On April 12th, 1980, Cecil Cooper and Don Money each hit grand slams in the second inning of Milwaukee’s 18-1 victory over the Boston Red Sox.

We have all had bad days at the office. Let’s just hope we never have one as bad as Red Sox pitchers Mike Torrez and Chuck Rainey had 46 years ago today.

Mike Torrez was no slouch. In 1975, he was a 20-game winner for the Orioles, and over his 18-season career, he won a total of 185 games. Chuck Rainey pitched in the Majors for six years; you don’t last that long in “the Show” if you have a whole lot of bad days.

What happened that day? Were Torrez and Rainey hungover from a brewery tour the night before?

The Brewers of 1980, Harvey’s Wallbangers, were a team built for power, of course, but not that much power in a single inning.

What I love best about baseball—what I think most fans love best—is that weird things just happen sometimes. Two grand slams in an inning; normally reliable pitchers who, for some reason, are unable to find the strike zone.

Baseball games and seasons consist of a moment-by-moment accumulation of the same kind of discrete decisions, emotions, coincidences, and unpredictability that our day-to-day lives do—just in a more compressed and observable way. This is what makes the game infinitely entertaining and fascinating.