Bottom of the fifth, one out, bases loaded, Cincinnati Reds outfielder Austin Kearns hits a pop fly to the wall in left center field. If it's caught, the man on third scores on the sacrifice fly. If not, it's either a grand slam home run or a tie game with a possible go-ahead run.
Kearns' ball indeed hits the wall. It's fielded by New York Mets left fielder Timoniel Perez.
At the same time, the man on first overruns the man who was on second. The man on first is out.
But what's this?
The umpires say that Timo caught the ball! He wings the ball in to the cutoff man who flips it to the player covering second base in time to get a force on the runner from second. End of the inning, end of the scoring threat. But wait, that's four outs, that last one wasn't necessary.
Actually, it's really only two outs! The ball DID hit the wall. It then slid right into Timo's glove. That, of course, is not an out, right? Well Timo slammed against the wall and came down with the ball. He then put his glove hand up to indicate that he'd caught it when he actually hadn't - AND FOOLED THE UMPIRES! So really, there's only the two outs from that one guy overrunning the other.
The ball then comes in to second base. The runner slides into the base after the ball arrives, but no tag is applied. There has to be a tag because there's nobody on third to force the out. But somehow, the umpires decide that that is an out. What happened?
The runner from second didn't have to tag up because the ball wasn't really caught. The ball wasn't caught, so that wasn't an out. The only real out was the overrunning.
I'm still confused as to what the hell the umps were doing there. But the key thing is that Timo's fake-out worked and the Mets went on to win the game. But what a hell of a play!
Knaa'mean?