Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s bat cracked in half on an 0-2 sinker from Reds reliever Luis Mey, and the shattered piece caught up to the ball in mid-air and hit it a second time, a few feet in front of the plate. That should be where a play like this dies. Instead it turned into an RBI single, and Major League Baseball says it counted clean.
Nobody sat in a room and wrote a rule for “the bat breaks and the severed half redirects the ball a second time,” because nobody building this rulebook ever thought that specific physics problem would show up on a baseball field. It has now happened at least six times this season. Six is not a freak accident anymore. Six is a sport getting quizzed on a question its own rulebook never studied for, and passing by accident.
Guerrero chopped a grounder toward the middle infield. The bat splintered on contact, and the barrel caught the ball again before it ever reached the dirt, sending it through the right side for the single. Larry Brown Sports has the ruling: broken-bat contact with a fair ball isn’t interference unless the batter deliberately deflects it.
Guerrero deflected nothing on purpose. He just stood there while a piece of his own bat did something nobody scripted, and the umpires let a coincidence stand in for a hit.
The single scored Andrés Giménez from second in the seventh inning and kicked off a four-run rally that turned into a 6-5 Blue Jays win over the Reds at Rogers Centre. Guerrero finished 1-for-5 on the night, and the softest, most broken piece of contact he made mattered more than the other four swings combined.
This is the same rulebook that got exposed by a scoreboard glitch that triggered MLB’s obscure fourth out rule earlier this year, a document written for a slower, less-photographed version of this sport now getting cross-examined by high-definition replay every other week.
Sportsnet’s own clip of the moment is captioned like it already knows how absurd it looks.
https://twitter.com/BleacherReport/status/2103699810020962588
The caption undersells it. The ball got hit twice on one swing and the second hit was the legal part.
The bit gets complicated if this keeps happening at this rate: someone eventually has to write the actual rule, and the funniest loophole in the sport stops being a loophole. For now it’s still just a broken bat outrunning its own bat boy.
I’m a Yankees fan, so my interest in a Jays-Reds box score usually caps out at zero, but this is the kind of nonsense that lives inside the Wild Card race hiding underneath every Yankees-Blue Jays game down the stretch. Toronto will take a run any way physics wants to deliver it.
Somewhere an equipment manager is out one bat and MLB just quietly ruled that doesn’t matter.
