NEW YORK -- This might be the only time that you see a player rip a gapper 350 feet into the outfield grass … and not end up with a hit.
But that's what happened to Juan Soto on Tuesday night at Citi Field, when Soto, Brandon Nimmo and the Mets got into some unusual baserunning hijinks.
The weird play happened in the first inning of New York's 6-4 win over the White Sox. Soto was called out for passing Nimmo on the basepaths after the two Mets were confused about whether White Sox center fielder Michael A. Taylor had caught Soto's line drive.
"Screwy play," said Pete Alonso, who was watching from the on-deck circle. "You're probably not going to see another one like that this year."
On the play in question, Soto -- who has been hitting into some hard luck early in his Mets tenure -- thought he'd been robbed again when Taylor appeared to make a diving catch on Soto's 110 mph line drive into the right-center-field gap.
Nimmo, who was on first base, took off running on Soto's rocket and had already rounded second by the time Taylor dived for the ball. Nimmo also thought it was a catch.
Soto, thinking he was out, pulled up on his way toward second and wheeled back into the infield grass. Nimmo, thinking he was about to get doubled off, sprinted back around the bases toward first. Midway between first and second base, Soto and Nimmo crossed paths.
"When Soto hit it, I thought, 'That's down for sure. It's a double or better,'" Nimmo explained. "I went to go round the bag, I had my back to the play, and then I heard the crowd acting like the ball was caught. And so I turned around and went to get back when I saw [Taylor] on the ground."
The thing was, Taylor hadn't caught the ball. He'd trapped it. So Soto wasn't out on a catch. But he was out for "passing" Nimmo (by standing in the grass as Nimmo raced by him on his way back toward first).
But there was basically nothing Nimmo could do. First-base umpire Tom Hanahan, who had the best angle to see Taylor's attempt, made the "safe" signal to indicate the ball had hit the grass. But that was way behind Nimmo, who had no way to see it.
Nimmo could have tried to pick up Mets third-base coach Mike Sarbaugh. But for the players and coaches on the field, it was difficult to see if Taylor had made the catch or not, because the ball short-hopped so cleanly into his glove.
"You're using all of your surroundings," Nimmo said. "And when I heard the crowd make the sound like it had been caught, that flipped the switch for me in my head, and I was like, 'All right, I'm going back.' With the home crowd, you can usually tell. If it was a visiting crowd, I wouldn't use that."
Nimmo said that ever since the Mets hit into their equally confusing triple play against the Nationals earlier this season, he has tried to rely less on looking for the umpire's call.
"I'm not going to lie to you -- [after] that triple play with the Nationals … I'm not really looking," Nimmo said. "I'm going more off of what the instinct is."
In the end, Nimmo got to stay safe on first. Under MLB official rule 5.09 (b)(9), "Any runner is out when he passes a preceding runner before such runner is out." So Soto, the runner who passed Nimmo, was out, and Nimmo, the runner who got passed, was not.
"As baserunners, that can be really confusing," Alonso said. "I mean, I couldn't tell from the on-deck circle, and I probably would have done the same thing. Weird play. When you're in the heat of the moment, you're not really looking at the umpire, you're trying to just see the ball, and from my vantage point, I thought he caught it."
Maybe the weirdest part of the whole thing: Because of the way such plays are scored, it went down as a "groundout" for Soto -- on a ball that he hit 354 feet in the air -- with White Sox first baseman Miguel Vargas credited with the putout.
This exact scenario is covered in MLB's rule interpretations for the official scorer. Under rule 9.05 (b)(1), the scorer is not allowed to credit the batter with a hit unless every runner that is forced to advance actually advances to the next base. The force on Nimmo was reinstated as soon as he retreated back around second base (because he thought he needed to tag up), and he ended up back on first base. It's as if Nimmo never successfully reached second base on the play, and that means Soto, the batter, can't be given a hit, even though he reached first base safely before he was called out.
Luckily for the Mets, they went on to score four runs in the inning. Alonso crushed a two-run homer in the very next at-bat, and Jared Young crushed another two-run homer, his first as a Met, two batters later.
"Definitely glad that Pete hit the home run there," Nimmo quipped.