Regular readers of the TM Daily Post are probably familar with our feature “Meanwhile in Lufkin,” a semi-regular sampling of the East Texas town’s remarkable police blotter.
So it’s a pleasure to click over to the Lufkin Daily News and find a total feel-good story.
As the paper’s Gary Stallard reported, eight-year-old Jaxson Havard of Huntington recently pulled off an unassisted triple play, which is even rarer than a perfect game or four-home run performance.
It’s happened only fifteen times in Major League Baseball history, the last of them in 2009 by former Houston Astros utility man Eric Bruntlett, who was by then a member of the Philadelphia Phillies.
The feat is probably more common in youth baseball; earlier this month, video of a six-year-old from Georgia doing it went viral, and it happened in a softball game in Oklahoma this week too.
But as Stallard wrote, Havard’s execution of the triple play was undeniably accomplished.
Jaxson’s awareness of the situation is what makes this play doubly — or triply — special. When the batter lifted a low line drive toward second base, Jaxson made the catch, turned and tagged the runner coming off first and sprinted toward second to double off the runner there…
The play was so impressive, even the opposing coach had to give Jaxson his props.
“My jaw dropped,” Chase Capps, coach of the A’s, said. “He looked like a pro out there, catching the ball and chasing down the runners. I had to run out and high five him myself after that.”
The bespectacled youngster, who wears number 32 in honor of his favorite player, the Texas Rangers’ Josh Hamilton, couldn’t have been any cooler about the accomplishment if he’d been coached on giving interviews a la Bull Durham: “I’ve been playing a lot of years, so I knew what I was supposed to do,” he told Stallard.
