Baseball is a beautiful sport because after 150 years of organized play, it can still randomly produce something that looks like a deleted scene from a Leslie Nielsen movie.

Wednesday night, Montgomery Biscuits outfielder Austin Overn hit what appeared to be a routine shot down the right field line during a Double-A game against the Biloxi Shuckers.

And then the earth ate the baseball.

No, seriously. 👇

Biloxi right fielder Damon Keith slid over to cut the ball off, accidentally drove it into the turf with his body, and somehow lodged the thing so deep into the ground that it completely disappeared.

You can feel his pain in this pic:

At that point, Overn simply kept running because apparently "ball swallowed by Alabama soil" is not covered extensively in the MLB rulebook. The result? An inside-the-park home run generated entirely by geologic behavior.

The best part came afterward, however, when multiple players and an umpire gathered around the patch of grass like archaeologists studying a lost civilization. 👇

Eventually, Biloxi first baseman Blake Burke managed to free the mud-covered ball from its grassy tomb, presumably earning himself an honorary degree in excavation science.

Naturally, the internet immediately descended into debate over whether this should have been ruled a ground-rule double, an inside-the-park homer, or an act of God. Reddit users spent the next 24 hours arguing over lodged-ball rules with the intensity usually reserved for constitutional law.

Honestly, with as boring as it can sometimes be in our over-stimulated society, this is why baseball remains unmatched.