Orioles pull off bizarre triple play after dropping a pop fly at Fenway Park
Officially, it will go down as a 6-4-3 triple play.
Unofficially, it’s one of the strangest triple plays we’ll see this year.
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In the bottom of the eighth inning with two men on in an already eventful game between the Boston Red Sox and Baltimore Orioles at Fenway Park, Orioles shortstop J.J. Hardy horribly misplayed a pop fly.
Hardy lost sight of the ball rather quickly and had to watch as it dropped near his feet moments later. We can assume this is where baseball instincts and muscle memory take over, because after picking the ball up he fired off a quick toss to second that was relayed over to first.
It took a minute for everyone realize what’d just happened, but when they came to it turned out the Orioles had just rattled off a triple play. The inning was over just like that.
Hardy’s gaff halted all the runners. So when he threw to second it actually caught everyone on the bases in motion leading to three easy outs.
As the announcers state in the video above, the infield fly rule was never called because the ball reached the outfield. Add in that this wasn’t a routine play and there’s not much that could’ve been done from a rules side of things.
This was just a super unfortunate play that turned into something incredibly lucky.
It’s not like teams exactly spend a lot of time practicing for these situations. You almost just have to take the loss and move on.
Fortunately for Boston, it won the game 5-2, so there won’t be much dwelling on what went wrong here.
Besides there are a few more pressing issues with the baseball team in that city right now.
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Blake Schuster is a writer for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at blakeschuster@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @Schustee
