Culture
Danny Jansen makes MLB history by playing for both teams in same game as Red Sox, Blue Jays resume
By Kaitlyn McGrath, Jen McCaffrey and Lauren Merola
BOSTON — Under sunny skies on Monday afternoon, 112-year-old Fenway Park bore witness to a bit more history.
Danny Jansen had been at the plate for the Toronto Blue Jays on June 26 in a game against the Boston Red Sox with one on and one out in an 0-1 count, when the skies opened up and the game was suspended for severe weather.
Fast forward two months and the game resumed Monday, but with Jansen now playing for the Red Sox. The Red Sox traded for Jansen on July 27, setting up the possibility of one player appearing in the same game for both teams.
The possibility became reality on Monday.
With Jansen substituted into the game to catch for the Red Sox, he settled in behind the plate, for an at-bat in which he’d started as the batter. (Boston’s original catcher in the game, Reese McGuire had been designated for assignment shortly after the team traded for Jansen.)
With Jansen behind the plate, the Blue Jays subbed Daulton Varsho into the game to take over Jansen’s original 0-1 plate appearance. Varsho struck out, fouling off the first pitch from Nick Pivetta and swinging through the second. (If the count had been two strikes, it would have been credited to Jansen’s line, but instead went to Varsho.) Following the strikeout, the runner on first took off for second and Jansen’s throw tailed into center. But Will Wagner followed with a strikeout to end the inning.
“At first, I didn’t really think of it that much,” Jansen said of the possibility of playing for both teams before the game. “But now here we are and it’s going to be a cool moment, especially when it’s all said and done, to look back on and it’s such a strange thing that’s happening but I’m grateful to have the opportunity to do it and it’s going to be cool.”
Pinch-Hitting for Danny Jansen: Daulton Varsho
Now Catching: Danny Jansen
🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯 pic.twitter.com/PXnVZvbpml
— Toronto Blue Jays (@BlueJays) August 26, 2024
The Blue Jays came out on top, 4-1, in the game that took two months to complete. Toronto broke a scoreless tie in the seventh on a solo home run by George Springer. The Blue Jays added three more runs in the eighth on doubles by Vladimir Guerrero, Jr. and Addison Barger. Jarren Duran’s solo homer in the bottom of the eighth accounted for the Red Sox’s only run. Jansen finished the game 1 for 4, with all four of his official at-bats coming as a member of the Red Sox.
Before the game, the Red Sox released their revised lineup, with Jansen slotted in to bat seventh and Triston Casas now batting eighth, where McGuire was hitting in the original lineup. Normally a starter, Pivetta took over on the mound for Kutter Crawford in what will officially be considered a relief appearance.
Game 1, Red Sox vs. Blue Jays: Duran CF, Hamilton 2B, Abreu RF, Devers 3B, Refsnyder LF, Yoshida DH, Jansen C, Casas 1B, Rafaela SS, Pivetta P
— Jen McCaffrey (@jcmccaffrey) August 26, 2024
The Blue Jays had to replace five players from the original lineup who are no longer available, including traded players and shortstop Bo Bichette, who is on the IL.
The resumption of the game creates several other wrinkles beyond Jansen’s double-duty.
For example, both Leo Jiménez and Wagner made their MLB debuts after June 26. Still, since they’ll appear in the suspended game that will go in the record books as having taken place on June 26, they’ll have appeared in a game before they arrived in the majors.
“We’re going in a DeLorean,” Blue Jays manager John Schneider joked recently, referencing the car best known for traveling back in time in the film “Back to the Future.”
This has happened before. The Athletic’s Jayson Stark wrote recently how in 2018, Juan Soto debuted before he debuted. “He arrived in the big leagues, with the Washington Nationals, on May 20. But he later played in a game that had been suspended on May 15 — and homered. Which means he debuted before he debuted and also homered before his first homer,” Stark wrote.
Meanwhile, the Blue Jays went to their bench late to insert Joey Loperfido as a defensive replacement, meaning he was technically in two places at once. On June 26, the outfielder was still with the Houston Astros and went 0-for-3 with a hit-by-pitch in a 7-1 win against the Colorado Rockies. Since he played left field in the final two innings, he’ll go down on paper as playing two games on the same day.
The Red Sox moved to 67-63 on the season, while the Blue Jays are 64-68.
Required reading
(Photo: G Fiume / Getty Images)
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions — or even books. With the Academy Award nominations announced last week, this week’s challenge celebrates past Oscar-winning films that were based on books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their filmed versions.
Not every poem about love is a love poem. This one, from William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” first published in 1794, is more analytical than romantic. Instead of roses and violets, it offers us dirt and rocks.
William Blake (1757-1827), obscure in his own time and a hero to later generations of poets and spiritual seekers, made his living as an engraver and illustrator. He conceived and executed many of his poetic projects as works of visual as well as literary art, etching his verses and images onto copper plates and printing them in vivid color — a style designed to blur the boundary between word and picture.
“The Clod & the Pebble” is set in a rustic tableau populated by wild and domesticated animals. In the print, we can’t quite see the main characters, who are presumably somewhere beneath the hooves and the ripples. But the cows and sheep, the frogs and the duck, are nonetheless connected to the poem’s meaning.
The two sections of “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” are meant to illustrate “the contrary states of the human soul” — the purity and wonder associated with early childhood and the harder knowledge that inevitably follows.
“The Clod & the Pebble” recapitulates this fall from sweetness into disillusionment, and the plate suggests it in contrasting ways. The wild animals down below symbolize a natural condition of innocence, while the livestock above live in confinement, bound to another’s use. At the same time, though, the cows and sheep are peaceful ruminants, while the frogs and the duck are predators.
In the poem, the Clod is an avatar of innocence. As it happens, this is a recurring character in the Blakean poetic universe. In “The Book of Thel,” a fantastical meditation composed a few years before the publication of “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” the Clod appears as a maternal figure selflessly nursing a baby worm:
The Clod of Clay heard the Worms voice, & raisd her pitying head;
She bow’d over the weeping infant, and her life exhal’d
In milky fondness
“We live not for ourselves,” she tells the poem’s heroine, a young girl named Thel. But in Blake’s system self-sacrifice can never be the last word. There is no innocence without the fall into experience, and no experience without the memory of innocence. Giving gives way to wanting.
Question 1/6
Love seeketh not Itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care;
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Get to know the poem better by filling in the missing words below.
First, the Clod’s perspective.
Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge tests your memory of 21st-century books that were inspired by ancient myths, legends and folk tales. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
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