Here’s one article about the incident:
You weren’t the first one to ask about this.
Seriously, how was nobody else on the field or in the dugouts confused by this? How did they all just let it happen, especially in a tie game in the ninth inning!?
You even hear in the video clip, they said, “Nobody’s saying anything.” It was bizarre.
Banks spent half his career as a mediocre first baseman. He is largely remembered for his premium years in his 20s when he was a shortstop, and at his peak he was a truly awesome player. But at 31 they moved him to first and he was never really the same.
The Mets brought up a new third baseman from AAA today, Brett Baty. He’s 22, and looks it - I was thinking he could be mistaken for a player in the Little League World Series.
So in his first major league at bat against the Braves just now, he hit the second pitch out of the park. Best part was they had a camera on what appeared to be his entire family in the stands, who of course went nuts. That made my day. 
It warmed my heart, too, even though I’m a Nats fan, so here you go.
Jesus, this kid looks young.
This is more common than you might think. There’s a Jon Bois video on the topic, and there seems to be about two counting errors a year in the last decade:
I’d never really looked at his stats in that detail before, but holy crap, you aren’t kidding.
From 1953 through 1961, Banks played primarily shortstop; in those nine seasons (well, really 8 seasons, as he only had 39 plate appearances in 1953), he had a total WAR (according to Baseball Reference) of 55.2.
From 1962, through the rest of his career, which ended in 1971 (though '69 was his final season as a full-time starter), he primarily played first base, and had a total WAR in those seasons of 12.8; in those years, he never had a season WAR of 4+.
Ernie Banks deserves a World Series ring because he was Ernie Banks, and I say that as a life-long Cardinals fan.
If all of baseball was played like Ernie Banks, we’d have more double-headers throughout the season and the Series wouldn’t be pushed back to November!
With the game against the Rays tied 4-4 in the Bronx, New York Yankees pitcher Aroldis Chapman threw five consecutive balls, missing the strike zone by 8-10 inches every time, to start his outing in the top of the 10th. When he finally threw a strike, the crowd showed him great appreciation. Never let it be said that New Yorkers lack sarcasm. In his first nine pitches, he only threw one strike, and issued consecutive walks to load the bases.
He struck out the third batter to get the second out of the inning, and then all hell broke loose. On an 0-2 count, the Rays’ Francisco Mejia smoked a ground ball double to right field and cleared the bases to give the Rays a 7-4 lead.
the yanks sure like to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory don’t they ?
NOPE! The Yankees came back and won it with a grand slam in the bottom of the 10th. As badly as Chapman pitched, he actually got the win.
wow not a ny fan but that would of been cool to see ,
Some nitpicking, that doesn’t include many players who played all or a majority of their career in the Negro Leagues, or other leagues and couldn’t play in the WS, and even though their stats are listed now, their stats are still influenced by playing time. (IE Josh Gibson played about 50 games a season, instead of the 150ish of the AL and NL) and WAR is a counting stat. Also any Japanese players who played in the NPB, only their US stats are included so prime years have been cut out.
I was curious about Ichiro and some famous Negro League players like Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson
While true, obviously when discussing players who were great and yet oddly never made it to a World Series, including players who weren’t in a World Series league misses the point of the exercise. We all know Sadahuru Oh and Martin Dihigo were great players.
Satchel Paige won the World Series.
Ichiro amassed 60 WAR in the majors. Had he started off in MLB rather than NPB it seems pretty likely to me he’d have beaten 72 WAR but of course with more MLB time, maybe he gets to a World Series.
Same with Josh Gibson (or Oscar Charleston, or Cool Papa Bell, or Biz Mackey…). Gibson is credited with 38 WAR in only 598 NNL games. He was an awesome player, basically Mike Piazza but with better defense. Might well have been the best catcher who ever lived. He won NNL championships though; he was not a great player mired on a mediocre team. Quite the opposite; his teams won again and again. When he played for Pittsburgh they won every year, and then he signed with the Grays, and THEY won every year.
And that’s just official records. Work is being done with NLL numbers every day, to say nothing of the amount of exhibition and barnstorming games those players played. I was reading Campanella’s entry in Posnanski’s “The Baseball 100”, and Campanella remembered playing both ends of 3 doubleheaders on the same day. For a catcher. Gibson was even more of a workhorse - those lost stats are a true Holy Grail.
You would be roping in stats against REALLY bad opposition though. Negro League teams would play anyone, and did. We all hear about Negro League players playing against MLB players in exhibition or winter league play (Johnny Mize once said of Martin Dihigo in a winter league “I was having a good year down there, and they were walking him to pitch to me.”) but that’s not what most barnstorming games were. Most barnstorming games were Negro League squads touring around and playing the local teams, in smaller cities and towns, who were, as one might imagine, not usually up to professional standards.
I am not sure how much value there is, in terms of determining his greatness, in adding in what Satchel Paige did to the hopelessly overmatched, Sandusky Tool and Die company team, frozen in terror and confusion at a devastating array of major league pitches while Satch giggled and waved at his defenders to sit down while he effortlessly laid waste to the yokels as five thousand fans watched in amazement. It’d be like calculating in Justin Verlander blowing away a slo-pitch team in exhibition play. It wouldn’t tell us anything about Satchel Paige we don’t already know.
My other point would be that exhibition play didn’t matter. We don’t count major league spring training games towards lifetime stats because they don’t matter; they are not, in the term used of the official rules, Championship Games. The number BBRef shows for Negro League play were the games that counted towards winning the pennant.
Incidentally, a minor bitch; I wish BBRef had full box scores and game accounts for the Negro League World Serieses. Some of these were epic matchups played before packed stadiums; they must have been awesome. The 1946 series went seven games, played in four different cities, and featured Satchel Paige, Monte Irvin, Larry Doby, Willard Brown, Hilton Smith, Leon Day, and Buck O’Neil. Like, holy shit.
It is 2022, and I just watched a baseball game in which Adam Waainwright pitched 7 scoreless innings, Yadier Molina threw out a runner attempting to steal second base, and Albert Pujols hit a grand slam home run.
The man seems to have found a little dose of fountain-of-youth water by returning to St. Louis. His OPS is as high as it’s been since 2014, and while his WAR for the season to date (as a part-time player) is only 0.6, that’s higher than it’s been for the past five years. If this is, indeed, his final season, it’s good to see him going out as a productive player.
Is Pujols a cyborg? Would that be allowed? (They want to bust one guy for having a cell phone in his pocket so I’m guessing it wouldn’t be.)
In today’s Cardinals/Rockies game, Brendan Donovan started as the DH. He went 2 for 2 with 1 RBI and scored 2 runs. Then Pujols pinch-hit for him (in the bottom of the 3rd!) and promptly hit a grand slam. Pujols finished 2 for 3 with 5 RBIs and a run scored. So the DH position produced 4 hits, 6 ribbies, and 3 runs scored.
Of course, it was against the Rockies in a 13-0 laugher, but still a rather productive day.
In today’s Dominican Summer League Game between Cubs Red and PIT Black, in a seven-inning contest, both teams pitched a no-hitter.
Cubs Red won 2-0, both of their runs coming in the bottom of the first inning off of errors.
Pirates pitchers issued seven walks over six innings with nine strikeouts, while the Cubs issued only four walks over seven innings.