Wait, was that really a 5-1 putout? At third?

Jun 30, 2018 • 1:37 am

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SAN DIEGO -- Maybe baseball's most beautiful trait is that, for all its many games each summer, for all the many years it's been our national pastime, something still arises that no one can recall seeing before.

Would you believe a 5-1 putout?

As a forceout?

At third base?

Well, have a seat alongside the 27,083 paying customers Friday night at Petco Park, where the Pirates put down the Padres, 6-3, because they probably didn't believe it either.

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It was the sixth inning, and San Diego had runners at first and second with one out, Joe Musgrove on the mound and Christian Villanueva at the plate. After a strike, Villanueva pulled a liner toward third base, where David Freese leaped but could only get enough of the ball to cause it to carom to his right into foul territory.

Musgrove, displaying surreal instincts for a play he surely had never conceived, much less practiced, broke hard from the mound almost in perfect synchronicity with the carom to cover third. The lead runner, Eric Hosmer, obviously had to freeze at second in anticipating Freese would make the catch. So when Freese recovered quickly, he fired to Musgrove, and 5-1 was formally entered into scorebooks around the stadium.

Watch for yourself:

"Great presence of mind on Joe's part to get after it there," Clint Hurdle would observe, and he was right. But there was more to it.

To start, Freese, although he didn't come down with the ball, not only pursued it quickly and picked it up cleanly, but also, as he'd later tell me, had in the back of his mind that help was on the way.

"I had a thought -- I don't know how to explain it -- that Joe could be coming to the bag and that I'd need to throw it," Freese said. "It turned out OK, right?"

Sure did. And just as impressive, Jordy Mercer also got to the bag well before Hosmer. He'd have been an option, too, but that's a more natural path for a shortstop.

A pitcher thinking to cover third?

"I saw the ball go off David's glove -- and he did a great job to bail me out and keep that from going down into the left-field corner -- and just wanted to do whatever I could to get over there and help," Musgrove told me. "Give the credit to David. He went up there and kept it in front of him."

Dude, come on, it was a 5-1 putout.

"Yeah, never saw one of those."

Neither had Freese.

"Not in my life."

Nor even Hurdle.

"No. Can't say that I have."

The 5-1 itself isn't the real rarity. Such an out was recorded Aug. 15, 2017 in Arlington, Texas, per my own research -- I Googled really hard -- when the Rangers' Rougned Odor grounded through the right side of the infield but was thrown out at first base when third baseman Nicholas Castellanos, positioned in shallow right as part of a shift, threw to Justin Verlander covering at first.

But sorry, that's one of a zillion scoring asterisks that now accompany the shifts. This was at third base.

And to find something comparable, our staff historian, Jerry Wolper, had to rewind 77 years to a game between the St. Louis Cardinals and New York Giants on May 13, 1941, when, according to the boxscore on Retrosheet.org, "Mel Ott's fly ball fell safely inside the line, but Jimmy Brown recovered in time to get force at third, with pitcher Mort Cooper covering. Harry Danning had held close to second fearing a catch."

That's it. That's the play.

Me, I'd file this Freese-Musgrove sequence more into the category with the following 5-1-3 gem from the Fort Wayne Tincaps back in May: