There was so much random fun stuff and quoting and thinking and what-have-you about Javy Báez’s magical baserunning play yesterday that I wanted to gather some of it up here. I’d started to incorporate into the Bullets, and it was just way too much. That tends to happen when you’re talking about a play about which every observer remarks, “I have never seen anything like that before.”
A note up front to the fun-haters: Everyone knows the first baseman screwed up badly. But do you really think Javy Báez played
zero part in baiting him into that screw-up? Do you really think there was absolutely no reason that the entire Pirates bench wasn’t screaming ‘first base’? Or that the catcher didn’t simply take the throw and immediately indicate first base, rather than trying to tag Contreras? Or that two defenders simply dropped the ball as Javy came upon them? There are multiple factors here, and at least one of them is that Javy just does crazy shit that throws guys off their kilter in the moment.