Oh, man. What a week.

There was a strikeout that hit the bat but never hit a glove. … There was a home run in San Diego scripted 100 percent by (who else) the baseball gods. … There was a pitcher who issued a walk after he’d gotten ejected. … And there was a guy who stole six bases in a game in which he forgot to get a hit.

A long walk home in Albuquerque

You’ve got to walk before you score three runs.

The Isotopes are the Triple-A affiliate of the Colorado Rockies. The big-league team can barely score any runs these days — on a walk, a hit or even (literally) an earthquake in San Diego. But enough about them. Back to Albuquerque. You have to see this play.

And if you’ve already seen it, what’s the problem? You can’t possibly see it enough!

So if you weren’t adding along at home, you just saw three runs scoring on a walk. And does that seem kind of rare to you? You should answer yes to that.

“I can’t recall ever seeing three runs scoring on ball four,” said dulcet Isotopes broadcaster Josh Suchon … and also every other living human.

When stuff like this happens in baseball, America seems to think this is what’s known as a Weird and Wild kind of play. They’re not wrong. And thanks for thinking of us, America. So we know what that means. It means there is lots to get to.

You probably want some Weird and Wild tidbits. So here you go.

• Aug. 21, 1914: Should we even count this? It happened in a Federal League game between Tex Wisterzil’s Brooklyn Tip-Tops and Biddy Dolan’s Indianapolis Hoosiers. It’s not totally clear from the play-by-play what happened. But it looks as if Brooklyn pitcher Ed (Don’t Call Me BB) Lafitte muffed the catcher’s throw back to the pitcher. Then the Tip-Tops started throwing the ball all over Federal League Park — and even the batter (Benny Kauff) scored, on a walk and two errors.

• July 11, 1983: This play — in a Cardinals-Dodgers game in L.A. — had actual living eyewitnesses. Fernando Valenzuela walked the bases full. Then in marched Dave Stewart to pitch to Tom Herr. Ball four was a wild pitch. Then the catcher, Steve Yeager, made a wild throw to the plate. And all three runners scored — even though Herr never made it beyond first base. Good times.

So that’s great knowledge, filled with exceptional name-dropping. But I still vote that the merry-go-round in Albuquerque was way more fun. However, there’s one more thing.

Meanwhile in Colorado … Have I mentioned that the Rockies have had a little trouble scoring recently? Over the first five games of their last road trip, they also scored three runs … in a span of 134 batters! And while that was going on, their triple-A team scored three runs in a span of one batter — who walked.

But in other news … the rulebook says the Rockies also are allowed to walk with the bases loaded. They just don’t do that much. They’ve scored three runs on walks … in their last 161 games combined! Meanwhile, their top minor-league team just scored three runs on a walk in a span of 20 seconds.

How’d you like to be the official scorer for a play like that? Somebody had to do that. And Frank Mercogliano was just the guy. He’s one of America’s ultimate students of all sorts of scoring decisions. So when this nuttiness broke out, he had a flashback.

He somehow remembered a Jose Bautista walk in 2017 in which the Mariners kind of zoned out … so Bautista ambled into second base. It took a couple of days but Bautista wound up getting credit for a steal of second — on a walk. And amazingly, Mercogliano recalled all of that. He just had to verify that recollection, with some assistance from Google and Retrosheet.

“I remembered that, but I wanted to make sure I found it,” he told Weird and Wild, “so that if anyone asked me, ‘Why is this a stolen base?’ I could say, ‘Well, it was done in 2017.’”

So how did he score it? The runner on third (Austin Nola) scored on the bases-loaded walk. The runner on second (Aaron Schunk) advanced to third on the walk, then got credited with “a straight steal of home.” And the runner on first (Jordan Beck) advanced to second on the walk, was awarded a steal of third and scored on a throwing error by bamboozled El Paso pitcher Omar Cruz.

It all kind of makes sense, except the “straight steal of home” part.

WEIRD AND WILD: “You used the expression, ‘straight steal of home.’ That’s the least straight steal of home ever. … So it counts as a straight steal of home, even though he had to make a left turn?”

MERCOGLIANO: “Yeah, exactly. Straight steal of home. … He just had to make a left turn in Albuquerque.”

How’d you like to be the broadcaster for a play like that? I know you want to say yes. But first, let’s hear Josh Suchon recount how he went about keeping his brain from overloading as all this was going on.

First, you should factor in that it’s Jackie Robinson Day, so everyone on the field is wearing the same number (42). And also understand that a broadcaster’s normal instinct after every walk is not that The Bad News Bears is about to bust out, but just to write down that walk in his scorebook. So Suchon was doing just that. Except then, he said, he heard the crowd buzz.

“Fortunately, our crowd is so great that I hear a commotion,” he said. “So as I’m starting to write ‘BB’ in my scorebook, I look up and I just see the blur of somebody sliding headfirst into home plate. And that’s when I realize something’s happening here. And then you realize the pitcher does not realize this is happening here. And then his teammates are trying to get his attention, and he throws wildly to third.

“And so I’m just trying to keep up with it. Everyone’s wearing No. 42, so I want to make sure that I don’t misidentify anybody. And I’m hoping that I’m counting correctly — up to three.”

• A savvy base runner in Schunk who detects immediately the pitcher has zoned out.

• Another astute base runner in Beck who watches that second run score and realizes the pitcher still hasn’t regained baseball consciousness.

By that, he means: a leadoff comebacker off Cruz’s glove … two pitches heaved off the backstop … two ball-strike challenges … a throwing error by the third baseman … three other walks … then this fateful walk, after he’d jumped ahead in the count, 0-2.

So was that a tipoff that Cruz was already reeling before that three-run carousel started spinning? Seems like it. But whatever happened, at least we got a three-run walk out of it that we can talk about for the next decade.

Baseball! It’s awesome.

“I think that plays like that reward people who truly love baseball and understand that something wacky can happen at any second,” Suchon said. “So whether you’re Aaron Schunk at second base, or whether you’re a fan in the stands, or whether you’re a broadcaster, or whether you’re an umpire, whoever you are, you just always have to be alert for this once-in-a-lifetime, once-in-a-generation experience where something like that happens, right?”

Let’s all hob knob

To people (on the radio) who literally haven’t seen that thing!

So let’s just say you were the great Tom Hamilton, the radio voice of Cleveland baseball for 36 seasons and a man who is three months away from being honored on Induction Weekend in Cooperstown. Then let’s just say the most bizarre strikeout of all time happened. And let’s just say it looked like this.

To people (on the radio) who literally haven’t seen that thing!

So let’s just say you were the great Tom Hamilton, the radio voice of Cleveland baseball for 36 seasons and a man who is three months away from being honored on Induction Weekend in Cooperstown. Then let’s just say the most bizarre strikeout of all time happened. And let’s just say it looked like this.

Yessir, just your standard strike three … in which the pitch somehow hits the bottom of the knob of the bat … and then the baseball miraculously caroms into that perfect spot between the forearm and the pads of the catcher (Austin Hedges). Um, what? I mean, he’s out!

So would it truly be accurate to say that Austin Hedges caught that strike three? Or did it catch him?

“I know one thing,” Hamilton told Weird and Wild. “Austin Hedges is as good a defensive catcher as there is in the game — but he does not practice that play.”

And for good reason. After all, what were the odds of that happening — 9 quadrillion to 1?

“Just the fact that you and I are talking about it right now,” Hamilton said, “tells us they’re astronomical.”

So how great is baseball? Think about how many baseball games Tom Hamilton has seen and called … and then this thing happens that none of us has ever seen and that seems almost impossible. And then … there it was.

It was enough to make Hamilton think back to his first spring training in this job. He was driving back from a road game with his first partner, Herb Score. And Score pretty much warned him that some day, something this wacky was definitely going to happen — because on any day in baseball, you can see something you’ve never seen before and you’ll never see again.

“And that,” Hamilton said, “is the beauty of our game. That’s why, to me, this never gets old, because no matter what kind of a team you’re covering, something’s going to happen that you and I haven’t seen again. And the question is, will it be tonight? Will it be tomorrow? Or will it be four months from now? But it’s going to happen again, where we’re going to see something we’ve never seen before, and we’ll have another story to talk about.”

Foul play suspected

And that team on the other side — the Cubs — caught neither of them (for two errors).

Do you think you’d have the guts to say what the great radio voice of the Padres, Jesse Agler, said … into a microphone … where everyone could hear him?

“If you’ve watched enough baseball in your life,” Agler said on the air, as Machado’s fifth-inning at-bat rolled along, “you have a sense, deep down in your gut, about what’s going to happen.”

He said that. And then, on the very next pitch … yep.

“The most predictable, yet unpredictable, game in the world,” Agler said, while Machado was still in mid-trot. “The Cubs dropped two foul pops in this at-bat, and the baseball gods reward the Padres with Manny Machado’s second home run of the season.”

You should know, if you’re not a regular Padres radio listener, that Jesse Agler has a rep as a noted predictor of the baseball future. He even predicted the Padres’ playoff-clinching walkoff triple play last September. Seems risky, right? But whatever!

“I think it’s fun to throw stuff out there,” he told the Weird and Wild column.

Oh, it’s fun, all right. It’s just that your chances of being wrong are so much higher than your chances of being right. And shouldn’t we all know that logically — that the odds are totally against that home run? Let’s prove that now.

I asked my friends from STATS Perform to look into this. And you know how many other players, in the 52-season history of their play-by-play database, have ever done what Machado just did — hit a home run after the other team clanked two foul balls? None! Of course.

So what is it about baseball that something that unlikely happens, and yet we actually find ourselves expecting it to happen? And then afterward, thousands of people are saying, “Yeah, that made sense.” Do we even want to explain to them that no, that did not make sense?

“I mean, it makes sense in the context of the beautiful stupidity of baseball,” Agler said. “It does not make sense in any other context. If you were going to run the numbers on it, there’s no way it would make sense. But again, I think that’s one of the things that draws people to this game in a deep, deep way, that is so uncommon in the rest of our lives.”

But what does the rest of our lives have to do with it? It isn’t trigonometry. It’s baseball.

“For those of us who are lucky enough to watch baseball professionally, with the amount of games that we see, there’s no way that that should be happening on any kind of basis, much less a regular basis,” Jesse Agler said. “And yet it seems like once or twice a week, you go, ‘Man, I’ve never seen that before.’ It’s just the damnedest thing. It really is.”

Baseball!

Jose Miranda as told by “Hamilton”

Poor Jose Miranda. There are a million things he hasn’t done. But if this past week was any indication, just you wait.

Just in the past week, the Minnesota Twins’ third baseman was out even when he was safe. … And that got him shipped back to the minor leagues … where he headed off to Target … and wound up as the early leader in our annual Injury of the Year competition.

So you know who’s here to tell his story? We are! Let’s hear a big hand now for … the cast (and chorus) of the Weird and Wild column.

We don’t know if history has its eyes on Jose. But we do. So in honor of his cousin — that Lin-Manuel Miranda guy, of “Hamilton” fame — here’s how we think the cast of “Hamilton” would rise up and put Jose Miranda’s week in its proper perspective.

He might have thrown away his shot

It was only last season that Miranda did something only three other players in history have ever done. He headed for home plate and got a hit in 12 at-bats in a row.

So perhaps you thought that would have been enough to get him into the Twins’ big-league (locker) room where it happens this season. But that was before he wandered onto the basepaths last Saturday … where this unfortunate thing transpired.

• “What’d I Miss?”

He’ll see you on the other side

It never feels like a good plan for baseball job security to find a way to get yourself tagged out even when you’re safe. But it’s an even worse plan when you’re 6-for-36, hitting .167/.167/.250 and have an OPS+ of (wait for it) 18.

Helpless … in aisle five

Catch it.

But those cases of water are heavy, you know! So that didn’t go well, either. Next thing we knew, Miranda was heading for the St. Paul injured list with a strained left hand … incurred in the most watery way possible.

– Zebby Matthews starts for Triple-A St. Paul tonight, a week after his last outing.

– Jose Miranda was placed on the Triple-A injured list with a hand strain before playing a game.

– Brock Stewart begins a rehab assignment at Low-A Fort Myers.

Yikes. What a week!

So Jose, the world’s gonna know your name. And we’re aware we just helped with that. But who lives? Who dies? Who tells your story?

That can still be you, Jose. Unless you prefer to leave it to … the Weird and Wild chorus! And man, we sure hope not. After all this singing, our vocal cords are officially shredded.

This Week In Useless Info

BEWARE OF ZOMBIES — While we’re on this subject, how unstoppable are the Padres in San Diego? The Braves couldn’t stop them. The Guardians couldn’t stop them. The Rockies couldn’t stop them. The baseball gods couldn’t stop them. But you know who could?

Those dastardly Zombie Runners.

So on Tuesday, the Padres finally had their 11-game home winning streak end on a run scored by … a zombie runner. (Cubs 2, Padres 1, in 10 zombie-fied innings.) And thanks to Katie Sharp, we can tell you that no team has ever had any kind of single-season winning streak that long foiled by a Zombie Runner (a.k.a. that mysterious dude who gets to start every extra inning on second base).

The Astros held the old home-streak record with 10 (ended in extras last July 13). The Rays got zombied after a nine-game road streak in 2021. And the Braves watched an overall nine-game win streak disappear in 2023 when they, too, were overrun by zombies. So zombie haters? This note’s for you.

CEDRIC THE ENTERTAINER — The awesome voice of the Orioles on MASN, Kevin Brown, keeps going down that Weird and Wild rabbit hole, digging up new tidbits for us every week. Here’s a fun one that caught his eye Tuesday.

Third inning — walk to break up perfect game.
Fifth inning — single to break up no-hitter.
Seventh inning — home run to break up shutout.

On one hand, this has been done before — 43 times, in fact, in the Baseball-Reference database. And the list of players who have done this, according to Kenny Jackelen, includes Ted Williams, Yogi Berra and Joey Votto. Whoever they are. But now here comes the Weird and Wild part.

Game 1 of the 1983 World Series, when a fellow named Joe Morgan did that for the Phillies against the Orioles (and their starter, Scott McGregor).

GROUND CENTRAL STATION — Those Kansas City Royals rolled into Yankee Stadium this week … and got swept – because of course they got swept.

Does it feel to you as if those AL Central teams never win at Yankee Stadium? You wouldn’t be wrong. I checked.

The record of the five AL Central teams in The Stadium over the past five seasons? How about 15-50 … or 17-55 if you count the postseason. A team that played at that pace over a full season would win (gulp) 38 games. What’s up with that, you ask? Must be pastrami-related!

• Became the first No. 1 pick in the history of the draft to pitch to a catcher (Henry Davis) who was also the No. 1 pick.

• Finally got to pitch against not just his friend and former LSU teammate, the Nationals’ Dylan Crews, but also the player who got drafted right behind him, at No. 2 in the country the same year (2023) that Skenes got picked first.

All that’s cool, but I’m not done.

• So Skenes has now pitched to either the No. 1 pick (Davis) or the No. 2 pick (Joey Bart) as his catcher in four of his first 28 big-league starts.

• And finally, there’s this: Hitters who were taken with either the first or second pick in the draft have three times as many strikeouts as hits against Skenes. That group — Dansby Swanson, Spencer Torkelson, Alex Bregman and Crews — is a combined 2-for-10 against him, with six strikeouts (and no extra-base hits).

THE REAL DRAFT KING — Speaking of the draft, Astros phenom Cam Smith only got drafted last July 16. He hit his first career home run in the big leagues a week ago. So it took him only 269 days to go from the draft board to a home run trot. And that seemed quick. I asked my friends from STATS just how quick.

Only six players in baseball draft history could beat that. Three of them went straight to the big leagues: Bob Horner (1978), Dave Winfield (1973) and Dave Roberts (1972). Horner went deep a mere 10 days after he got drafted!

Three more got drafted that summer and were in the big leagues, hitting home runs, by that September: J.D. Drew (1998), Bo Jackson (1986) and Nolan Schanuel (2023).

Baseball!

This Week In Strange But Trueness

All this stuff really happened in the last week. I swear.

• Nationals reliever Jorge López managed to walk a guy (and give up three runs) after he got ejected (three pitches into a messy Andrew McCutchen plate appearance Wednesday). Washington reliever Eduardo Salazar helpfully finished López’s walk.

• Braves bopper Marcell Ozuna hit two home runs in the same *day* — in two different cities (Atlanta and Tampa) … with a little assistance from a two-hour, 45-minute rain delay that turned the first of those homers into a 12:53 a.m. walkoff special last Friday — err, Saturday.

• Nationals rookie James Wood got hit by a Paul Skenes pitch Monday — but it was the catcher (Pittsburgh’s Endy Rodríguez) who wound up on the injured list. Apparently, that can happen when baseballs ricochet off the hitter’s leg and head directly for your bare hand.

#Pirates Endy Rodriguez left with an injured hand tonight.

• Since that Pirates-Nationals series was about as bonkers as it gets, of course Tommy Pham got thrown out at first base Wednesday on a single. … OK, so it would have been a single if he’d just been aware that the aforementioned James Wood didn’t catch his line drive to left before it hit the ground. Confusion then reigned. The Pirates wound up with two runners dashing toward first. And when the throw from left beat Pham to the bag, he wound up as only the eighth hitter in the live-ball era to “single” into a 7-3 out at first. Hat tip: Katie Sharp.

· Bryce Harper hit a home run Tuesday in breeeezy Philadelphia with a 45-degree launch angle. Not to imply that’s a rarity, but the league average last season on balls hit with a 45-degree launch angle (or greater) was a dazzling .019! And the last left-handed hitting Phillie to pull a home run to right field in that park with a launch angle that pronounced was … Ryan Howard … 10 years ago!

• And here’s to Beloit Sky Carp outfielder Emaarion Boyd. He stole six bases in a game last week … despite the slight technicality that he didn’t get any hits. So how many bases has he stolen this season in games where he actually got a hit? Right you are. That would be none!

THE NAME RINGS A BELL — Baseball is better than science fiction, isn’t it? Last Sunday, new Red Sox ace Garret Crochet made his first start against that White Sox team that traded him, right there in the park where he’d pitched his whole career. So how’d that go?

He took a no-hitter into the eighth inning, naturally … only to have it broken up by … a guy he was traded for (Chase Meidroth)!

Want to guess how many pitchers, in their voluminous database, had a no-hitter busted up that late in a game by a hitter he’d been traded for? As always, zero is a fantastic guess.

Nutty epilogue — Kenny did find a game in 1954 where Early Wynn lost a no-hitter in the ninth. Then, three years later … he was traded for the guy who got the hit, Fred Hatfield!

RAIN ON ME — Welcome to one of the Strangest But Truest games in the history of the new Yankee Stadium. This was last Friday night, when the Giants and Yankees played baseball in the midst of approximately 2 billion raindrops — for five-plus innings anyway.

There were a few walks! Yankees pitchers walked 11 Giants in this game — in 5 2/3 innings! And what’s so Strange But True about that? They were the first team in the modern era to hand out that many walks without even getting 18 outs. And the last team to walk that many in six full innings did it as recently as 87 years ago (the 1938 White Sox).

The Stro Show! Then there was Yankees starter Marcus Stroman. He had quite a night, if only because he gave up five runs before he got an out — and then didn’t make it through the first inning. On one hand, he’s not the only Yankees starter on his own team who has given up that many runs before he got an out. (Carlos Rodón did it on Sept. 29, 2023, in Kansas City.) But Stroman did become the first Yankees starter ever to allow at least five runs before he got an out and not make it through the first inning in any version of Yankee Stadium. Well then.

Robbie Ray broke the rules! And finally, how ’bout Giants starter Robbie Ray. He only went four innings — but he still got The Win. That’s not actually allowed — in any other game. But did you know that in baseball, they let that whole five-innings requirement slide when it rains (and the winning team only pitches five innings)? Who knew it had happened five other times since that rule went into effect … 75 years ago. But baseball is inventive like that!

SHUT UP AND PLAY THE HITS — Finally, how about Dodgers multipurpose man Miguel Rojas. Just as we all expected, he’s pitched to more hitters in the big leagues this season than Max Scherzer, Alexis Díaz or David Bednar!

That would be 14 of them. And he faced all 14 in a six-out outing last Saturday that played, let’s just say, a pivotal role in the Dodgers’ unprecedented 16-0 loss to the Cubs. But that’s not even the Strange But True part.

The Strange But True part is that in the eighth inning, Cubs rookie Gage Workman got his first career hit … against Miguel Rojas, position player. And then, in the ninth inning, Workman got his second career hit … also against Miguel Rojas, position player.

So, how many players have gotten their first two career hits off the same true position player? Katie Sharp dug into that one. And that answer would be … none!

Baseball!