Misjudging a fly ball sometimes happens, but what New York Yankees’ outfielder Aaron Hicks did Sunday is much more rare. With the Yankees at Wrigley Field to play the Cubs, Chicago second baseman Javier Baez hit a long fly ball to left field. Hicks looked like he’d settled under it about 20 feet from the wall…and then started looking around, and then it flew over his head and entered the bleachers about 15 rows up.
Of course, we don’t know exactly what happened here. Maybe the ball hit a weird light/shadow angle and Hicks just lost it, only looking like he had it pinned down. Maybe he had the initial angle and then there were wind effects. Or maybe he did just completely underestimate and then lose this ball. The ESPN camera certainly had a hard time finding it too, but that may have been about focusing on Hicks rather than where the ball was. The call of “Hicks…can’t find it, and and it’s in the bleachers, so it doesn’t matter!” was great, though.
In any case, it’s not like Hicks losing track of this one had any impact on the game. The Baez home run was so hard-hit that it landed way up in the stands.
Javier Baez with an absolute moon shot. 104.5 MPH at a 39 degree launch angle… Max height 143ft.
— Daren Willman (@darenw) May 8, 2017
There’s no way Hicks could have made a play on this ball even if he correctly anticipated where it was going. But this did produce a hilarious reaction.
[Matt Clapp on Clippit]