Random Baseball

The Fankees won the World Series sending us into the dark days of winter on a very low note. But just so we don't have to go through these cold nights with nightmares of Jeter and Slappy we have this happy story from south of the border.

Alexei Bell—National Series slugging sensation two years back and offensive hero of the August 2008 Beijing Olympiad—Tuesday (November 3) became the first player in Cuban League history to smack two grand slam home runs within a single inning during Santiago’s bizarre mercy-rule-shortened 24-0 slaughter of Oriente League rival Camagüey. Bell thus matched a rarer-than-rare feat accomplished on only one single occasion in more than a full century of major league play. And such a Herculean feat is not known to have occurred anywhere else either in big-time competitions—not in the first class Japanese leagues, other Asian professional circuits, the North American minor leagues, or the Caribbean winter leagues. Nor has such a thing ever been witnessed in IBAF-sponsored international tournament play, and probably not in North American youth leagues either.