Nationals pitcher hits extremely bizarre triple with help from the stadium

By Ross Kelly July 14, 2018 at 9:08am

Sometimes you just need to rely on whatever help you can get, and for the case of struggling Nationals pitcher Tanner Roark, he relied on the quirky dimensions of Citi Field to help him at the plate.

Roark took the mound on Friday night against a Mets team that he’s dominated throughout his career. He’s gone 7-2 with a 3.09 ERA vs. New York over his career, but he was winless in his two previous starts against the Mets this year.

But it wasn’t Roark’s arm that generated headlines from this matchup as it was his bat instead. Owner of a career .136 batting average, Roark had never hit more than a double in his 250 career at-bats — until Friday.

Thanks to some help from a concrete wall down the first base line, Roark did something even rarer for a pitcher than hitting a home run: He hit a stand-up triple off Noah Syndergaard.

Roark flared one to right field that took a bounce onto the wall where it just kept on bouncing. Baseball players are known for their meticulous fielding drills, but right fielder Brandon Nimmo apparently never practiced grabbing a ball off the wall.

Should Brandon Nimmo have been charged with an error on the play?

Roark just kept chugging around second base and ended the at-bat with an out-of-breath triple. You can understand why he was so winded as he’s been playing pro ball since the 2008 season but had never hit a triple or home run before this game so he wasn’t used to running that fast for that long.

“I didn’t know if he was going to get to it or if it was even fair, so my 90 degree turn [wasn’t good],” Roark said after the game. “Ryan Zimmerman was making fun of me, how I turned the bases. Then I saw the ball go past Nimmo, and I just kept running.”

“I was just trying to use my inner high school days and trying to be athletic,” he added.

Roark and his teammates weren’t the only ones surprised about his first career triple.

https://twitter.com/NBCSNationals/status/1017920594636169222

It would be nice if Roark carried that same success from the batter’s box onto the mound, but as you can see from the score above, things didn’t go as well for Roark for what he’s paid to do.

Despite his previous success against the Mets, Roark came up on the losing end of this game as he allowed four earned runs and eight hits in 5.0 innings pitched.

He lost his sixth straight decision to drop his record to 3-12 and to become the majors’ first 12-game loser of the season.

There have been 14 home runs hit by pitchers this season, but Roark is the first to hit a triple. He also became the first Nationals pitcher to hit a triple since Joel Hanrahan in 2007.

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