The Red Sox beat the Yankees because a rookie hit a home run that was basically impossible

Nobody on Earth right now throws a baseball harder than Yankees closer Aroldis Chapman. Chapman holds the record for fastest pitch since people started recording such things, and he’s thrown so many pitches this year over 100 miles per hour that the MLB StatCast leaderboard for Fastest Pitches has a “Chapman Filter” so you can move his otherworldly data out of the way and check on regular people’s regular pitches.

Chapman entered the ninth inning of the Red Sox-Yankees game Sunday night to protect a 2-1 lead. He took the mound sweating a lot and looking really pissed off, as people wearing turtlenecks in New York in August are wont to do. Then he ate Hanley Ramirez — three pitches over 100 miles per hour, three strikes, one extremely speedy out. The game felt over.

Next up was Rafael Devers. Devers has been awesome as a rookie, but he is one of the youngest players in baseball at just 20 years old. He’d never faced Chapman in his life. He’s also left-handed, like Chapman is. Before Sunday night, exactly one lefty had homered off Chapman, back in 2011. Chapman quickly began eating Devers with a flurry of fastballs to build up a 1-2 count. The game felt even more over.

The fourth pitch Chapman threw to Devers was his sixth-fastest in 2017, which is to say it was the sixth-fastest pitch in 2017. It entered the top of the strike zone at 102.8 miles per hour. MLB has been tracking pitches since 2008, and in that span, nobody has turned a pitch that fast into a home run.

And yet Devers did! Though 20, though lefty, though batting on the road in the ninth inning, though facing one of MLB’s fastest pitcher’s fastest pitches, Rafael Devers popped a solo homer over the left-field wall. The game stayed tied until extra innings, when another rookie, Andrew Benintendi, hit an RBI single to give Boston the lead that would eventually win them the game.

So that’s all pretty cool for them!