All Routine Groundouts Should Look Like This

When you’ve reached the “playing for the Salt Lake Bees” point of your baseball career, it’s perfectly reasonable to have some fun with it. Eric Young Jr., erstwhile MLB speedster and veteran of 610 big league games over nine seasons, showed how this was done in a game on Sunday.

Young hit a weak bouncer down to first, which was fielded by erstwhile buzzy prospect Gordon Beckham, who was a second baseman for most of his nine big league seasons and is himself in the “playing for the Tacoma Rainiers” portion of his baseball career. This was not the first time either had been involved in such a situation, and they were not alone in this—the Mariners Triple-A affiliate currently rosters Jayson Werth, along with former Mets bench guys like Kirk Nieuwenhuis and Danny Muno; Young’s Salt Lake City teammates include Dustin Ackley and Ben Revere. The point being not just that this game unfolded in the Let’s Remember Some Guys cinematic universe, but that everyone involved knows how this is all supposed to go.

Which made it that much better when it did not go that way. Beckham went to tag Young instead of taking the easy force, and so Young made him work for it:

This should happen more at all levels of baseball, especially when runners are on base.