SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- Giants left-hander Robbie Ray was only four pitches into his Cactus League debut against the Cubs when alarm bells started to go off.
Literally.
Emergency sirens at Scottsdale Stadium blared in the top of the first inning on Sunday after a person started smoking in a bathroom, triggering an announcement that instructed fans to evacuate the building.
Dozens of fans started heading toward the exits as the recorded message played on a loop, but Ray and the rest of the players were told to stay on the field and keep playing by the first-base umpire.
“I was like, ‘We’re just going to play through this?’” Ray said after exiting an eventual 4-2 Giants victory. “It kind of rattled me a little bit.”
The fire alarm was eventually turned off after several minutes, but the inning only got wilder from there.
A distracted Ray allowed the first three batters he faced to reach base, but he ended up catching a huge break after the Giants turned a wacky triple play on a base hit to get him out of the inning unscathed.
“It was definitely Spring Training, you know?” Cubs third baseman Alex Bregman said.
After Matt Shaw and Bregman walked to lead off the inning, Seiya Suzuki sent a flare to right field that was fielded by Giants second baseman Luis Arraez, who tried to throw home.
Ray assumed Shaw would score, so he encouraged first baseman Rafael Devers to cut off the throw and fire to second, where Devers caught Suzuki trying to stretch a single into a double.
“When he made that cut, I didn’t see [Shaw] not go home,” Ray said. “I thought he would have just clearly gone home. So I was yelling at [Devers], ‘Two, two, two,’ to go to second base. And then I realized there was a guy stuck between second and third. I looked at third and the guy [Shaw] is just standing there. I was like, ‘Oh, this is perfect. I’m going to get two outs.’ And then I ended up getting three.”
Shaw retreated to third base after Suzuki was thrown out, but Bregman kept going and ended up getting caught between second and third, allowing shortstop Willy Adames to tag him out.
“I felt like I got a good read off the bat, and I should’ve ran a little more with my head up,” Bregman said.
“I don’t even know what happened,” Adames said. “I couldn’t even look at it because we don’t have review on the iPad. But I know there were too many people at third base. There should be like maybe two guys there. There were like three.”
The play appeared over at that point, but Shaw created more confusion by stepping off third base, apparently thinking the inning was over. Third baseman Matt Chapman caught him wandering off the bag and alertly tagged him out, completing the unusual triple play.
“Well, there were a lot of distractions going on,” Chapman said. “The fire alarm going off, people vacating the stadium. Just trying to figure out if that was real or not. And then some early baserunning miscommunication. Willy comes over and tags [Bregman] and gives me the ball. I think Shaw thought he was out, so I just tagged him. Not much more to it. Just early Spring Training, probably getting used to running the bases again, but we’ll take it.”
“That’s the beauty of baseball, I guess,” Adames said. “Every day you just see something new.”
Giants manager Tony Vitello said the umpires were in contact with stadium personnel in the press box during the game, so they knew it was safe to continue even after the fire alarms sounded. Ray said he would have preferred for play to be paused, but Vitello commended the 34-year-old veteran for managing to pitch through the disruption.
“That was inexplicable,” Vitello said. “I feel bad for Robbie. Now we can kind of laugh about it, but Chappy said the same thing I was thinking. You’re trying to play, but your family is in the stands. I’ve been a condo guy pretty much my whole career. When the fire alarm goes off, you just assume somebody pulled it or something like that. But yeah, that was a little bit of a dicey situation. And then for it to end the way that it did will be something we’ll probably joke about all Spring Training long.”
“It’s enough chaos for Spring Training in one game,” Ray said, smiling.