Well, one thing is for certain: The St. Louis Cardinals paid attention to all the baserunning drills in spring training.
It was amazing to watch that play out in real time. The Pirates simply had no clue how to handle it.
With Paul Goldschmidt at the plate with two outs and the bases loaded in the fourth inning of Tuesday’s game, he hit a sharp grounder to short — which should have ended the inning. But keep an eye on what Nolan Gorman did on the base path. Instead of slowing down to slide, Gorman kept running through the bag at full speed. This led to both a safe call at second base, and it amazingly distracted Pirates second baseman Yu Chang.
The @Cardinals are out here playing chess. pic.twitter.com/ATSSWVrJaZ
— MLB (@MLB) June 14, 2022
Again, the bases were loaded with two outs. So while Gorman’s effort allowed him to beat the toss to second, Chang could have made the turn and thrown to first to force out the slow-running Goldschmidt and end the inning with no runs scoring. But Chang was caught so off guard by Gorman’s antics that he chased after him to third base, which allowed Yadier Molina to score from third.
Even though the Cardinals eventually ran into an out there, they were able to score the run by keeping the play alive and eliminating the force opportunity at both second and first.
You almost never see an MLB team so unprepared to handle something like that. It was the chaos we all needed in a Tuesday afternoon baseball game.