The Milwaukee Brewers record-setting season came to a disappointing halt after being swept by the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 2025 National League Championship Series, but it cannot be understated how electrifying, and bizarre, Game 1 of the series turned out to be.
The Dodgers narrowly defeated the Brewers in a 2-1 victory that was decided in the ninth inning, but the score could have been much higher if not for one of the oddest double plays to exist.
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In the top of the fourth inning with one out and with the bases loaded, Dodgers third baseman Max Muncy launched a ball to deep center, forcing Milwaukee’s center fielder Sal Frelick to leap at the wall in an attempt to stop a grand slam. The ball bounced off Frelick’s glove, but he was able to gather it to make a miraculous catch, leaving Los Angeles’ base runners in a state of confusion.
Dodgers’ right fielder Teoscar Hernández forgot to tag up, so Frelick’s throw to the cutoff man and then to home plate got Hernández out and ending the inning. The chain of events was so chaotic that it led Jayson Stark of The Athletic to include it on his “MLB’s Strange But True 2025: The plays, moments and stuff we couldn’t believe” list.
“I’m pretty sure I don’t have the power to will crazy stuff to happen in baseball just because I happen to be the universe’s No. 1 fan of that crazy stuff. But you should know that not everyone believes that,” he wrote.
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“So, there I was on Oct. 13, minding my own business in a press box in Milwaukee, moments after the Strangest But Truest “ground-ball” double play of all time. My brain was still trying to absorb how it was possible that a 404-foot rocket to the center-field fence had just forced me to write an 8-6-2 “grounded-into-double-play” entry on my scorecard.”
“So you thought you knew what a groundball looked like, huh? Well, one thing we can agree on is, it sure didn’t look like that — possibly because this was a baseball that never touched the ground at any point.”
Beyond the shock and awe of Muncy’s grand slam being robbed, Stark was more perplexed by how the play could be ruled as a groundball, so much so that he asked official scorer Tim O’Driscoll to make sense of it.
“How, I wondered, could this be scored a “groundball,” despite the slight technicality that it never touched anything remotely similar to “the ground?”
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“It’s a ground-ball double play,” O’Driscoll said, “because once the ball hit off the glove and off the wall, the ball wasn’t caught. … (Then) there was a forceout at home and a forceout at third. And because the ball wasn’t caught in the air, it becomes a ‘groundball.’”
“I asked if he understood the irony in that. He couldn’t help but laugh.”