he rounded third, that he hit it.”
Bruce Bochy talks with the umpire crew after Bengie Molina’s hit on Sept. 26, 2008. (Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)
The protest: We interrupt this uproarious tale for this important message: At the time, the manager of the Giants didn’t think this was quite that uproarious.
“I remember getting pretty heated,” Bochy reminisces now. “I’m thinking, ‘Where’s the common sense in this whole deal?'”
Oh, right. There was that part. Where was the common sense in this whole deal?
Bochy says he told Welke immediately that he didn’t want Burris in the game after all. That plea got him nowhere.
“We were trying to bring Manny back, and they said no,” Bochy says. “They said that change had been made and I couldn’t do that. So now, this was getting complicated. Looking back, I see their point. But to me, it’s just common sense, because time was called as Manny was going out there. Before he hits the base, there has to be timeout. So you would think it would revert back to (before) the timeout and Bengie could finish running out his home run …
“But in their mind, the move had been made. So I said, ‘I’ve got to play this game under protest,’ because I couldn’t make sense of what happened. Plus, not only that, we’d just tied the game, but now I’d just lost my cleanup hitter and my best base-stealer. So I used two players just in this one deal, and I’m thinking I shouldn’t have.”
He thought that through the entire 12 minutes of confusion and bedlam. He still thinks it now. But just so you know, in case this ever happens again, common sense still won’t prevail — because this turned into The Bill Welke Rule.
For years, whenever Joe Torre and the MLB rule squad would come around in spring training to review new rules, “they’d bring me up,” Bochy says. “They’d say, ‘Bruce, this is how we have to do this now with replay. Don’t make any moves until the replay is done.'”
The dawn of fake box score news
Have you ever tried to convince a computer that some nutso, impossible thing just happened and yeah, we know it’s impossible but take our word for it? Good luck. That’s not a line computers are ever going to buy. Computers, weirdly, are programmed to believe that the impossible is always impossible, 100 percent of the time.
“We have our software that runs programs, and it expects certain things to be true,” Forman says. “And one of those things is that pinch-runners don’t happen in the middle of plays.”
One of the beautiful things about baseball is that it’s a nuanced game, with literally millions of possibilities. I think I speak for many humans when I say we love that about baseball. Computers, on the other hand, have never gotten the hang of love.
So if the computer is telling us the thing that just happened can’t possibly happen, here’s a thought: Shouldn’t that mean it’s the computer, not the umpires, who would be correct about that thing?
“No,” says Dave Smith, the founder of Retrosheet, whose collection of box scores provides the foundation of Baseball-Reference. “Computers are just following the rules that we set out. The problem is that the logic of our rules did not account for the sun coming up in the west.”
This would explain how, in the beginning, it wasn’t only the Baseball-Reference computers that balked at what they were being asked to translate into another beloved baseball box score. It was, in fact, every computer.
The official scorer that night, Michael Duca, tried to enter this strange phenomenon — a guy pinch-running for a man who hit a homer — into baseball’s official database. And, right you are, of course that database said: Nope. Sorry. Not possible. Our sun always comes up in the east.
“So I remember looking at the box score the next day,” Bochy says, “and it still didn’t have Burriss scoring that run. It had Bengie scoring the run.”
It took a little while, but eventually, the powers that be stepped in and wrote up a special program that forced the official MLB computers to accept that this freaking happened, and the guy who hit this home run didn’t score this run, and just get over it, OK?
But that was not the end of this story. Noooo. That’s because, for quite some time, both of the sites which most of us refer to when we need to check back on some historic box score — Baseball-Reference and Retrosheet — continued to insist that Emmanuel Burriss did not score this run. In fact, neither of those sites even acknowledged that he ever participated in this game.
Now, however, an even wilder development has transpired on the box-score front: Retrosheet and Baseball-Reference post two different box scores of this game. That appears to be true of no other game in their database. So why this game? Yet another classic Strange But True plot line perpetrated by Bengie Molina’s bizarre homer.
The retro-fit
The wrong box score was on his site. So for Dave Smith, that felt like the wrong box score was embedded in his brain, knocking on his forehead pretty much daily. There may be nothing official about Retrosheet, but he’s one of those special people in the world who turned his passion into reality, so he is consumed by this goofy idea that accuracy matters.
But when it first came time to enter the Bengie Molina Game into the Retrosheet database, it quickly became apparent there was no accurate way to do that — no easy, accurate way, anyhow.
“You basically only have two choices,” Smith says. “You either have Molina hitting the home run and Burriss doesn’t appear in the game, or if you want Burriss to score, then he has to hit the home run. Those are the only two choices, and if those are the two choices, then obviously, the one you take is for Molina to hit the home run.
“So we just didn’t have Burriss in the game at first. That solved the problem. It was totally wrong. But it kept the program from blowing up.”
Wow. That means this story was almost called “The home run that blew up Retrosheet.” But luckily, the program didn’t erupt. And then, after a year or so, that voice in Smith’s head — the one that told him his box score was still wrong — just wouldn’t shut up.
“We had it that (wrong) way for about a year,” Smith says. “And then finally, we bit the bullet and said, ‘Screw it. We’ll put in some special-case coding for this play and this game, so the computer goes through and finds that OK, this play is right. But it takes special-case coding, which is basically the last thing you ever want to do. You want to write programming that handles everything, but we just couldn’t.”
Understand now that he didn’t have to change it. He and his group didn’t have to write that special code. But he couldn’t take the alternative, because “it just pissed me off completely that this box score was wrong. So finally, I said to myself that when I get some time, we’re gonna fix it. And we did.”
But meanwhile, over at Baseball-Reference …
A whole different frame of ‘reference’
“I’ve actually used this game,” Sean Forman says. “I’ve given a couple of talks on crazy scoring — about how, basically, record-keeping is not really as clean as people imagine it to be. And this is one of the examples I use.”
Hey, excellent example. But you know the difference between this example and those other examples? Forman and his crew at Sports-Reference.com have gone in and fixed many, many other box scores that cause their computers to cry for help. They haven’t fixed this one. But that isn’t because it’s impossible to fix — as Retrosheet has demonstrated so vividly.
Stuff does happen, Forman admits, “and we have to account for those things on an ongoing basis. So we have a variety of one-offs in our code base — like the Johnny Damon double-steal in the (2009) World Series, where he stole two bases on one play. We have a Pat Venditte (switch-pitching) table that tells us which hand he was using on all the switch-hitters he faced. … There are a lot of things like that.”
And what happens when those things come along — or folks visiting the site find stuff that doesn’t add up? Forman and his crew go back in and tweak those things to make them right. But that is not what they did with this thing, with this game. What they did instead was present …
https://cdn.theathletic.com/app/uploads/2020/04/15193633/MOLINA-HR-9-26-08.png
(baseball-reference.com)
The 114-word preamble
When you dial up the box score of Dodgers at Giants, on Sept. 26, 2008, you might notice something. You don’t just find a box score. You find a 114-word preamble which attempts to explain the weirdness that unfolded that night. Yep, 114 words before you even get to the line score.
“And when do you ever see that?” asks Omar Vizquel, who did research on this game before we spoke about it. “You go over every game on record for the last 100 years. You never see that.”
OK, slight correction. You mostly never see that, Forman says, but out of a gazillion games on this site, there are probably 50 to 60 — “like Disco Demolition Day and crazy stuff like that” — that have required some slight explanation. Just not this.
“I’ll be honest,” he confesses. “Part of this note is a little self-serving.”
It’s self-serving, in one sense, because it takes special effort to fix something like this, he says. So he argues it’s better and more accurate just to explain it. But there’s also another sense. And he tips us off to that with these eight words, which appear toward the end of the “explanation”:
“We find it to be a poor ruling.”
“I’m totally with him,” Bruce Bochy says, when he hears about that “poor ruling” portion of the preamble. “I agree!”
“And I’m on Bochy’s side,” Forman says, when informed about this all-important managerial support.
But we interrupt this kumbaya moment to ask: Wait. Considering that Baseball-Reference has become essentially the site of record for the most history-laden sport in America, is everyone OK with this — that this box score is wrong, and they know it’s wrong, and they’re OK with it being wrong? Even if we agree it was an illogical ruling, is this all right?
Before we let Forman answer that, you should know that his site has made sure the career run totals for Molina and Burriss are correct on Baseball-Reference, even though they’re not in the 2008 game logs. There are actually “thousands” of discrepancies on the site between career totals and game logs, he says, because of sketchy record-keeping many decades ago.
“So from my viewpoint, this is just another one of those discrepancies,” Forman says. “I admit that it’s somewhat artificial, in the sense that we could reconcile it pretty easily. But there are thousands and thousands of discrepancies.”
But he also concedes this:
“I will admit that this is somewhat of a vanity project on my part.”
Well, you know what? In some ways, it’s kind of cool that we can still be fighting about how to record one play that happened 12 years ago, and he in particular is trying to make a point about that play. But on the other hand, is there any sort of obligation for a site like Baseball-Reference to tell us what really happened in that game, as opposed to what Forman and a certain Giants manager remain convinced should have happened?
“I would argue that with our (preamble), we’ve done that,” Forman says. “We’re trying to be very clear in what happened in the game and how we’re representing what’s on the page. So to me, we’ve given a much richer view of what actually happened than what a simple box score, with the correct runs scored for the two players, would have done.
“So yes, we’ve made a choice that’s not in line with the official record. But as historians, in this one case, I’m willing to allow some leeway on that.
“And if and when I ever sell the site and somebody else is in charge,” he says, with a laugh, “they can make the other choice.”
All right, now what?
So here we are, all these years later, and the official records of baseball still say Bengie Molina wound up with a 3-0-1-2 box score line — on a night he hit a home run! Just read over that line a couple of times. Then ask yourself: Are you sure Baseball-Reference has this wrong? Or is it really everyone else who is all mixed up?
“Can you imagine 100 years from now,” Bruce Bochy muses, “somebody looking at that and going, ‘Wait a minute. That’s impossible, how Bengie didn’t get a run for that.’ … You know, now that we’re talking about it, I’m getting confused again.”
Hey, join the club. Omar Vizquel did the research, relived the whole moment, and he’s confused, too.
“The box score is wrong because they don’t know how to write it down,” he says. “How did that guy hit a home run and he didn’t score? The only way to do that is if he missed home plate.”
Ah, but if he missed home plate, then that, of course, wouldn’t be a home run. So yikes. Is baseball perplexing at times, or what?
Over at Retrosheet, they also have an explanation of what happened here, buried deep in their play-by-play account. And it’s an incredible 208 words long — stuffed in between “Molina homered” and “Ishikawa popped to catcher.” It has to be the only 208-word side note ever.
https://cdn.theathletic.com/app/uploads/2020/04/15193716/Retrosheet-Molina-play-08.png (retrosheet.org)
“We’ll often have comments in the play-by-play,” Smith says. “They’re usually 15, 20, maybe 30 words. But that’s about it. We don’t have whole paragraphs.”
Well, not until Bengie Molina came along. So look at that. Then look at this opus you just read. And obviously, we’re still struggling to explain it. It just might not be fully possible.
“You know, I’ve been involved in a lot of strange plays,” Vizquel says. “I bunted into a triple play once. So that was a really weird play. When I was fielding, there was a ball that got inside my shirt, so I couldn’t make the play. There are just unexplained things that happen in baseball that sometimes, you just don’t know how to explain.
“But this,” Vizquel says, “is one of the craziest plays ever.”
The home run that broke Baseball-Reference (and generated the Tim Welke rule) -- (link*)
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