BRADENTON, Fla. — You’ve seen it, right? If you’re here, odds are good that you’ve seen it.
Might’ve been on TV. Might’ve been on Twitter. Might’ve been in person — and this would gain you admission into a blessed club, populated by the special geniuses of LECOM Park. Welcome.
If you haven’t, here it is — a Very Special Baseball Play, starring Oneil Cruz, Kevin Kramer and Jason Martin on one side, and Chavez Young, Kevin Smith and Patrick Cantwell on the other. We’ll watch it together, and then we’ll discuss why, exactly, it happened. We’ll do it together.
Just your standard 2 guys being thrown out at the plate baseball play. pic.twitter.com/QqL8xcAHuM
— Cut4 (@Cut4) March 9, 2020
Standard, indeed. Cruz hit the baseball. Young chased down the baseball and threw it to Smith. Smith threw the baseball to Cantwell. Cantwell tagged Kramer with the baseball, and then Martin. The aristocrats!
On one hand, it’s spring training; what’s the big deal? On the other hand, it’s spring training — the best time and place on Earth, or at least in sportswriting, to focus on something stupid. This is the anatomy of a stupid thing.
Advertisement
1) None of this is possible without the wind at LECOM Park. During the game, 30 mph gusts were recorded at Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport. I’d say it’s easy to imagine that what we felt at the ballpark was stronger, but … I have no idea how to measure wind. At one point, the press box door blew open. The outfield concourse felt like a wind tunnel. It was, in my scientific estimation, a lot.
In any case, this is apparently what 30 mph looks like — so sure, let’s go with that.
So, that’s the sort of force Cruz was hitting directly into. Or, as general manager Ben Cherington put it, “If not for gale-force wind, we’d have had a different outcome” on the play.
In the video, you can tell from Greg Brown’s reaction — and what sounds like a BB gun fired into a snare drum — that Cruz put all of his 6 feet, 7 inches into the swing.
Kramer and Martin, in other words, never should’ve had to run at all. That’s how Derek Shelton opened his answer about it.
“I don’t know how that ball didn’t get out of the ballpark,” Shelton said. “I mean, I thought it was gonna knock the batter’s eye down.”
Martin? “I know he hit the ball pretty much as best as he could have hit it.”
That’s been a thru-line for the last week or so; on Friday in Dunedin, the wind was blowing out to an absurd degree. On Sunday in Port Charlotte, some crosswinds made life miserable for everyone.
“It’s unbelievable,” Shelton said. “When we were down in Port Charlotte (Sunday), I was talking to some of the Rays coaches about it, and they’ve said the exact same thing. And I think you’re seeing a lot of 2-1 games, 3-1 games, and then you saw a 19-13 game.”
“It’s probably the windiest spring training I’ve ever seen, and I think it’s affecting a little bit of what you see with offense.”
2) Jason Martin is, frankly, too good a base-runner. Standing on first, Martin knew — wind or no wind — that the ball was either headed over the fence or off the wall. There was no reason not to go all-out.
Advertisement
“That’s why I was able to get so good of a jump,” he said. “I figured that there was no way that the center fielder was gonna catch it.”
Shelton? “Martin made a really good read on it and runs really well.”
3) Kramer fell. Or, as Martin said, he “took a little tumble and the rest was the rest.” What can you do?
“I think if you can prevent guys from tripping at any time, whether it’s spring training or during the regular season, (you take it),” Shelton said.
If he doesn’t go down, both guys score — and once he went down, Martin was pot-committed because of the quality of his jump.
“Twenty-twenty hindsight, I’d probably want to go back to third once (Kramer) falls, but I have no clue where the ball is,” Martin said. “(The catcher) could’ve been fumbling the ball.”
At some point soon, the Pirates will create an honest-to-god disaster on the basepaths due to their own mistakes. We’ve seen too much of it for too long to think that a few weeks of new voices will reverse that cruise ship. This, though, wasn’t it.
It was still the baseball equivalent of a two-car traffic jam in your own driveway. Stupid, funny, memorable — spring training, baby.
Monday notes
• Cruz — 21 years old and the Pirates’ best positional prospect — was in Monday’s round of cuts. He’ll play shortstop for Double-A Altoona. Cherington praised his energy and hitting, and said they’re excited to watch him develop. It’s a matter of getting him at-bats and establishing good habits.
“I think we just talked about pitch-to-pitch intensity,” Cherington said. “He’s so talented that there’s probably levels of baseball he could play and be successful, maybe without doing that. At the Major League level, everybody’s doing that. So we talked about that, and he’s really responded to that.”
• Optioned to Indianapolis: Pitchers JT Brubaker, Blake Cederlind, Cody Ponce and 1B/RF Will Craig.
Advertisement
• Reassigned to minor-league camp — a designation for players not on the 40-man roster — were pitchers Montana DuRapau, Luis Escobar, James Marvel and Blake Weiman, and catchers Jason Delay and Arden Pabst.
Brubaker, Ponce and Marvel will stretch out for the starting rotation, Cherington said.
(Photo: Jonathan Dyer / USA Today)