Kody Clemens pulls off one of baseball's rarest feats

The Twins were dead. Down 3-0 to the Royals, down to their final out, nobody on base, and Kansas City reliever Matt Strahm one strike away from closing it out. Then a hit-by-pitch, a single and a walk turned the ninth inning into a threat, and Kody Clemens stepped in representing the winning run with an 0-2 count against him.

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KODY CLEMENS WALKOFF GRAND SLAM DOWN 0-2 ARE YOU SERIOUS

Strahm's next pitch was a slider that never left the middle of the plate, and Clemens didn't miss it, launching it over the wall in right-center for a walk-off grand slam. That's not just a walk-off — it's what's known as an "ultimate grand slam," a walk-off homer with the team trailing by exactly 3 runs. It's one of the rarest events in baseball, and Clemens became just the 34th player in MLB history to pull it off, and the first ever in Twins franchise history, a lineage that traces back to the Washington Senators in 1901.

The 0-2 count makes it even nastier. Reporting on the at-bat noted it was the first known ultimate slam to come on an 0-2 pitch across the last 17 occurrences of the feat dating back to 1988. Clemens had every excuse to be in defensive, get-a-piece-of-it mode with 2 strikes on him in a season-defining spot. Instead he sat on a mistake and put it into orbit.

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@StoolBaseball

Kody Clemens Just Added His Name Directly Into The Baseball GOAT Debate With This Ultimate Grand Slam @jordiebarstool

There's a name-recognition layer to this too. Clemens is the son of Roger Clemens, one of the most dominant and polarizing pitchers the sport has ever seen, so any moment where Kody's name lands in the same sentence as "history" and "grand slam" is going to get extra attention. This one earns it on its own merits, no bloodline required.

It also lands at a fun time for the Twins, who needed exactly this kind of jolt with the trade deadline looming and the roster picture still taking shape. A walk-off like this doesn't fix a season by itself, but it's the kind of clip that gets replayed in every recap for the rest of the year, and it turned what looked like a quiet Thursday loss into one of the wildest finishes of the 2026 season.