Watch: Red Sox Star Goes 78 Feet in 4.4 Seconds to Make Impossible Catch
To run 78 feet — or 26 yards — in 4.4 seconds, is not itself a terribly astonishing feat.
To do so while tracking a baseball and subsequently making the catch while then sliding along a warning track and slamming into a wall?
Well, that’s why Jackie Bradley Jr. is a baseball superstar getting paid a lot of money to play center field for the Boston Red Sox.
Catcher Bobby Wilson of the Twins got a hold of a 1-2 pitch Sunday from the Sox’s Nate Eovaldi — making his debut for his new team after spending the season in Tampa Bay — and it looked like it absolutely belonged in the score book as a leadoff double.
Nothing is out of reach for Jackie Bradley Jr. pic.twitter.com/N150kJFDJK
— NESN (@NESN) July 29, 2018
Bradley instead hauled his rear end after it, and stretched out, making a monster of a play.
This is one of those cases so often seen in baseball where mathematics is utterly at a loss to describe the fact that these are still human beings out there.
Jackie Bradley Jr. had to go 78 feet in 4.4 seconds. A four-star grab with a catch probability of 42 percent. @statcast.
— Ian Browne (@IanMBrowne) July 29, 2018
A “42 percent” catch probability? Maybe in video games, the defender makes that catch three times out of seven.
But the only case of “MLB The Show” on display here was the show Bradley put on.
Forty-two percent? As Han Solo famously said, “Never tell me the odds.”
The Red Sox are 74-33, having beaten the Twins 3-0 in a game where Eovaldi allowed just four hits across seven innings on a super-efficient 82 pitches.
The bullpen came in and allowed just one baserunner more on a walk in the eighth, closing out the easy win.
But if Bradley doesn’t make that play in the third inning, it’s 2-0 with a runner on second and nobody out, and Eovaldi is pitching from the stretch instead of having the luxury of using his full windup.
Let’s see a replacement player make that catch.
The crowd knew it, and that’s why Bradley got himself a huge standing ovation for risking his body to make one of the best grabs of the year.
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