Minor League Team Gets Hosed By Mother Nature Thanks To Lightning-Induced Balk

One of the fun things about baseball is that, for as long as the game has been around, we still manage to see things we've never seen before, and that's what happened on Tuesday during a Minor League Baseball game that saw a team score a run, all thanks to Mother Nature.

The Norfolk Tides — the Triple-A affiliate of the Baltimore Orioles — were down in Florida to take on the Miami Marlins-affiliated Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp when, in the bottom of the first inning, Norfolk's Roansy Contreras was preparing to deliver the 1-1 offering to Graham Pauley with a runner on third base and nobody out and the Tides up 2-0.

As Contreras was in the middle of his pitching motion, a giant clap of thunder rattled the entire stadium and made every single person in it jump, including the Norfolk pitcher.

You can understand how that could happen, but the home plate umpire ruled it a balk, and the runner from third was allowed to advance home and cut Norfolk's lead in half.

That's Florida in the summer for you.

I get that technically, that was a balk, but can't we make an exception for that one?

I mean, I jump if the dog barks and I'm not expecting it. If a bolt of lightning and the ensuing thunder shakes a Triple-A ballpark like that and everyone inside of it jumps too, we should just move on and pretend it never happened.

Fortunately, that moment was far from a game-decider. In fact, Jacksonville probably could've used a lot more thunder to give them a hand in this one, because they wound up losing to Norfolk by a score of 9-5.

So, for any pitchers reading this, be sure to tune out anything Mother Nature throws at you, including a bolt of electrical energy shooting out of the sky.