It’s been over a month since the last pitch of the 2024 Major League Baseball season was thrown, and if you’re like us, you might be starting to feel it. Whether or not you literally spend your winters staring out the window waiting for spring, there’s no real substitute for good old-fashioned, straight-up baffling baseball action.
Jose Siri understands that.
Siri, now a New York Met, is spending part of his offseason playing ball for the Gigantes del Cibao of the Dominican Winter League. On Sunday, his time there happened to include… this.
Look, as they say, any landing you can walk away from is a good landing; as goes for planes, so goes for stolen bases. But it’d be difficult to overstate just how many times he could have made an out on this play. Generally speaking, overrunning third base and crawling over home plate is not a winning strategy. That said, Siri went 3-for-4 with a leadoff home run on Sunday -- clearly, sometimes it's just your night.
We should probably address the elephant in the room, and that’s whether this brazen act of baserunning was strictly legal. Per rule 5.09(b)(1) of MLB’s official rulebook, "a runner’s base path is established when the tag attempt occurs and is a straight line from the runner to the base he is attempting to reach safely," and the runner may not stray more than three feet outside of his lane. If this had happened in April, this play might still be caught in a complicated review process, and no one is jealous of the umpire who had to make the call here.
With that said, here's a bonus: Siri’s actually been at this all week. On Wednesday, he stole home for the third time in his LIDOM career, making him just the sixth player on record to do so -- and the first since 1970.