Any fan of baseball knows the cliché, that if you go to a game, you may see something you’ve never seen before. Those of us who went to Yankee Stadium last Saturday certainly did. Over 46,000 watched Aaron Judge go yard three times and the Yankees homer nine times, setting a franchise record and scoring 20 runs as part of a stunning weekend of torpedo-bat-aided offense.
I was one of those who saw all 20 Yankee runs, but I didn’t technically see the last two runs that the Brewers tacked across to bring the score to its final at 20-9. That’s because, in the top of the eighth inning, I saw something else I’d never seen before: a major-league line drive buzzing right at my face.
On an 0-1 count, Carlos Carrasco threw a slider on the inner third to Joey Ortiz, who you might remember as one of the Orioles prospects sent to Milwaukee in the February 2024 trade that sent Corbin Burnes to Baltimore (for a year, anyway). Ortiz, a young infielder with good bat speed, got all the way around on it, ripping it foul into the seats down the third-base line. The ball left his bat at 97.8 mph, a nifty statistical souvenir denied to anyone that had the misfortune of getting struck by a foul ball before Statcast debuted in 2015.
A friend who’d seen I was at this historic game had called me as Ortiz stepped in, and for just a few seconds, I was distracted from the play on the field, so I didn’t see the ball until I heard some commotion in the section around me. I looked up barely in time to see the ball hurtling towards me, and it hit me flush in the right cheek. For the morbidly curious, YES Network didn’t cut to the crowd after the liner, but thankfully (is that the right word?) the Brewers’ broadcast got a distance shot.
Enhance a bit on the left side of the screen, where the ball whizzes into the crowd:
The ball bounced away*, and I stood up in a state of shock as blood began to pour from my face.
(*Side note: Incredibly, no one retrieved this ball for me. If you’re the person who swiped it as I saw my life flash before my eyes, may the baseball gods never again grant you a foul ball!)
I was lucky in more ways than I could count in that moment. CT scans at the ER later that evening would reveal several fractures on the right side of my face, but further testing showed no significant damage to my teeth, nose, or eyes. An inch or two in either direction, and the whole story could have been different; a bit to the left and my nose is crushed, a bit lower and my teeth are gone, a bit higher and my eye is mush, and a bit higher still, my forehead takes the blunt force and lord knows what happens then. Even the broken bones I sustained could’ve been worse, with the doctors telling me they should heal with rest over the coming weeks and months.
I was luckier still, with Section 228 at the Stadium coming to my aid. A PA who happened to be nearby helped keep me calm and stanch the bleeding while we waited for Yankees medical personnel to come.** Adrenaline also kept me in it, and as I walked out of the section under my own power, I did as much as I could to pump up the crowd and assure them I was alright. I tried to convince everyone, and perhaps more so myself, that I was good, that it was a glancing blow not unlike the one that nicked John Sterling a couple years ago.
(**Another side note: In a terrifying moment, this person leapt to action and was kind, professional, and extremely cool under pressure. I never got a chance to thank her, so if anyone knows this person, please reach out!)
But after we reached the top of the stairs, I sat down behind the section and felt the world coming to an end. I was consumed by nausea, the voices around me suddenly seemed to be coming from miles away, and I passed out. By the time I came to a few moments later, I was in a wheelchair being whisked somewhere into the bowels of the stadium.
Esteban Rivera, a friend of mine and a brilliant FanGraphs analyst*** formerly of PSA, kept me company as Stadium personnel brought me to see the doctors downstairs. Once I came to and processed, blinding pain and broken bones in my face notwithstanding, that it didn’t seem like I was going to die, Esteban and I tried to piece together what happened, in ways that only baseball nerds like ourselves would. Which hitter had struck me? We were far enough from the plate that getting a line drive foul seemed borderline unfathomable, so the hitter must’ve been a quick, pull-happy kinda guy. What was the exit velo? Oh, and also, that Judge fellow must be coming back up to the plate soon, is he going to hit his fourth homer of the day?
(***Yes, I’m doing one more aside, but just to show how sharp Esteban is, before the game he’d brought up the concept of weight distribution in bats. Not an hour later was the story of the Yankees’ new mass-shifted bats circulating the internet, surging well beyond the normal baseball circles.)
I didn’t get the chance to see Judge’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to tie an MLB record against Jake Bauers, of all people, as the Yankees’ medical staff tended to me. The staff was universally very kind, and kept me in good spirits through what was a frightening experience. Though they did as much as they could for a man who was possibly concussed and presumably had broken half his face, they told me that since they couldn’t run scans on my head, I should get to the hospital, where they could better diagnose whatever had just happened to me. They also told me to expect a call from the Yankees soon, though that call hasn’t come just yet. (You have my number, Hal!)
We called an Uber to take us downtown to NYU Langone on 1st Ave. Over the course of several hours at the ER, a host of doctors and nurses examined me, put me in a tube, and ran countless tests to make sure my eyes, ears, and brain were functioning. Miraculously, my right eye was essentially unimpacted by the blunt force of the baseball, and somehow none of my teeth were dislodged in any way. A few of them have shifted downwards slightly, and surgery may be required to fix my now awkward bite, but beyond that the worst of it seems to be a host of minimally displaced fractures on the right side of my face that should repair themselves. As miserable a time as it was, as much as my head pounded, the headline from the doctors, it seemed, was that if you were going to get obliterated by a line drive and break your face, this was the way to do it.
I arrived back at my apartment at 2 a.m. The first thing I did was bring up the Ortiz at-bat, but after having seen that low-light, I switched to the highlights. I watched the YES Network broadcast of the Yankees’ three first-inning home runs on three pitches. It already felt like a lifetime ago, but just 12 hours earlier, Esteban and I and everyone in Section 228 were going ballistic, with seemingly each Yankee swing somehow producing a dinger and a roar.
I’m not sure I have anything much to say, at least not yet, about the surreal sensation of having some of the most fun moments of your life and some of the most terrifying occur within hours of each other. I will never forget the ecstasy of those nine home runs, which to my mind made this by far the best regular-season Yankees game I’d ever attended. And I’ll never forget the brutal impact of that ball, the tattoo of the seams on my face, the people who came to my aid, or the hours of stressful examination at the hospital afterward.
Part of me wishes I had a more poignant note to leave you with. There are certainly morals you can choose to read into this story, if you want to. You never know what might happen on a given day, so give your friends and family a hug. It can be a random world out there, and astronomical odds are never zero. What are the chances that a 98-mph line drive screams to a far-out section at the exact moment when, after three hours of rapt attention, I happened to look down at my phone? Things of that nature.
For the most part though, I’m just a guy who works at a baseball blog, who had an insane story to tell after going to a baseball game. If there must be a moral, if you’re at a game, watch the game. Sure, a sporting event can double as a social event, and be merry with friends and with strangers while you’re there, but when the ball is in play, watch the ball. It’s what we pay to see, after all.