Triple plays are a rarity in baseball, but when they occur, purists of the sport go bonkers.
But sometimes, if you're not paying close enough attention, you can easily come out confused on the sequence of outs in a bang-bang play.
Such was the case during Thursday night's game between the Angles and Rangers at Globe Life Park in Arlington, Texas.
In the top of the fourth inning, the Angels loaded the bases with zero outs as David Fletcher stepped into the box. On a 1-0 count, Fletcher lined one down the third baseline in what appeared to be a line drive right into the glove of Rangers's third-baseman Jurickson Profar. What happened next was super confusing for pretty much everyone involved.
Taylor Ward, the Angels player on third, thought that the ball was caught in mid-air as an out. But upon replay, the ball hit the ground just before it meeting Profar's glove. Profar, alertly, stepped on third to record the first out on a force and then tagged out Ward after he was caught in no man's land trying to break for home plate. Profar then fired the ball to second where Rougned Odor recorded another force out for the third out of the triple play.
Odor was just as confused as Ward, as he chased down and tagged Kole Calhoun despite Calhoun already being out on the force.
Does it all make sense now? We hope so.
According to STATS, that was the first triple play in over 106 years (June 3, 1912) that was recorded without the batter being one of the three outs. That was the first 5-4 triple play since September 18, 2006, when the White Sox did it against the Tigers.
Had Profar not been able to snag the liner, the Angels would've tacked on at least two runs to their 1-0 lead. Those runs would've come handy later in the game, as the Rangers stormed back after being down 6-3 and took the game by a final score of 8-6.
(h/t MLB)
