At Only Baseball Matters, Greg Hunnicutt tells us about a remarkable at bat.
In what was still a close, two run game, with the Dodgers ahead 2-0 against the Cubs in the seventh inning, Alex Cora managed a home run after an 18 pitch at-bat against Matt Clement. With the count at 2-2, Cora fouled off 14 straight pitches to stay alive. Clement, who pitched solidly despite giving up two runs on four straight infield hits in the third inning, made fourteen very good pitches against Cora, all coming down and in against the left-hander. Cora, mostly weakly fouled off each pitch. But he stayed alive. At first the fans seemed disinterested, as they often can in the more routine parts of a game. After about the eighth consecutive foul, the mood in the stadium seemed to change.
Camera shots of the fans and the Dodgers bench showed that mixture of humor and fascination that begins to set in when faced with the strange and absurd. With each successive foul after that, the atmosphere became more charged. On the eighteenth pitch, Clement left a ball over the plate, and Cora hit it out. There was a collective sense of amazement in the stadium, and I expect among people watching at home.
The Dodgers web site has the story, too, complete with the pitch-by-pitch video and Vin Scully with the call. It’s worth a look, but as Hunnicutt says, the fun must have been between pitches.