MLB | The Run He Should Never Have Been Scoring (Daikin Park, Houston)

Chien-Ming Wang was 8-2 with a 4.07 ERA and had never scored a run in the major leagues. On 15 June 2008 he scored one, and he was never the same pitcher again.

Houston was still a National League club, so there was no designated hitter, so the best pitcher on the New York Yankees had to bat. Roy Oswalt struck him out twice. In the sixth Wang laid down a bunt that Oswalt fielded and threw to third for the force, which left Wang standing on first with two out. Johnny Damon's grounder to short should have ended the inning; Miguel Tejada could not handle it. Derek Jeter singled to right, Wang ran, and somewhere between second base and home the middle of his right foot gave way. He scored, was helped to the dugout, and did not pitch again that year. The diagnosis was a sprained Lisfranc ligament and a partial tear of the peroneus longus tendon.

The Yankees won the game 13-0. It was the second-to-last win of Wang's career in pinstripes.

The reason this game gets cited in arguments about rules rather than arguments about luck is what followed. Wang came back in 2009 pitching with his arm rather than his legs, which is his own description of it, lost his first three starts while allowing 23 runs in six innings, and had a torn capsule in his right shoulder repaired by James Andrews that July. He finished 1-6 with a 9.64 ERA, was not offered a contract, missed the Yankees' World Series run entirely, and rode in the parade anyway.

The designated hitter had been an American League rule since 1973 and a National League refusal for exactly as long. The practical result was that American League pitchers ran the bases a handful of times a year, unpractised, at full speed, in interleague games. Baseball made the DH universal in 2022. Wang's foot is not the reason, but it is the example people reach for.

Visiting. The ballpark opened in 2000 as Enron Field, became Minute Maid Park in 2002, and has been Daikin Park since 1 January 2025 under a fifteen-year naming deal running through the 2039 season. Its retractable roof and the locomotive above left field are both from the era Wang pitched in. The name outside is not. Houston moved to the American League in 2013, so the specific circumstance that put him on the basepaths cannot happen here again.

Cover: the field at Minute Maid Park, July 2021, under the name it carried when Wang played here. Photo: The Sharpest Lives, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: Wang pitching for the Yankees, 9 September 2006. Photo: Keith Allison, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.