Boucher warms up for his first inning.

“There’s no rules that say a pitcher can’t use a hockey stick,” said umpire Tony Randazzo before Friday’s game between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Tampa Bay Rays. “I don’t make the rules; I just sometimes enforce them.”

Two hours before Friday’s game, Andrew Friedman of the Rays signed Tampa Bay Lightning coach Guy Boucher to make his major league debut — as the league’s first hockey-stick pitcher. Boucher lasted three scoreless innings before being ejected in the fourth inning for throwing off his gloves and engaging in a five-minute one-on-one brawl with Blue Jays outfielder Colby Rasmus.

The event marks the first time in baseball history that not only an NHL coach has played in the majors, but also completed an inning using a hockey stick and wearing blue jeans.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Blue Jays manager John Farrell said after the game. “All you can do is tip your cap and say, ‘Well done,’ to both [Guy Boucher] and the Rays front office.”

One night in 1977, Dennis Martinez was confronted by a decision: fight or go make love somewhere …

When faced with an onrushing and plainly nettled George Scott, a gentleman scampers. “A hasty retreat is what he beat,” Vin Scully might have said if he’d been calling the game. But probably not.

Martinez, it should be noted, lived to feel the breeze on his loins for another many days. Scott, it should be noted, is to this day still being restrained by Martinez’s long-retired teammates among the ruins of Memorial Stadium.

Readers — no fewer than one of them — not long ago sounded the call, clarion in nature and execution, for more classic brawls. So it is with the sense of agency that comes from satisfying a customer that I introduce the new NotGraphs category: “Classic Fu*king Brawls.”

“I have all the talents!” Arthur Rimbaud announces — in French, unfortunately — during his long poem A Season in Hell, published in 1873. “I have all the talents!” Brewers third baseman Aramis Ramirez is clearly thinking, about 140 years later, after hitting an impressively long home run off Mets starter Chris Young.

Look, Lew Ford knows. He’s read all the articles about Pythagorean wins, and the articles making fun of the articles about Pythagorean wins. He knows that his team spits in the face of every predictive metric out there, and that if there were any such thing as karma, a giant worm would broken out of the earth and devoured the entire bullpen. He knows that Notgraphs has already published seven articles about the Orioles in the last two weeks alone, that there’s a backlash against the backlash against the backlash. He knows all too well the fickle nature of American celebrity culture, its simultaneous thirst for underdog and sacrifice.

Lew Ford knows himself, as well. He recognizes that we live in a universe of chance. He’s spent plenty of time contemplating the unlikeliness of his own existence: as a professional athlete, as a prospective children’s author, as a sperm. He understands our desire to feel secure, to feel as if the world around us behaves according to rules, and that he himself violates those rules. He knows that his own success can only diminish our conceptualization of success itself by adding to its randomness. Lew Ford understands that Lew Ford makes our existence, in some small way, less meaningful because of his own.

That said, Lew Ford knows that the worst thing you can do is to try to control the uncontrollable, to fight against the current and struggle in vain; far better to let it lead you where it may. That no matter how much life confounds you, all you can do is raise your eyebrows and smile back at it.

Lew Ford knows all this. And now, he’s going to ground out weakly to first, because he is Lew Ford.

Because the author, alienated from his humanity by the forces of Capitalism, has no other means by which to establish contact with others than to capture and reproduce video on this absurd corner of the internet, is maybe one reason why he’s made an animated GIF tonight of Yu Darvish throwing an equally absurd first-pitch slider (for a strike) to Matt Joyce from this evening’s Rangers-Rays game.

Another reason is maybe because, having witnessed that same absurd first-pitch slider from Yu Darvish to Matt Joyce from the aforementioned Rangers-Rays game that’s happening tonight, the author felt compelled to share that moment with others, for the purposes of their communal fucking wonderment.

There’s a thing that Mark Reynolds intended to do with his bat, and then he did that thing.

Now, Mark Reynolds has no more use for his bat.

Right-hander Jeurys Familia, 22, was ranked third overall among Mets prospects by Marc Hulet before the season. Tonight — which is to say, like, five minutes ago — he made his major-league debut, striking out Lance Berkman with a 97 mph fastball on a 3-2 count in the eighth inning of the Mets’ game against the Cardinals.

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That play, Manny Machado to Mark Reynolds, Monday afternoon in Toronto, was one of the many manifestations of Orioles Magic. I saw it. I felt it. Our Investigative Reporting Investigation Team confirmed it: “Yep, that’s what Orioles Magic looks like,” they reported. Something — someone — kept Reynolds’ toe on the bag.

It’s obvious, especially after Mississippi Matt Smith’s excellent post, I Cannot Use This Website to Explain the Baltimore Orioles, that there’s a higher power at work here. Something greater than all of us. Something we’ll never understand. Jesus, probably. And now that I’ve thought about it, He’s leading us — all of us — to a greater common good, to something that brings all of us together, united in baseball: a potential defeat of the New York Yankees. (Except if it’s the Red Sox who beat them. Then we all lose. Well, except Boston. You see my point.)

It’s not that I’m rooting for the Orioles. I’m too shocked, jealous, and bitter about their random success to root for them. But if the Blue Jays can’t win, I’d rather the Yankees didn’t. That’s just the way I live my life. So the Orioles have become a means to an end.

My point is: That was a fantastic play by Machado and Reynolds. Believe.

GIF credit: Professional GIFmaker @SAJagfire.

At the end of the first Back to the Future, Doc Brown returns to 1985 for the purpose of bringing Marty and Jennifer — for reasons too obvious to acknowledge — bringing them back to the year 2015. Moments later, Marty notes that there isn’t enough road in the Lyon Estates subdivision to accelerate to 88 mph (i.e. the speed at which the time-traveling DeLorean needs to reach to initiate time travel). To which comment Doc Brown replies, “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”

Doc Brown’s sentiments ring true for the present post, as well — except, instead of “roads,” what Doc Brown would say is “any actual reason” and, instead of “where we’re going,” he’d say “apropos Action Footage of young Mets right-hander Matt Harvey striking out Laynce Nix on a 99 mph fastball.”

Here’s the aforementioned fastball:

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All things considered — or just, like, one thing considered — Marlins right-hander Josh Johnson had rather a poor game Saturday night (box). He pitched only three innings, for example, but conceded two homers. And also ten hits, he allowed. And also six runs.

Another thing that happened in the game was very newly acquired first baseman Adrian Gonzalez hit a home run in his inaugural Dodger plate appearance. And Andre Ethier went 4-for-4. And Clayton Kershaw struck out — as he does — struck out over a quarter of the batters he faced.

All of which is to suggest that there’s no shortage of readymade narratives for Saturday night’s Dodger victory over the Marlins. And yet, for those right-thinking readers whose main concern is to isolate moments of breathless and conspicuous genius, the story of the game might very well be Josh Johnson’s first-inning slider to Hanley Ramirez.

This first-inning slider, in fact: