Things got strange at Angel Stadium on Tuesday night. Colorado rookie TJ Rumfield hit a drive to deep right center in the fourth inning with his team already up 7-0, and the ball bounced off Jo Adell's head before clearing the wall.
According to Statcast, the batted ball would have been a home run in exactly one of the 30 ballparks in Major League Baseball. That park was Angel Stadium. And it was only a home run because of Adell's skull.
The record does not need much decoration; it already does the talking.
The play recalled something from May 1993, when Jose Canseco — then with the Texas Rangers — suffered a similar fate off Carlos Martinez's bat. The ball hit Canseco's head and went over the fence. Both came in losses. Unlike Canseco's, Adell's version required the ball to bounce off his head and then back onto the field before going over the wall, creating a brief moment of confusion about whether the play was dead.
Canseco's headshot became a footnote to a larger story: three days later, he injured his elbow pitching in a blowout loss to the Boston Red Sox, an injury that eventually required Tommy John surgery. Whether that outcome had anything to do with the domer is not something the record clarifies.