Mariners baserunning gaffes lead to absurd game-ending double play

If you’re a fan of the Minnesota Twins, then you’re conditioned to expect the worst this season. That’s how far the expectations have fallen with the team off to a highly disappointing 13-34 start entering play on Saturday.

We’re sure that overwhelming sense of dread crept into their minds on Saturday night too when the Seattle Mariners threatened to rally in the ninth inning at Safeco Field. However, in a stunning twist, it was actually the first-place Mariners who managed to run themselves right out of the ballpark with the worst display of baserunning we’ve seen in a long time.

[Elsewhere: Chase Utley authors perfect responses to Mets 99-mph message]

To try explaining this play will undoubtedly lead to confusion and then failure. Even those involved couldn’t possibly understand how Seattle went from first and third with one out, to game over despite the baseball never being put in play.

We’ll just say this: Both Shawn O’Malley, who was on third, and Kyle Seager, who was on first, literally ran into absurd outs. What’s most impressive though is how they did it in seamless succession, which made it look like the Twins had executed something spectacular.

In their own way, we guess they did simply by not screwing it up. In the scorebook, it’ll go down as your every day 2-4-5-6 double play. More importantly, on the scoreboard, it secured a Twins 6-5 victory.

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Mark Townsend is a writer for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @Townie813