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Fantasy Baseball: Major Leaguer Has To Reenact Home Run To Make It Official

Two weeks ago it was baseball's 500,000th error.

Now, we want to pass this along: There were some very odd odd events Saturday during a game between the Washington Nationals and St. Louis Cardinals.

Here's what happened:

The Nationals loaded the bases. Slugger Michael Morse was at bat. And his long hit to right field bounced off the top of the fence.

Was it a home run? The umpires weren't sure at first. Baserunners were confused too. Morse was actually tagged "out."

Then, as Yahoo Sports explains, the officiating crew went to the video replay — and ruled that Morse had indeed hit a grand slam.

But what should they do to make the play official? The umps decided that everybody should go back to their bases and that Morse should return to home plate. And then, as you can see in the video, he did something we'd never seen: pantomimed hitting the ball again before rounding the bases. It was like being a kid again and dreaming of winning the game for your team with a grand slam. Only he'd also just done that.

Weird.

The Nationals won, by the way, 6-4.

Speaking of fantasies, while the Nationals could clinch the National League's East Division today, there's another big baseball story in D.C.: Will the team finally let "Teddy" win their mascot race?

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.
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