Roger Angell on the unassisted triple play
Randy Velarde’s unassisted triple play, May 29, 2000 (Oakland at New York)
from A Pitcher's Story by Roger Angell (2001)
The Monday holiday celebration, against the brash, attractive Oakland Athletics, suffered by comparison and starter Andy Pettitte may have reflected that his 4-1 win might have been the only two-hitter in Yankee history that felt like an anticlimax. History, in any case, arrived in the sixth inning, but so quietly that its observers or acolytes -- the Yanks and A’s in the field and we in the stands -- could manage no more than a murmured “Wha’?” … “Huh?” when a low batted ball to Oakland second baseman Randy Velarde became three outs before our eyes. Velarde, completing the four or five steps required, flipped the ball to an umpire as he trotted toward his dugout, while realization and a great gabble of conversation and explanation rose from every side. The situation had been routine -- no outs, Tino Martinez on second base (he’d been hit by a pitch) and Posada on first after an infield error. When the pitcher, Omar Olivares, allowed the count on the next batter, Shane Spencer, to reach three-and-two, both runners took off with the next pietch, as expected. The ball, an undemanding chance, was gloved by Velarde at shoulder height, and he tagged Posada, in front of him on the base path, and unhurriedly continued to second, in plenty of time to step on the bag and double-off -- no, triple-off -- the returning Tino. Velarde, who is a former Yankee shortstop, had turned the same trick in spring training against the Dodgers five years ago. Practice makes perfect.
The play required so little skill and hustle that one’s first impulse was to think it was ordinary -- something that the game must crank out every week or so in its endless rounds of circumstance. But this was only the eleventh unassisted triple play in baseball history, and the first in any New York ballpark. I had not imagined such a thing and could claim memory of only two prior and assisted, unfabulous triple plays in all my years at the game. The next morning, I remembered to look in the box score, and there it was: “TP-Oakland 1 (Velarde).” An accompanying item listed the ten previous players who’d pulled off the chance -- baseball is the only sport that keeps this word in its lexicon -- going back to 1909, and including Bill Wabsganss, who did it in the World Series of 1920. Most of them were shortstops or second basemen, of course, but Johnny Neun, a first baseman with the Tigers, on May 31, 1927, grabbed a line drive struck by an Indians batter, tagged the next man on the base path, and, glimpsing history, ran all the way over to second to beat the other base runner to the bag. There had been an unassisted triple play pulled off by the Chicago Cubs in Pittsburg on the afternoon before Neun’s; the next one arrived forty-one years later.
I couldn’t get over what we’d seen -- and that the players appeared to have barely noticed it. “Yeah, strange” … “nope, never saw one” was the most that came out in the clubhouses. Shane Spencer, who had started it all, said, “It happens.” The play, I began to realize, had next to nothing to do with the participants: it was a statistical widgit, an idea more than a play. Len Berman, the sports anchor at New York’s Channnel 4, was scornful when he ran the clip the next evening, and called the moment less exciting than a hit batsman. I am still in the grip of it, though, and find myself foolishly murmuring, “I can’t believe it” when it comes back to mind. The unassisted triple play may confirm something that lies deep within the sensuousness and near-seriousness of baseball: the notion, so boring to non-fans, that in fact anything can happen out there if you wait long enough, and when it does you will be struck by a bolt of luck that never showed itself, here in New York, to Casey Stengel or Ring Lardner or Red Barber or Babe Ruth.
