Washington’s badhop luck repeats after 95 years

Connecting the World Seriesbound Washington Nationals to all sorts of things, including the Giants of today and yesteryear:

I once knew a man who loved the social whirl but kept showing up at the wrong party. He’d get there and it was breaking up or all of the cool people were noshows. Sort of like Bryce Harper on the major league scene.

Harper spent seven years trying to lead the Washington Nationals into the World Series, only to be cast off as a free agent over the winter. After much handwringing and some interest from San Francisco, he signed with the Phillies — who had a disappointing season and fired manager Gabe Kapler, leaving Harper to wonder what’s next.

Meanwhile, the Nationals became the first Washington baseball team to win a postseason series (the NLDS) since 1924, when the American League Senators beat the New York Giants of Bill Terry, Frankie Frisch and High Pockets Kelly. In the decisive seventh game of that World Series, aging legend Walter Johnson staged a Madison Bumgarnerlike performance, pitching four scoreless innings to close out a 12inning victory after going the distance in Game 5 just two days before.

The Senators won that game when Earl McNeely’s groundball hit a stone, or a pebble, and bounced over the head of third baseman Fred Lindstrom, scoring Muddy Ruel from second. A remarkable stroke of good fortune that historians discuss to this day. Why the details? Once again, esoterically, the Giants come into play.

The Nationals wouldn’t be in the World Series if they hadn’t won the wildcard game against Milwaukee. Down 31 in the bottom of the eighth inning against fearsome reliever Josh Hader, they scored three runs when Juan Soto’s tworun single turned into a basesclearing miracle, the ball taking a strange bounce past right fielder Trent Grisham.

In the aftermath, people noticed that Soto’s hit landed directly on a border of Nationals Park’s sectioned grass field. You see this all over the big leagues, groundskeepers cutting the grass in different ways to reveal what passes as an aesthetically pleasing pattern. Why would that ball bounce to Grisham’s right when it was a slightly hooking drive struck by a lefty hitter? I contacted the Giants, and they passed along this response from supervisor of baseball operations Jorge Costa:

“At Candlestick, when we had a field pattern, balls tended to ‘snake’ as players came in to field them,” Costa said. “Watching the play in question, it’s possible it was a combination of the spin of the ball and the pattern.”

Credit the Giants, notably the late Peter Magowan and CEO Larry Baer, for always maintaining a pristine grass outfield, free of all the artistic nonsense. We’ll never know the truth about Soto’s historic shot, only that “bad hop” is now an undeniable entry in Nationals lore.