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Sports

Let's Watch This Ridiculous Double Play and Ponder Our Place in the Universe Together

A butterfly flaps its wings in Mongolia and a baseball bounces off an ump for a double play in minor league ball.

Was that a 1-Blue-6-3 double play?! @SportsCenter #SCtop10 pic.twitter.com/1qFdwTVnIp
— Dayton Dragons (@DragonsBaseball) August 12, 2016

Baseball has been played for more than a couple of centuries now, all across the globe, at myriad levels, every single day, which means we can safely surmise that the number of games played, conservatively speaking, reaches the hundreds of millions. Maybe even billions. Who the hell knows, really?

The point is, there's been a lot of baseball and so it would follow that, at the very least, we've exhausted all possible double play permutations.

And then this shit happens.

It took place last night, in an A-ball game between the Dayton Dragons and the South Bend Cubs. Much like my attempt to distill the entirety of the human baseball experience into three sentences, any attempt I make to describe the video above would fail miserably. I could tell you that the ball ricochets off the pitcher, then caroms off an umpire, directly into the path of the shortstop, who calmly steps on second base and whips it over to first. Start to finish, the whole thing takes under four seconds and better resembles a billiards trick shot than a traditional baseball play. A millimeter either way and this probably never happens.

But you don't want that. You want context and, frankly, I've got nothing for you. There were so many moving parts to the play that I highly doubt there's been anything quite like this, which is a nice little comfort, really. Chances are, nothing you do tonight or this weekend is all that meaningful within the wider fabric of the universe, but—but!—together, we just witnessed something that is likely completely unique. I don't know about you, but that makes me feel pretty good.