Meet Danny Jansen. He may be the first to play for two teams in one MLB game.

On Monday, catcher Danny Jansen, seen here with the Toronto Blue Jays and now with the Boston Red Sox, could become the first player in MLB history to appear in a box score for both teams in the same game. (Facebook via MLB on FOX)

By Jayson Stark / The Athletic

Everyone knows you cannot be in two places at the same time. Those are the rules, the immutable rules of physics. But who knew you could play for two teams in the same baseball game? Those are also the rules — the wacky suspended-game rules of baseball.

So on Monday, Boston Red Sox catcher Danny Jansen may go where no baseball-playing human has gone before. He could become the first player in MLB history to appear in a box score for both teams in the same game.

“Oh, man,” Jansen said recently. “It’s going to be nuts.”

Since June 26, Jansen has been stuck in the batter’s box at Fenway Park in Boston, frozen in baseball time. Life has gone on, but the box score of that game tells us he is still batting.

It was the second inning. He was hitting for the Toronto Blue Jays, with one out and a runner on first. He had just fouled off a first-pitch cutter. And that was when the weather gods decided it was time to mess with the baseball gods.

Those raindrops turned into a rain delay. That rain delay turned into a suspended game. The resumption of that game was scheduled for Aug. 26. And then came the trade deadline. And Jansen was traded, for the first time in his career — to the team the Blue Jays were playing that night, the Red Sox.

What happens next?

When this game resumes, one thing is guaranteed: Jansen will not get to finish his at-bat. The suspended-game rules may be a little zany, but they are not that zany, not enough to allow a player wearing a Red Sox uniform to bat for the Blue Jays.

But here is where this could get fun: The Red Sox also need to change catchers. Reese McGuire, who was catching for them at the time, is on their Class AAA roster now, not their major league roster. So if Boston manager Alex Cora is as astute as we think he is, we are headed for one of the greatest public address announcements ever:

“Now catching for the Red Sox, Danny Jansen. Now pinch-hitting for Danny Jansen. …”

“Oh, man,” Jansen said, thinking of the possibility. “Such an oddity.”

It is an oddity, all right, but the suspended-game rule makes so much weird and wild nuttiness possible.

It makes time travel possible. Because of this rule, Juan Soto made his official debut after his actual debut in 2018. He arrived in the majors with the Washington Nationals on May 20. But he later played in a game that had been suspended May 15 — and homered. That means he made his debut before his debut and also homered before his first homer.

It makes team travel possible. Because of this rule, reliever Joel Hanrahan won a game for the Nationals while he was playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates. In 2009, he pitched a scoreless top of the 11th inning for the Nationals on May 5. Then that game got a little slippery, in more ways than one.

It was delayed, suspended and finished two months later. But he had been traded to the Pirates by then. So, yeah, while he was hanging out in the Pirates’ bullpen in Miami, the Nationals rallied to win in Washington, so their winning pitcher was Hanrahan. What a magic trick.

But back to Danny Jansen. It makes no sense that a player could be taken out of a game, and then, at the same exact moment, be subbed into that game for the other team. But have we mentioned that the suspended-game rule is inventive like that? Here is what it says, right there in Rule 7.02: A player who was not with the club when the game was suspended may be used as a substitute, even if he has taken the place of a player no longer with the club who would not have been eligible.

Yes!

Not that Jansen was intricately familiar with any of this when he was traded to Boston on July 27. But all it took was one day in his new clubhouse before he realized he was going to have to study up. Those Boston sports writers had a lot of questions.

“I didn’t know at first,” he said. “I was like, ‘What — am I going to have to go on the other team?’ I didn’t know what was going to happen. It just kind of caught me off guard about the whole situation. Because when I got traded, it was just a whirlwind at first, and I didn’t think about it.”

Will this be a baseball first? Don’t answer too quickly. There is, in fact, another living human who did this.

Unless you were a big fan of International League in the 1980s, you probably do not recognize the name Dale Holman. But did you know he has several artifacts from his career that are housed in the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum?

And why is that? Because, in 1986, Holman did something that might sound familiar: He played for both teams in the same game.

He started that game in June, playing right field for Syracuse. He finished that game Aug. 16, playing left field for Richmond. But unlike Jansen, Holman was not traded. He was released. Then he hooked on with Atlanta’s Class AA team in Greenville, South Carolina. He was still there a month later when Atlanta’s Class AAA club in Richmond needed to find an outfielder in a hurry. Guess who got called up?

Naturally, just two days later, Holman’s new team was about to resume a suspended game with his old team, Syracuse. It almost went unnoticed, except that afternoon, a lightning bolt suddenly hit Richmond infielder Paul Runge. Wait, he thought, wasn’t the new outfielder in town playing for the other team when this game began?

“Until then, nobody had remembered it, even myself,” said Holman, who now lives in Miramar Beach, Florida. “But then Paul Runge did. I remember we were sitting in the clubhouse, and he said something about it. He said: ‘You’ve got to get in there!’”

So next thing he knew, Holman was in the lineup — and singled in his next two at-bats, against a team he was playing for as recently as the third inning. But that was not even his biggest claim to fame.

In the second inning, when he was still in the Syracuse lineup, he had hit a two-run double against Richmond. So not only had he played for both teams, he had gotten a hit for both teams in the same game. And even nuttier, he got credit for driving in the winning run against the team he was playing for when that game ended.

For nearly 40 years, Holman has had this space all to himself. As best as even longtime minor league historians can tell, he was the only player to play for two teams in the same game. So: Was he rooting for Jansen to join him or not?

“Well, he can’t join me,” Holman said. “He didn’t get a hit. You know, that’s the deal. So he can go ahead and play for three or four teams in a day. It doesn’t matter.”

Jansen found that amusing.

“He’s not wrong,” Jansen said. “I mean, I ended my day with the Blue Jays 0 for 1 — no, wait. I’m 0 for 0, and down, 0-1, in the count. So I didn’t get a hit for both sides.”