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Could a major leaguer really play for two teams in the same game? That's the question for catcher Danny Jansen, who finds himself in one of the trippiest situations in baseball history.
Jansen — who played for the Toronto Blue Jays at the start of this season — was up at bat in their game against the Red Sox on June 26th when the game was stopped due to a rain delay. The rain didn't let up and the remainder of the game was forced to be postponed until August 26th. Well, in between that time Danny got traded from the Blue Jays to — yep, you guessed it — the Red Sox!
And there's a good chance Boston will need him to play catcher when they resume their game against the Blue Jays. So could Jansen conceivably be playing catcher for the Red Sox while he finishes his at-bat for the Blue Jays?
No, that would violate the laws of physics. But he admits the situation is pretty interesting.
“Oh, man, it's going to be nuts,” Jansen said recently to The Athletic.
The whole thing is only made possible due to a little-known MLB rule for substitutions in a rain-delayed game. The Athletic looked up Rule 7.02, also known as the suspended-game rule, which states: “A player who was not with the Club when the game was suspended may be used as a substitute, even if he has taken the place of a player no longer with the Club who would not have been eligible …”
Danny Jansen was as equally surprised as anyone else by the news. “I didn’t know (much about this) at first,” he admitted.
“I was like, ‘What — am I going to have to go on the other team?' I didn’t know what was going to happen. It just kind of caught me off guard about the whole situation,” he elaborated.
But Jansen came to appreciate the unconventional nature of the opportunity. “Because when I got traded, it was just a whirlwind at first, and I didn’t think about it. But then, once that stuff settled, I heard about (the suspended-game scenario),” explained. “And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s cool. That’s a unique thing that’s going to happen.'”
Indeed it is. So maybe Danny Jansen isn't Superman, or Hannah Montana, with the extraordinary ability to be two places at once, but seeing him listed in the box score for two teams in the same game should be mind-blowing enough!
