Baseball is a game of failure, and Monday night at Comerica Park, the entire Tigers grounds crew found that out the hard way against an opponent with four legs. A black squirrel wandered onto the field during the Tigers-Orioles game and turned a routine middle inning into a full-blown chase scene, with more than a dozen stadium staffers sprinting around the outfield trying to corner an animal that clearly had better first-step quickness than most of them.
The grounds crew fanned out across the outfield grass and warning track trying to run the squirrel down between innings.
This wasn't a quick in-and-out either. Per Awful Announcing, Orioles third base coach Buck Britton was reportedly tossing seeds toward the squirrel to keep it on the field longer, which is either the funniest bit of gamesmanship of the year or just a guy who wanted to watch the chaos unfold a little longer. Either way, it worked. What should've been a 30-second field-clearing turned into a genuine spectacle, with Tigers broadcaster Jason Benetti calling the action like it was a playoff race, at one point noting the squirrel was 'still eluding an entire horde of groundscrew members.'
The chase eventually spread wide enough that it looked less like pest control and more like a live-action video game, dozens of adults in matching polos converging on one very committed rodent that had no interest in going quietly.
Stadium staff finally closed in and grabbed the squirrel off the grass as fans watched from the stands.
When the crew finally corralled the squirrel and hauled it off in a towel, home plate umpire Bill Miller asked the Comerica Park crowd to give the grounds crew a round of applause for a job well done. Instead, Detroit fans booed, loudly and unmistakably, because the squirrel had clearly won the crowd over as the sympathetic underdog in this whole ordeal. Even the Orioles' own broadcast booth reportedly lost it laughing at the reaction, which tells you everything about how the night went.
It's the kind of moment that outlives the box score. Nobody's going to remember who threw a good slider in the sixth inning, but the image of a full MLB grounds crew getting shown up by a single black squirrel at Comerica Park is going to live on Twitter timelines for a while. Baseball's dead time between innings has a way of producing this stuff, and this one might be the best of the summer so far.