Just a couple of days into the 2025 MLB season, we may have already gotten the weirdest moment of the year.
On Saturday night, Jomboy Media shared an interesting (and bizarre) revelation from a game the night before between the Seattle Mariners and the Athletics. Against Mariners reliever Gregory Santos in the sixth inning on Friday, first baseman Seth Brown of the Athletics worked a walk … that wasn’t quite what it seemed.
Brown took four called balls out of the strike zone … and yet somehow remained in the batter’s box for an additional pitch. That additional pitch also missed the zone, and only then did Brown take his base.
Here is the video from Jomboy Media (with the true ball count overlayed on the bottom right of the screen).
That was an extremely strange sequence, especially since the scorebug showed “3-2” for back-to-back pitches there. While the home-plate umpire may have just had his head in the clouds, it was even weirder that no one on either team noticed the error (especially the Athletics, who, in theory, stood to be disadvantaged by the extra pitch).
Though the Athletics had a runner on first at the time, the five-ball walk did not really matter in the end as Gio Urshela lined out in the next at-bat to end the inning. But that still had to be the most ridiculous oversight (by both the umpires and by the teams actually playing in the game) since this similar one involving another AL West team a few years ago.
