The history of baseball lasts over one hundred years, so whenever something unique happens, it is incredibly surprising. Triple-plays are also rare, so those are equally surprising.
Sunday Shenanigans is a great opportunity for rules that we know exist but never show up to shine. This week, one of them did. If you hit a home run but miss a base on the way back to the dugout, you can be called out if the opponent challenges it.
Baseball is a very human game. People are calling for robot-umpires, but those could take the weirdness out of baseball. Things would be considerably more consistent and fair, but they would make Sunday Shenanigans a lot more difficult. This week is a perfect example of that. In a game between the Detroit Tigers and New York Yankees, Detroit pitcher Kyle Funkhouser received a bad break.
The idea for Sunday Shenanigans was to cover the weirdest play of the week. Covering possibly the dumbest play in Major League Baseball history was not expected, but instead welcomed. We knew the Pittsburgh Pirates would be bad, but this Thursday brought them to a whole new level.
When the White Sox hired Hall of Fame manager Tony La Russa in late October, the reactions were mixed, to say it nicely. It had been 10 years since La Russa last managed the St. Louis Cardinals, and the game had evolved massively in his time off.
To follow up the most contested Sunday Shenanigans last week, this week gave us the least contested one. This means that we will have to go with a broad, more outside-the-box approach. It’s fitting, considering that this is a wacky series on its own.
For the first six weeks of the Sunday Shenanigans series, no week was harder than this one. The Astros’ first visit to Yankee Stadium since the news of their cheating scandal broke was bound to cause some crazy actions from fans, and we will get to that later. Angel Hernandez was umpiring a series, and multiple rough calls in an inning against Kansas City’s Brady Singer got three ejected.
There have been a ton of absolutely awful calls by Major League umpires. Luckily, this has mostly been erased by the replay rule, as whenever an umpire messes up, the affected team can usually choose to review the play to change the outcome.
Tyler Glasnow’s fifth start, coming against the Toronto Blue Jays on Friday, would be his worst of the season. And there would be no shortage of shenanigans.
No one has ever mistaken sports fans to be a calm bunch, especially those of big-market teams. However, on April 16, some New York Yankees fans got hostile over the team’s performance and took things to a new level.
This week’s Sunday Shenanigans brings us back to a week ago. April 4’s Sunday Night Baseball clash between the Chicago White Sox and Los Angeles Angels was a pretty standard baseball game throughout five innings. That is, if the pitcher mashing a home run while striking out seven is standard to you.
Welcome to the very first installment of Sunday’s Shenanigans, a weekly article detailing the craziest, chaotic moment in Major League Baseball over the past seven days.
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