Since we're admitting authorial biases here, enjoy José Bautista and his iconic bat heave.

Disclaimer

The pages here attempt to work through the types of scenarios you will see in a typical baseball game, plus some of the more rare possibilities that pop up in real game conditions. It is not meant to be fully representative of every single possibility or condition that can occur in real life, and indeed, even the more common types of plays or outcomes are going to softened a little bit by terms like "usually" or "typically". Why? You see, baseball might be as close as you can come to representing the proverbial “thousands of monkeys on typewriters trying to produce Shakespeare” scenario. After all, there are as many as 2,430 games over the course of a full MLB season, which means that something you'd expect to see once in a hundred games is going to pop up once ever 24-or-so games— or, to use slightly fuzzier math, a little less than once a month. Weird stuff is always happening in baseball, and if we wanted this project to never be complete, we would attempt to catalogue it all.

Now, where possible, we have added video-based examples of different plays/outcomes, as culled from MLB’s generous video archives. And where possible, we also include a link to those archives where you can view up-to-date examples of different plays. While generally excellent, these archives have some drawbacks; some plays are difficult to, if not impossible, to search for, and you’re also at the mercy of the way individual clips are edited/labeled. All of which is to say, you may occasionally run into a clip or two that seem confusing or out of place, and we apologize for that in advance.

Last but not least: the author here confesses that he is a slightly-irrational fan of the Toronto Blue Jays, which may result in their being slightly-over-indexed in terms of how often they show up in the representative clips/screenshots. We have tried to be fair in the distribution of clips (which is to say: sometimes bad things will happen to the Toronto Blue Jays in these clips), and not antagonistic towards their various rivals. Mostly.