What happened in Miami on Friday night definitely belongs in the “here’s something you don’t see everyday” category.
The Pittsburgh Pirates are off to a very nice start to the 2018 season. They came into Friday night’s game against the Miami Marlins with a record of 9-3, and have an early lead in the NL Central. One thing that’s been going good for them outside of Gregory Polanco’s power surge has been their defense.
Coming into Friday night, they had only committed four errors as a team, which was tied for second best in baseball with a few other teams. Well, you can add one more error to that total after what happened in the bottom of the fifth inning.
Now I personally have seen two runs scored on a sacrifice fly, but I had never seen three runs scored on a sacrifice fly. Just when you think you’ve seen it all, huh?
With Starlin Castro at the plate and the bases loaded he hit a nice and easy fly ball to right field, and Pirates’ right fielder Gregory Polanco fired home to cut down the tagging runner. The catcher cut it off with no problem.
The problem started when a usually smart decision maker in Francisco Cervelli decided to try and cut down the runner at first base trying to get to second. He airmailed the throw into center field, which normally isn’t a big deal, except for the fact Starling Marte wasn’t there.
Since it was a fly ball to right, he was backing up Polanco and was nowhere near center field. The ball rolled all the way into deep center, allowing all three runners to score.
We shouldn’t point fingers at anybody, but Cervilli should probably know that one, nobody is there, and two, if he is going to throw, it had better be a good throw. It wasn’t, and a 2-1 lead became a 4-2 deficit. But hey at least they got the out right?