The odds of one epic, did-you-just-see-that collapse culminating on the final day of the year is one thing. Having two epic collapses on the final day of the year, with the second one coming on a game-winning, walk-off, 12th-inning home run... well, that’s just silly.
Dan Johnson: International Man of History
It's also pretty damn unprecedented. Only one team had ever held a September lead of 8 or more games and gone on to miss the postseason (the 1964 St. Louis Cardinals). The Atlanta Braves and the Boston Red Sox both led the wildcard standings by 8.5 games on September 5, and both blew it on the final day of the year. The Braves did it by getting swept by the Phillies, allowing the Cardinals to sneak into the playoffs, and the Red Sox did it by blowing a ninth-inning lead and somehow losing for the fifth time in barely a week to the crummy Baltimore Orioles.
Meanwhile, the Tampa Bay Rays had to come back from a 7-0 deficit in the 8th inning, scoring 6 runs in the bottom of the 8th, and needed a two-out, two-strike pinch-hit home run from Dan Johnson to tie the game at 7 in the 9th inning. Who is Dan Johnson, you may be asking? Dan Johnson is nobody. Dan Johnson was batting .108 coming into this game, and left this game with a putrid .119 average. His best month of the year was April, when he hit .141. He is a 32-year-old nomad with a .235 lifetime batting average. He has 11 home runs since 2008.
And, believe it or not, he is a man with a long history of haunting the Boston Red Sox. Setting up Evan Longoria's game-winning, 12th-inning homer would be enough to make any player infamous in Red Sox Nation. But Johnson has been bringing pain to Beantown for years.
Of those other 10 home runs since 2008, two of them were also game-deciding shots against the Boston Red Sox.
On September 9, 2008, Johnson hit a pinch-hit, game-tying homer off Jonathan Papelbon, giving the Rays a critical win in the postseason chase. Tampa Bay barely won the AL East that year, beating the Red Sox by only two games. And they would later go on to defeat the Red Sox in seven games in the ALCS, a series in which the home team won every game. If not for Johnson's home run, the Rays and Red Sox would've finished with the same record, and the Red Sox -- having won the season series -- would have gotten home field over Tampa Bay.
Johnson’s blast may have been the deciding factor in getting the Rays to the World Series.
Then, on August 28, 2010, with the Red Sox trying to claw back into the wildcard race, Johnson hit yet another crucial home run against Boston, again off Boston closer Jonathan Papelbon. This time it was a 10th-inning shot that won the game, and he did at as a regular starter, but the result was the same. The Red Sox lost eight of their next 12 games and went from 5.5 games out to 10 games out. Their playoff chances evaporated before they could even blink.
The circumstances surrounding Johnson’s second blast weren’t lost on anyone. Read some of the excerpts from the 2010 Associated Press article about Johnson’s game-winner and it becomes clear how amazing it is that Johnson has done it yet again, on a bigger scale than ever.
Again, this was written prior to last night. In the wee morning of August 29, 2010 to be precise:
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - Now the two biggest hits of Dan Johnson's career have come against the Boston Red Sox.
Johnson hit a lead-off homer in the 10th inning that gave the Tampa Bay Rays a 3-2 victory Saturday night.
He sent a 2-2 pitch from Scott Atchison (2-2) into the right-field stands for his second big homer against the Red Sox in three years. Before Saturday night, Johnson's most memorable moment was a game-tying homer off closer Red Sox closer Jonathan Papelbon on Sept. 9, 2008, that keyed an important comeback win en route to Tampa Bay's AL pennant.
"In the year 2100, they're going to be talking about Dan Johnson and what he did against the Red Sox in '08 and '10," Tampa Bay manager Joe Maddon said. "It's awesome. He has not been a regular player. He made to the big leagues with Oakland. Battled and got back and then he shows up with two of our biggest hits that we've had."Johnson started this season at Triple-A Durham — after playing in Japan last season — and was recalled on Aug. 2. He was 0 for 3 and had just three hits in his last 35 at-bats before the game-winning drive.
"The moment was special for me after having such a rough night," Johnson said. "Getting a chance to redeem myself. I was like, please get out. After it did, I was just like relieved."
Johnson's key 2008 homer came on the day his contract was purchased from Durham by Tampa Bay. He arrived at game time because of flight delays.
"Maybe it's just coincidence that both of those have been against the Red Sox," Johnson said. "The first one, I had no idea what was going on. Deer in the headlights. This one, I've been here a while and got some at-bats under me."
"I don't care who hits it, it hurts either way," Boston manager Terry Francona said.
And now, the three biggest hits of Dan Johnson’s career have damned the Boston Red Sox.
Two directly, one indirectly. One in ‘08, one in ‘10, and in ‘11. Two were in the 9th-inning, one was in the 10th, two were as pinch-hitters. All three gave the Tampa Bay Rays a win at the expense of the Boston Red Sox, late in the year no less.
Longoria will get the most celebration because he hit the game-winner that sent Tampa Bay to the playoffs. But the true hero is Dan Johnson, a 32-year-old nobody who is batting .167 over the past four years, with only 11 home runs during that time. And three, count ‘em, three of those 11 bombs have gone on to ruin a Boston Red Sox season.
Of everything that happened on Wednesday, of the comebacks and the collapses and the game-winning shots, that fact is easily the most unbelievable.
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