On Friday night, in the top of the sixth inning, Seattle Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh sliced a pitch off his bat and down the left field line.
Three Houston Astros — Jeremy Pena, Joey Loperfido and Alex Bregman — converged on the ball with Pena seemingly coming up with it before violently flipping over the wall and into the stands.
“Look out!” SCHN announcer Todd Kalas said. “Did he do it?”
“Is he okay?” analyst Geoff Blum asked.
As Pena gathered himself, Kalas and Blum continued to express amazement in what they had just seen, or at least what they believed they had just seen.
“Pena makes the catch and goes tumbling a la Derek Jeter into the stands,” Kalas said. “And he came up with the catch!”
“That is incredible,” Blum continued. “He has been playing his tail off on defense.”
It took a moment but when Loperfido removed the ball from his glove, Kalas and Blum realized they had been duped.
“Did Pena catch it? Loperfido got it,” Kalas said. “Loperfido caught it and Pena couldn’t stop his momentum.”
As impressive as it would have been for Pena to come up with the catch, Loperfido deserves his due for hauling it in despite the chaos that was going on around him and, briefly, over top of him.
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