Rarest feats in baseball
talking moments after risking his life for four hours without interruption, that’s because he was. Honnold has the ability to control fear, remaining calm and analytical in dangerous situations to such a degree that neuroscientists have studied his brain to assess how it differs from the norm.
But that ability doesn’t run in the family, with Honnold choosing to leave his mum in the dark about his daring feats.
“I’ll call her in a bit,” he said. “Though I don’t even know what to tell her. ‘ Hey, by the way. . .’” Team practices at this point in the NFL pre- season are voluntary, but in a compulsory sort of way. No one is compelled to attend, especially established stars, but it’s a good idea for young players to show up if they want to keep their jobs.
Which was demonstrated this week by the desperate measures to which two men went to attend their team’s practise sessions.
First there was Packers cornerback Davon House, who was caught short when his connecting flight from Minneapolis to Green Bay was cancelled. With no more flights that night and no rental cars available, House sent out a call for help, tweeting: “Any packer fans in Minnesota want to take a trip to Green Bay maybe I can hitch hike a ride.”
That plea was answered promptly by a local named Chad Johnson who, with his brother, picked up House and completed the five- hour drive to deliver the Packer to Green Bay, rewarded with a stadium tour and signed souvenirs at 3.30am.
That was a cheap price to pay compared to the journey of Bills cornerback Shareece Wright who, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, chose to get an Uber for his 860km trip from Chicago to Buffalo.
The driver initially assumed Wright wanted a ride to Buffalo Wild Wings, a restaurant chain, but happily obliged once the footballer was in the car.
“I promised him on the phone,” driver Hadi Abdollahian told the Washington Post. “So I said, ‘ Let's hit the road'.”
Eight- and- a- half hours later, Wright was in Buffalo, all for the low, low price of $ 1290 ( including a $ 415 tip). There have been more than 210,000 games played in the history of Major League Baseball.
That’s what happens when a sport turns its season into a marathon, with the current version of MLB seeing 30 teams each running out 162 times a year.
And from those 210,000 games across 140 years of competition, only 16 players had previously done what the relatively unknown Scooter Gennett managed this week.
The San Diego Padres infielder — who had scored just 39 career home runs over five seasons — smacked four homers in one game on Wednesday, recording one of the rarest feats in baseball.
But not the rarest. . .
The most celebrated single- game performance in sports, only 23 times has a pitcher retired all 27 batters in a row. It has been achieved by some of the game’s all- time greats — Cy Young and Sandy Koufax — and forgettable scrubs — Dallas Braden and Philip Humber. No man has thrown two perfect games and only Don Larsen, in the 1956 World Series, has thrown one in the playoffs.
Fifteen times has a fielder pulled off this particular oddity: being responsible for all three outs in one play. To even happen, there must be runners on first and second with no outs, and they have to be advancing on contact. The ball must be hit in the air to a middle infielder. He must catch it to retire the hitter, stand on second to force out the runner who left that bag, then tag out the runner who left first base. It’s complicated and doesn’t even look that cool.
The rarest exploit in all of baseball. Just three pitchers have struck out 20 batters in a single game, with Roger Clemens accomplishing the feat twice. Given a typical game has only 27 outs available, a pitcher has to miss an awful lot of bats if they want to replicate the efforts of Clemens ( 1986, 1996), Kerry Wood ( 1998) and Max Scherzer ( 2016).