New York Yankees outfielder Spencer Jones already looked like an outlier before he stepped into the batter’s box in the sixth inning of Game 2 of the American League Wild Card Series.
The Yankees rookie is 6-foot-7, plays center field, runs better than a frame that size usually allows, and carries a batting stance that draws comparisons to Shohei Ohtani.
On Wednesday night at Yankee Stadium, he added a line to the record book that no one else has occupied in more than a century of searchable play-by-play.
Jones led off the sixth against Garrett Crochet, the Red Sox ace working in relief for the first time in months. The at-bat ended with a swing and a miss on a pitch in the dirt.
A third strike that the catcher does not hold is not automatically an out, and Adley Rutschman could not keep the ball. Jones took off for first. The call on the field went against him. Replay did not. The out was overturned, and a strikeout that should have ended the plate appearance instead put the tallest man in the Yankees lineup on base.
From there the inning got stranger. Jones stole second, tacking a stolen base onto a strikeout that had not counted as an out. He later came around to score. New York kept hitting.
The Yankees batted all the way around, and Jones found himself in the box again before the sixth was over. This time the strikeout stuck. There was no wild pitch, no errant throw, no second life. He was out.
The combination is what makes the sequence historic.
According to Baseball Reference researcher Katie Sharp, Jones is the first player in major-league history, regular season or postseason, to record two strikeouts and a stolen base in the same inning.
The play-by-play record used for that search reaches back to 1910. In more than a hundred years of games, including every October series that has been logged the same way, nobody had done it.
The oddity landed inside a series New York has controlled without its captain. Aaron Judge has been unavailable, and the Yankees still won the first two games against Boston by scores of 9-0 and 9-2. Jones is not Judge, and nobody in the organization is pretending otherwise.
He is, though, another 6-foot-7 outfielder with real power, and he just turned a pair of strikeouts into a run and a stolen base in a playoff inning.
That does not decide a series against the Tampa Bay Rays, the American League’s top seed, if New York advances. It does suggest a club that has found ways to convert messy moments into something useful.
The franchise has not won a World Series since 2009. An inning that had never happened before is not a championship. It is a reminder that this October, even the failures have not stayed failures for long.
