The Tale of Danny Jansen: A Historic Moment in Baseball
Everyone knows you can’t be in two places at the same time. Those are the rules — the immutable rules of physics.
Ah, but who knew you can play for two teams in the same baseball game? Those are also the rules — the wacky suspended-game rules of baseball.
So next Monday, if all the forces in the universe line up right, Boston Red Sox catcher Danny Jansen will go where no baseball-playing human has ever gone before. Not in the big leagues anyway.
For the last 54 days, since June 26, he has been stuck in the batter’s box at Fenway Park, frozen in baseball time. Not literally, of course. But this is baseball. So even as everything else around him has swirled in a million different directions, the box score of that game tells us he is still batting.
It was the second inning. He was hitting for the Toronto Blue Jays in Boston, with one out and a runner on first. He had just fouled off a first-pitch cutter. And that was when the weather gods decided it was time to mess with the baseball gods.
UPDATE: We are now in a rain delay ☔️ pic.twitter.com/M1BNJ2l3xF
— Toronto Blue Jays (@BlueJays) June 26, 2024
So those raindrops turned into a rain delay. That rain delay turned into a suspended game. The resumption of that game was scheduled for Aug. 26. And then …
The trade deadline happened. And Jansen got traded, for the first time in his career — to the team the Blue Jays were playing that night, the Red Sox. So friends, history beckons. And also wackiness. We’re big fans of both.
So where could this be leading? What does it all mean? And are you sure this has never happened before? (Spoiler alert: Don’t be!) Let’s take a look.
So what happens next?
When this game resumes, we can guarantee one thing: Danny Jansen will not get to finish his at-bat. The suspended-game rule may be a little zany at times, but it isn’t that zany — not enough to allow a player wearing a Red Sox uniform to bat for the Blue Jays.
But here is where this could get fun — and historic. The Red Sox also need to change catchers. Reese McGuire, who was catching for them at the time, is on their Triple-A roster now, not their big-league roster. So if Red Sox manager Alex Cora is as astute as we think he is, we’re headed for one of the greatest P.A. announcements ever:
“Now catching for the Red Sox, Danny Jansen. Now pinch-hitting for Danny Jansen … fill in the blank, but who the heck cares!”
“Oh, man,” Jansen said, when we ran that scenario by him. “Such an oddity.”
It’s an oddity, all right. But it’s only possible because …
The suspended-game rule is the gift that keeps on giving
Of all the 14 gazillion rules in the baseball rulebook, the suspended-game rule has to be the most awesome. It makes so much weird and wild nuttiness possible, it’s the best rule ever.
It makes time travel possible. Thanks to this rule, Juan Soto managed to debut before his debut back in 2018. He arrived in the big leagues, with the Washington Nationals, on May 20. But he later played in a game that had been suspended on May 15 — and homered. Which means he debuted before he debuted and also homered before his first homer.
…
