Spencer Jones is already a pretty unique baseball player.
The New York Yankees‘ rookie stands 6-foot-7 and can play centerfield. He runs well, has a batting stance oddly similar to Shohei Ohtani, and has some of the best raw power in MLB.
And now, he can claim an inning unlike any other in baseball history.
Spencer Jones’ Impossible Inning
Jones led off the sixth inning for the Yankees on Wednesday night in Game 2 of the AL Wild Card Series against Boston Red Sox ace-turned-reliever Garrett Crochet.
It was Crochet’s first outing in months, and it was about to go poorly.
It started, though, with a strikeout of Jones. It wasn’t actually an out, though.
Jones had swung and missed on a ball in the dirt, and a strike three that isn’t caught allows the runner to try to beat a throw to first.
When the ball bounded away from Red Sox catcher Adley Rutschman, Jones sprinted to beat it out.
The big fella was called out on the field, but replay showed it as a clearly wrong call, and it was overturned.
Once Jones was on first base, he stole second, adding a stolen base to his strikeout. He eventually came around to score.
And then, amazingly, the Yankees batted around and got Jones to the plate again in the sixth.
He struck out, again.
This time, there was no dropped third strike. Jones was actually out.
He became the first player in MLB history to have two strikeouts and a stolen base all in one inning — in either the regular season or postseason — according to Baseball Reference’s Katie Sharp.
The play-by-play era goes back to 1910 for such a data search, so in more than 100 years of baseball, no one had ever done what Jones did in an important inning for the Yankees against the Red Sox.
A Good Omen
That stat has to be a good omen, right?
Jones struck out twice in the same inning and still stole a base and scored a run. What are the odds of that?
These Yankees are still missing Aaron Judge, but Jones is another 6-foot-7 outfielder with great power. He obviously isn’t as proven as the Yankees’ captain, but he’s still an immense talent.
The Yanks showed in two blowout wins over Boston (9-0 and 9-2) that they can win meaningful games without Judge.
Whether or not he returns for the ALDS, the Yankees will truly believe they can upset the AL’s No. 1 seed, the Tampa Bay Rays.
And hey, if things keep going like they did for Jones on Wednesday night, when even bad outcomes could turn into something good, the Yankees could have a chance at winning their first World Series since 2009.
Yankees’ Spencer Jones Had Inning Unlike Any In Baseball History