Weird & Wild: The Giants-Dodgers 32-second, 9-6-4-2-1 popup play that will live forever
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By Jayson Stark
Jun 23, 2023
Hey, sorry we’ve been off the Weird and Wild grid for a while. Had a family reunion to attend. But it was worth returning, just because I now get to write about …
A team that trailed five different times in the same game and still won! And also … a pitcher who crammed three errors and three strikeouts into the same inning. Not to mention … the same guy managed to score the tying run and winning run in the same game, but somehow did that in a span of two hitters. (Think about it, all you mathematical minds out there.)
“And that was one of the craziest plays in the history of baseball,” said Dave Flemming, on the Giants’ TV rendition of that play. Hey, ya think?
Well, if that doesn’t convince you, feel free to watch it again. We’ll let the great Jon Miller emcee the festivities this time, from his call on KNBR Radio. So classic.
“What is happening?” Miller asked. And that seems like kind of a loaded question in retrospect.
Can I start my answer by saying: We just saw 32 seconds of popup madness featuring the same guy (Giants reliever Jakob Junis) throwing the pitch that started this adventure and then recording the putout that ended it?
I don’t know about you, but I can’t stop watching this! So I tracked down Junis and kicked off our entertaining conversation by mentioning that. Then I couldn’t help but ask: What’s wrong with me?
“Oh, no,” Junis comforted me. “It is such a wacky play, man. It’s comedy when you think about it.”
Hey, I’ve thought about it, all right. I write a column entitled “Weird and Wild.” So naturally, it’s pretty much all I’ve thought about all week. Now here’s what I’ve concluded, after way too much thought — not to mention some actual research:
You just watched a play unlike any in the history of baseball. All right, I’m not including tee-ball. But in Major League Baseball? No chance. I’ll even document that in a moment.
But first, it felt like the best way to illuminate the moment was to see it through the eyes of the pitcher who made it possible — in more ways than one. So let’s hear from Jakob Junis, because he lived it.
Pop Quiz — You know, popups always look so routine when the ball goes up. But how should we describe what happened when that ball came down? Much tougher question! And Junis said he probably wasn’t the best person to answer it.
“I don’t know,” he said with a chuckle. “Honestly, clearly, I wasn’t thinking straight, because I picked it up and chucked it — and launched it down the right-field line.”
Mookie Python’s Flying Circus — Anybody want to guess what the hit probability was on this ball, according to Statcast? I asked Junis. He went with: “Hmmm. I’d say 1 percent?” And he was high! It was actually zero. More on that in a moment, too.
But then the baseball clanked off Casey Schmitt’s glove at third. That’s one error. Whereupon Junis saw the ball hip-hopping his way and thought: I need to get an out somewhere. So first base felt like an inspired choice — until he wound up heaving it halfway to Pasadena. That would be two errors.
“I didn’t have any time to hesitate,” Junis said. “So I just threw it — and yeah, obviously. you know what happens next: The circus breaks out.”
Waiting for the Double E — OK then. Time for our first history update. The batter, Mookie Betts, had barely even made it to first base — and we’d already had two errors bust out … on a ball with a 0 percent hit probability!
I thought: That seems hard. So I reached out to noted Statcast wizard Jason Bernard to determine exactly how hard. The Statcast search engines then whirred for quite a while. Bernard reported back:
This was the first play in the Statcast era (2015-23) to feature two “E’s” on a ball with a zero hit probability … because of course it was.
“Wow,” Junis replied, when I relayed that bulletin. “That’s just insane, that that play transpired on something that had a zero probability. … But you know, it’s just one of those weird, weird things you don’t really practice too often. I don’t think anybody thought, when that ball went up in the air, that that was about to happen.”
Good point!
I Don’t Know’s on Third — So that about covers how this funfest launched. Let’s skip ahead now to how it finished, by raising another fun question I’ve been trying to sort out all week:
How was it possible that this play could somehow have ended with … the guy who threw the pitch that started all this and the guy who hit that pitch (a whopping 47 feet, I might add) … then converging again — at third base?
(For more hilarious details on all the stuff in between, particularly, the Mike Yastrzemski “defensive coordinator” portion of this tale, I highly recommend the brilliant account of this wacko event from our Giants chronicler on the scene, Andrew Baggarly.) Now back to Jakob Junis.
“There wasn’t a whole lot going on in my head,” he admitted. “I threw it. And then I literally was just staring. I don’t think I moved for, it felt like 10 seconds. You know what I mean? I just stood there.
“Obviously, the crowd is going even crazier when the ball drops, because guys are just running around the bases. Then I see Yaz pick it up, and he starts running towards the infield. And that’s when I kind of got my bearings back and realized something was going on.”
Rundown After Sundown — Oh, something was definitely going on. But what the heck was it? Baseball Reference’s Katie Sharp and I tried our best this week to find some other play — any kind of play, from any other game in history — that featured a pitcher delivering a pitch and then recording a putout between third and home, with lots of madness in between. But really?
I guarantee the Giants never spent one minute of spring training practicing a play that would go 9-6-4-2-1, with two errors and the pitcher ending the rundown festival. Junis pretty much confirmed that.
“If it was up to the coaches and everybody, I think they would want the pitcher to be as far out of that picture as possible,” he said. “But it just happened to work out (laughs) that I was the only guy within the vicinity of third base — and luckily, it was a short rundown.”
It Ain’t Over Till it’s Over — Yes, but there was also this uproarious bonus action: The rundown was over. Junis applied the tag on the Dodgers’ Zombie Runner, Michael Busch. You’d think, at that point, everyone would have been ready to shut this down.
But wait! Mookie was still dancing on the basepaths. And as he pulled into third, what happened? Junis decided to — aw, what the heck — see if there was another out he could salvage out of this. So he flipped the ball to shortstop Brandon Crawford, who also had arrived at third base by then — but way too late.
“Yeah,” Junis confessed. “I should have shut it down. … But I guess I just really couldn’t keep the ball in my hands on that play.”
Unnatural History — So now that it’s over, let’s reflect for a moment on whatever that was we witnessed. Miller called it “a Greek tragedy.” And it’s hard to argue, other than the fact that A) everyone lived to tell about it and B) Giannis Antetokounmpo wasn’t involved.
We also just witnessed a play featuring two errors and two runners on third! When I asked Junis at what point he realized he’d just seen that, his answer was, basically: Not until he heard my question.
“It’s just one of those plays, man, that you can never really draw up and don’t really ever see coming,” he said, quite correctly.
But then it was time for the biggest question of them all: Has there ever been a play remotely like this one in recorded modern history? For help with that, I turned to the great Katie Sharp.
She searched the entire Baseball Reference play-by-play database, which goes back to 1914 but is not 100 percent complete the farther back in time we travel. On one hand, she did find other plays where a pitcher made a throwing error but still wound up making a tag to record a putout at home (or between third and home).
What she couldn’t find, though, was the big news. This was the only play — in over a century of baseball — in which all that nuttiness happened on a popup, not to mention one in which two different players made errors trying to turn it into an out! So that meant it was time for the money question, for Junis.
“Would it surprise you,” I asked, “to learn that you were involved in something no pitcher has ever been a part of?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It would, because this game has been around a long time. And I feel like a lot of things have happened in 150 years, or however long the game has been around. So to be a part of a play that’s never happened before is pretty, pretty rare.”
Yeah, it is. And he could even call it “fun” — considering that he and his side got to live happily ever after. But finally …
Is it possible to describe the indescribable? Have I mentioned, incidentally, that this was how Junis recorded the first save of his seven-year career? And, despite all those base runners running around, it was still (sort of) a 1-2-3 inning (with a Zombie Runner thrown in there, of course)? How wacky is baseball anyway?
But what kind of save was this? And what exactly should we call a play like this? I couldn’t help but ask the man who threw the pitch, recorded the putout and stuffed an error in the middle of all that.
“If you were trying to explain baseball to somebody from Bolivia,” I asked him, “how would you explain that?”
“Yeah, I don’t even know if you can really explain that to anybody, if they weren’t there, or if they didn’t see the video or see it live,” Junis said. “You know what I mean? It would just take so long, and there’d be so many moving parts, that they would probably think you’re kind of crazy halfway through the story.”
Ah, no doubt. But we know the truth. It wasn’t truly crazy. It was just …
Baseball!
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