Greatest Night In A.L. History Ends With Simultaneous Walkoffs

On the late-season collapse:

“I think you can certainly say across the board, if the urgency was felt, we didn’t respond to it...There were regrets. There was a lot of talent in that clubhouse. We didn’t get the results we wanted.”

Schadenfreude. It’s a German word that means “to take pleasure in the suffering of others.” Let me just copy and paste a 1,000-word essay on the definition of the word so we can be on the same page:

Now, you see the way your cheeks are jutting out, and how your mouth is curving in an upward arc? This is because you’re happy. That’s schadenfreude.

“In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened!” -- Vin Scully

But had Vin been calling any of the games Wednesday night, he could have said it again... and again... and again. The improbability -- or impossibility -- of Wednesday night’s events has been chronicled elsewhere on this site. But just how improbable or impossible were those events, compared to other collapses in baseball history?

Today we offer, as a public service and completely free of charge, two guarantees ...

Guarantee Number 1: The next four weeks of baseball will be filled with more thrills and spills and life-changing moments and crimes against probability than most human beings, not being used to such things, couldn’t handle without a good supply of aspirin and frequent naps.

Tampa Bay Rays blog DRaysBay summed up the moment nicely.

Coming into Wednesday night with the Boston Red Sox and Tampa Bay Rays tied for the American League Wild Card spot, we expected drama, but what happened was crazier and more unlikely than anyone could have imagined. Just look at the numbers.

And then you have the Rays... They were down 7-0 as late as the 8th inning, when they had just .3 percent chance of winning. Then, even after the comeback, they were down to their last strike with Dan Johnson, a career .108 hitter who was just 1 for 45 in situations with two strikes. The odds of them winning at that point were just 2 percent.

It’s been a night of amazings and delays and extra innings, with the Red Sox and Orioles waiting out an hour-and-twenty-five-minutes rain delay. While the Sox were waiting, they were undoubtedly in the clubhouse watching the Rays mount their amazing comeback against the Yankees, the ultimate impact of which still isn’t known.

After the rain delay, Alfredo Aceves got himself into some seventh-inning trouble by hitting two Orioles with pitches, but got himself out of it. The Red Sox almost added an insurance run in the eighth, but Marco Scutaro was out trying to score on Carl Crawford’s double. In the bottom of the eighth, Daniel Bard needed only nine pitches to dispatch Baltimore.

While some American League fans watch extra innings in Tampa, waiting for a result in the Yankees vs. Rays game, the game between the Red Sox and Orioles at Camden Yards in Baltimore has resumed after a rain delay of one hour and 25 minutes.

When the game was delayed by a severe thunderstorm that blew through Baltimore, the Red Sox had a 3-2 lead over the Orioles in the bottom of the seventh inning.

Papelbon threw five pitches. Johnson didn’t remove the bat from his shoulder. The sixth pitch was a fastball to Johnson’s liking, and a stunned crowd watched the baseball fly beyond the bullpens in right-center field. The game was tied, and the Rays went on to win that game and the American League East, edging the Red Sox by two games.

Since then it’s been a strange road for Johnson, who spent a season in Japan and hasn’t been able to lock down a job with the Rays, even as they’ve been desperate for power bats. This season he’d played in 30 games, and hit exactly one home run.

Johnson fell behind 1-and-2 in the count. At 2-and-2, Johnson fouled off a fastball, but then Wade threw Johnson a changeup he could handle. Johnson pulled a low line drive down the right field line, and barely, impossibly, it cleared the fence and stayed within the foul pole. It even hit a guy in the junk. Down to the last strike, Dan Johnson came up with a pinch-hit solo homer, and the Rays caught the Yankees 7-7.

Wade got out of the inning, but we’re into extras now, and I can’t even begin to explain how amazing this has been. 7-0. 7-6. Last strike. 7-7. More baseball.

Welllllllp.

Here’s what the Baltimore-area radar looked like at 9:55 p.m. ET:

The bright reds and oranges are the ones heading toward the center of Baltimore, where Camden Yards is located and where the Red Sox and Orioles are waiting out a rain delay in the bottom of the seventh inning with the Red Sox leading 3-2.

But such a clinching, should it happen, will be delayed for a stretch. Because at 9:33 Eastern, heavy rains compelled the umpires to stop the game and order the groundskeepers to cover the infield.

It’s obviously an official game, but Major League Baseball holds the reins of this contest, and MLB will do everything humanly possible to play this game to its natural -- that is, nine innings -- conclusion. And while there’s definitely severe weather in the area, it’s not a huge storm and figures to blow over well before things get seriously late.

But Scutaro topped those feats in the sixth.

Then this happened:

Maybe it was the 21-minute break between the bottom of the fourth and the bottom of the fifth, during which the Red Sox went ahead 3-2 on Dustin Pedroia’s laser blast into the left-field stands.

Maybe it was simply more of the lack of sharpness that’s afflicted Jon Lester in his previous three starts.

But Price missed outside with a first-pitch fastball, and when he tried to come in, Teixeira turned on the pitch and did what he did earlier:

Desperately looking to climb back into the contest, the Rays sent four batters to the plate against Aaron Laffey in the bottom half. One of them got hit. The other three made outs. And so the score remains 6-0 New York with four in the books.

A short-lived lead, as things transpired.

In the fifth inning, Pedroia did himself one better. This time Simon’s fastball was higher and insider, but not quite as faster, and Pedroia lined the pitch into the left-field stands to give the Red Sox a 3-2 lead.

In the bottom of the third, Joe Girardi called on his bullpen, replacing Betances with some guy named George Kontos after Betances threw 44 pitches. Just 23 of those 44 pitches were strikes, so Betances wasn’t particularly good, but he was better than he was in his debut, and he kept the Rays off the board.

Through three, the Yankees are on their third pitcher, but they still hold a 5-0 lead. There’s still a lot of time for the Rays, but they probably shouldn’t procrastinate.

Just moments after J.J. Hardy put the Orioles ahead with a two-run homer in the bottom of the third inning, the Red Sox tied the score when Alfredo Simon balked with Marco Scutaro on third base.

Mike Aviles followed the book with a grounder that skipped past Orioles third baseman Chris Davis for an error, but the inning ended when Aviles was nabbed trying to steal second base.

Lester’s first pitch to Hardy was a cut fastball, which was supposed to start on the inner half of the plate before coming inside and busting Hardy’s bat. Instead it started in the middle of the plate and broke right into Hardy’s happy zone, and he blasted the pitch over the left-field fence for a two-run homer and a 2-1 lead.

This game’s all about the Red Sox (and secondarily, the Rays). But can’t we spare a moment to applaud J.J. Hardy, who’s now hit 30 home runs this season, after hitting only six homers last season and 11 the season before?

Jon Lester, looking to continue his long history of success against the Orioles, has matched Alfredo Simon with two scoreless innings.

In the first inning, Lester gave up a one-out double to J.J. Hardy but escaped with no further damage. And in the second, Lester gave up an infield single to Adam Jones, but got an inning-ending, around-the-horn double play when Mark Reynolds sent a grounder toward Red Sox third baseman Mike Aviles.