But a lot of weird and wild and confusing stuff happened in that game. If you enjoy baseball - or humor - you will enjoy this NBC article. It's a hilariously written conversation about exactly what happened in that odd, odd game.
Here's a taste:
Joe Posnanski: The craziest, silliest, weirdest, wildest, angriest, dumbest and funniest inning in the history of baseball began with a single by a guy named Rougned Odor.
I’m pretty sure that’s how my novel would start. Comedy is the field of my co-writer, Michael Schur, but I honestly cannot imagine a more perfect name to start this madness than Rougned Odor. It’s like Ignatius J. Reilly or Bugs Bunny or Michael Dukakis. I mean, Rougned Odor is a guy who had stories written about the drollness of his name TWO YEARS before he even made it to the big leagues.
Michael Schur: I believe I heard an announcer say, at some point in this series, that he is named Rougned because his father is named Rougned, and that he comes from a long line of Rougneds. I could easily look up whether this is true, but I don’t want to, on the off-chance it is not. I want to believe there is a massive, sprawling, Gabriel Garcia Marquez-novel-style intergenerational family in Venezuela where all of the men are named Rougned. And the women, too, for that matter.
Love in the Time of Rougned Odor. He cracks a single off a 99-mph Aaron Sanchez fastball, and, our journey begins. We don’t have time to pause for the obvious, but every single person in baseball now throws 99 mph including various sideline reporters. But enough preamble. This fifth game of the ALDS is tied 2-2. Up to this moment there has been no foreshadowing of what is to come. This has been a solid, tense, well-played elimination game between the Texas Rangers and the Toronto Blue Jays.
Maybe this is the tip-off that something crazy was bound to happen. A “well-played elimination game between the Rangers and Blue Jays?” In what bizarro universe are we living when that is the situation?
We are in a universe where the Cubs are are not only in the playoffs, but they’re the ones WAITING to see who they get to play.
Fair enough. Excellent point.
Anyway, you have this conventional game going on in Toronto, so with a runner on first, the Rangers are required by international law to blow an out and bunt over the runner, which Chris Gimenez ably does. Then Delino DeShields Jr., whose middle name is Diaab and who comes from a long line of Delinos, does the last boring thing of the entire inning. He hits a mundane slow roller to third. He’s out, Odor moves to third, Shin-Soo Choo’s at the plate. And at this point, I’m just sitting there, sort of watching, sort of thinking about other stuff, and I’m completely unaware that the next 45 minutes or so would be the craziest baseball-watching experience of my entire life.
There have been some bonkers postseason games in the last 30 or so years: the Joba Chamberlain bug swarm game, the Cubs-Marlins game where Moises Alou got angry at a fan for doing something entirely reasonable and then Alex Gonzalez and the rest of the team lost the game for them, and so on. I believe the craziest postseason game I have ever seen was 2004 ALCS Game 6, which included Schilling’s bloody sock, Mark Bellhorn hitting an opposite-field, three-run homer (originally ruled a double but then correctly ruled a home run — pre-replay, mind you — by a group of umpires whom I will love, unconditionally, forever), and then A-Rod slapped the ball out of Bronson Arroyo’s glove, which was (again) (correctly) overruled by those selfsame umpires. The fans in New York went berzerk and threw things on the field, the Sox had to pull their guys into the dugout, and in the ninth inning the foul lines were manned by police in riot gear.
The question for us, going forward, is: Was this game weirder?
And the clear answer is, yes, of course this game is weirder. Because nothing — not bloody socks, not poor Bartman getting yelled at for doing a human thing by moving his body as a ball came flying at him, not even a guy getting suspended because footballs may or may not have been deflated, not anything is as weird as what Toronto Blue Jays catcher Russell Martin did next.