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.
In a week, he could become the first player in major-league history to appear in a box score for both teams in the same game. And here’s our plea to the forces in the universe: This needs to happen!
“Oh, man,” Jansen told The Athletic the other day. “It’s going to be nuts.”
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.
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“This game,” said Danny Jansen, “is nuts.”
(Photo: Getty Images / Danielle Parhizkaran/The Boston Globe)