Last night, during the Reds-Cardinals game, history was made: Donald Lutz made his debut, grounding out in his lone pinch-hit AB against Adam Wainwright.

What’s so special about that, you ask? Well, Lutz, in making his Reds debut, became the first German Major League Baseball player in history (there have been some that were born on military bases there or who came over to America as young children, but Lutz is the first player who can truly be said to be “from Germany”). Although born in Watertown, NY, he grew up and spent essentially his entire childhood with his mother in Germany, not playing baseball until his teenage years.

Who knows how long this first stint for Lutz will last (he is, after all, mainly on the roster right now as a replacement for Chris Heisey while he is on the DL), but still, it’s not every day you can say that something happened yesterday in baseball that hadn’t happened before. So congratulations to Donald Lutz, the first German MLB player in history.