A ball bounced off Jo Adell’s skull last night in Anaheim and sailed over the fence for a Colorado Rockies home run, which is either the funniest thing that has happened in baseball this year or God collecting on a debt he’s been carrying since April.
https://twitter.com/MLB/status/2062005611424813203
The play happened in the 4th inning. TJ Rumfield hit a deep fly to right field, Adell went up to catch it, the ball grazed the outside of his glove, ricocheted off his head, and gone. Homer. Colorado already led 8-0. The Angels lost 8-2. None of that context matters. What matters is that Jo Adell, a 2024 Gold Glove finalist, became the reason another team scored.
The Canseco comparisons were immediate and correct. On May 26, 1993, José Canseco’s head absorbed a Carlos Martinez fly ball and turned it into a homer for the Indians. Rangers centerfielder David Hulse ran over to back him up and reportedly started laughing. That’s 33 years of head homer history. Baseball thought it was done with this subgenre.
It was not done.
Here’s what separates Adell from Canseco, though, and why this hits at a completely different frequency: Canseco was already a punchline when the ball hit his head. He was a guy you expected this from. Adell is a different problem entirely. This is a man who, on April 5th of this year, robbed three separate home runs in a single game against the Mariners. Three. Cal Raleigh in the first. Josh Naylor in the eighth. J.P. Crawford in the ninth, on which catch Adell fell into the stands and still kept the ball. Per Sports Info Solutions, no outfielder had done that in their tracking history going back to 2004. Torii Hunter, a nine-time Gold Glove winner who has seen everything, said: “I’ve never seen three and I’ve never seen a guy on the third one fall in the stands, catch the ball, keep his feet in like he’s a wide receiver, and come up with the catch.”
That was 59 days ago.
Fifty-nine days later, bounced off his skull. The ball chose him.
What I keep coming back to is the poetry of this. Jo Adell is not having a bad year defensively. He’s not Canseco stumbling around in right field. He went from “no outfielder in 20 years of data has done what this man just did” to “the ball used his head as a trampoline” and the gap between those two events is basically nothing on a calendar. The same hands that kept three balls from leaving the yard became the reason a ball left the yard. You want to talk about the home run race or Ohtani’s leadoff shot — fine, those are real stories. But no story this week lands harder than a Gold Glove finalist becoming the home run.
Jo Adell is not a man. He is a premise. And the universe just collected on it, in Anaheim, in the fourth inning, off his head.
Revis didn’t even look up from the couch. He knows better by now.
