A great thing about baseball is that you always think you’ve seen everything it has to offer, and then a line drive ricochets off of two people in the field and allows a double play to happen.
The weirdest double play you’ve ever seen bounced off the pitcher AND the umpire
Two deflections and one throw later, the Dayton Dragons managed to record a double play.
MiLB.com
This play doesn’t work without the ball doing exactly what it did. The pitcher, Alex Webb, gets caught between his instinct to catch the ball and his instinct to protect himself, so the liner bounces off his shoulder in the opposite direction of a potential double play.
That is, until umpire Isaias Barba, while trying to move out of the way so as not to interfere with a ball in play, instead gets hit right on the foot, and maybe even kicks the deflected ball a little in the process, booting it over to the shortstop.
From there, it’s your standard 6-4-3 double play, just with a 1 and an umpire attached to the front. Baseball is just the best (especially since no one got hurt by that thing).
Want to watch it from another angle? MiLB.com has a video of this oddity for you.
(Vine h/t @KentMurphy)
