Ken Davidoff

Ken Davidoff

MLB

Juan Soto defies human logic while burying Yankees

WASHINGTON — It’s all fun and games until someone goes deep in his pretend major league debut. Goes back in time, sort of.

The statistical oddity of this resumed Yankees-Nationals game Monday afternoon at Nationals Park, suspended by rain after 5 ¹/₂ innings on May 15, had everyone chuckling over the complications prior to Chad Green’s first/not-first pitch to open the bottom of the sixth. Then Juan Soto, the dynamic 19-year-old rookie who made a quite memorable Yankee Stadium debut last week, creamed Green’s 16th pitch to make the Yankees 5-3 losers and to heighten those delightfully geeky discussions — at the Yankees’ expense.

Soto, the outfielder from the Dominican Republic, blasted his third homer in two games against the Yankees. This one, a two-run, sixth-inning shot off a Green 97 mph fastball, traveled an estimated 433 feet and cleared the stadium’s second deck as it broke the 3-3 tie, landing on the concourse.

“Soto got us again,” Aaron Boone said, between the end of this game and the makeup of the May 16 rainout. “He’s obviously a really good-looking player.”

Boone’s Nationals counterpart, Dave Martinez, said he didn’t envision such a titanic hit from his teenaged freshman, “but I thought he had a good chance to hit the ball hard. That was hard.”

Martinez used Soto as a pinch hitter for Matt Adams, and Soto was on the bench because when this game began, the outfielder had not yet been called up to the majors. He arrived five days later, and when you go to Soto’s page on Baseball-Reference.com going forward, you’ll continue to see “May 20, 2018” as his first big-league game, and historians will note that he hit his first homer (which also was his first hit) on May 21.

However, if you go to Soto’s 2018 game logs, you’ll see May 15 as his first game, and this homer off of the Yankees will be listed as career homer No. 1.

Asked if he’d ever seen a time-traveling player, Martinez laughed and said, “No, first time. Pretty impressive. I wish I could do that.”

This all brings to mind an exchange from “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me”:

Austin: Wait a tick. Basil, if I travel back to 1969 and I was frozen in 1967, presumably, I could go back and visit my frozen self. But, if I’m still frozen in 1967, how could I have been unthawed in the ’90s and traveled back to.

[goes cross-eyed]

Austin: Oh, no, I’ve gone cross-eyed.

Basil: I suggest you don’t worry about those things and just enjoy yourself.

[to camera]

Basil: That goes for you all, too.

Indeed. Don’t sweat any of this too much. It’s an enjoyable quirk of baseball, which features the occasional suspended game thanks to most of the games being held outdoors and therefore exposed to the elements.

(Although if you want it explained as basically as possible: This game goes first in Soto’s timeline, yet his accomplishments are not notated as his “first” anything, because, well, they really weren’t.)

Before this resumption, a Washington reporter playfully asked Boone if he had heard of Soto back on May 15, when he still played for Double-A Harrisburg.

“Yeah,” Boone replied. “My dad told me about him in spring training of 2016.”

Despite the heads-up from Bob Boone, the Nationals’ vice president and adviser to general manager Mike Rizzo, Aaron Boone couldn’t work the space-time continuum to his advantage. Quickly, the unique elements of this game turned uninteresting to the Yankees. They have to hope their future, as in a World Series, doesn’t feature any more encounters with young Mr. Soto.