Shohei Ohtani wasn’t exactly sure what happened with the ball he hit down the right field line on Saturday night at Angel Stadium.
With confusion abounding, the Dodgers’ two-way star had only one focus.
“I just kept running,” he said in an on-field postgame interview through an interpreter.
Good thing, too.
In the top of the eighth inning of the Dodgers’ 15-2 drubbing of the Angels, Ohtani hit a Little League home run — a triple that he then scored on via an error — with the help of a rarely seen application of one of MLB’s universal ballpark ground rules.
On the play, Ohtani’s 89.7 mph line drive landed deep in the right field corner, took one big hop just inside the foul line, then bounced over the low wall in foul ground at Angel Stadium.
Only, the ball never actually left the field of play.
Instead, it hit the protective netting that extends nearly down to the right-field foul pole (a new addition at Angel Stadium this year) and ricocheted back onto the field as Ohtani chugged around the bases.
By the time right fielder Jo Adell retrieved it — after initially raising his arms, evidently thinking the ball should have been dead — Ohtani was already pulling into third base.
Things only got worse from there for the Angels. Adell fired a relay throw that got past two cut-off men on the edge of the infield. With no one else in position to back it up, the ball trickled toward the mound as Ohtani raced home to score without a throw.
“Just a Little League home run,” manager Dave Roberts said afterward. “It was good to see him hustle.”
“I turned around and [saw] Shohei was coming home, and I’m like, ‘what happened?’” added Alex Call, one of two runners on base who initially scored on the play, “I didn’t find out until later. But I guess, yeah, the ball’s in play there.”
As soon as Ohtani slid across the plate, the Angels nonetheless began appealing to the umpires about the impact of the protective netting. Manager Kurt Suzuki even challenged the ruling after walking out of the dugout, explaining later that “we thought maybe a fan might have it” from behind the screen.
“That was a tough one, obviously,” he said in his postgame news conference. “Before the nets were [installed] down the line, that ball bounces into the stands and it’s two bases.”
Instead, video replay confirmed the initial call.
And amid all the mayhem, a spotlight was placed on one of the universal ground rules that applies in all MLB ballparks:
“A live ball (batted, thrown or otherwise) striking any screen or protective netting set on the field facing a wall or railing (e.g., a backstop or protective netting along the first or third base line) and rebounding onto the field is live and in play,” according to a section of rules on MLB’s website.
“The netting, if it hits, it’s in play, so that wasn’t a question,” Roberts said. “I didn’t really know what they were challenging, but no, we weren’t concerned about that.”