Lorenzo Cain’s Most Curious At-Bat

Lorenzo Cain didn’t know Alex Gordon was going to homer in the bottom of the ninth. The Royals still needed a run. They were trailing, 4-3, with six outs to spare and the dominant never-gonna-give-up-a-game-tying-homer Jeurys Familia looming in the Mets’ bullpen.

Forty-six seconds after Ben Zobrist stepped on second base, having led off the eighth with a first-pitch double against Tyler Clippard, Cain stepped into the batter’s box. Forty-six seconds was all the time he needed. Presumably, by then, he’d considered the possibilities, weighed the pros and cons, and made up his mind. “I’m gonna bunt.”

Sixteen seconds later, he squared around.

Lorenzo Cain has been playing baseball for just 14 years. He’s been in the Major Leagues for six. Three years ago, he learned how to run. In his career, he has one sacrifice bunt. He’s bunted for a hit twice. Now, he’s arguably the Royals’ best hitter. Just two innings prior, Zobrist led off an inning with a double. Cain came up to the plate and, like the very good hitter he is, singled. Zobrist moved to third, and Eric Hosmer brought him in with a sacrifice fly. This was not an uncommon series of events.

Cain still had time to back out of this. A hit would likely tie the ballgame. He’d just seen how well an inning could go when he swung after a Zobrist leadoff double.

Twenty-three more seconds elapsed before Cain stepped back into the batter’s box following the first failed bunt attempt. This guy couldn’t have been more ready:

Cain was unable. He fouled the pitch off of his own self. Clippard blew him away with the next one, and the Royals went down scoreless in the eighth. Hosmer didn’t get the sacrifice fly Cain was trying to set up for another six innings.

Evidently, Cain called for this bunt on his own. Ned Yost said he can count the number of bunts he’s called this year on one hand.

Said Cain, about this bunt of the past:

“That was my call,” Cain said. “Just trying to do whatever I could to get the run over there to tie the game up.

Said Cain, about bunts of the future:

Lorenzo Cain told Rusty Kuntz he will never bunt again. There were expletives involved.

— Andy McCullough (@McCulloughStar) October 28, 2015

I understand this at-bat, ultimately, had very little to do with the outcome of the game. Maybe it cost us an extra hour or two of our lives, because maybe if Cain swings away in this at-bat, the Royals tie the game in the eighth and win it in the ninth. Or maybe if Cain doesn’t give himself up, the Royals simply take the lead in the eighth and shut the door in the ninth. Who knows? But what happened, happened, and we’re allowed to reflect on it.

I mean, it’s crazy, right? This probably never should have happened. Why did this happen? The first thing worth considering is Lorenzo Cain. He is the primary actor in this, after all, and he made the decision. He made the decision, knowing that he’d attempted exactly five bunts in his Major League career. Three of them came way back in 2010 when he played for the Brewers. Remember when Lorenzo Cain played for the Brewers? Then, he went four years without ever squaring around for a bunt, until he caught the Indians by surprise last September, bunting for a hit against Trevor Bauer. About a month later, he laid down a sacrifice bunt against the Orioles in the playoffs. It had been more than a year since his last bunt attempt.

Next, we consider the game situation. The runner was already in scoring position, and while Zobrist isn’t by any means a burner, he certainly he isn’t slow. If Cain just gets a hit, which he did more often than any other Royals player this year, there’s a decent chance the run scores anyway. Certain ground balls and fly balls move him over, too.

Now, think about Tyler Clippard. Tyler Clippard is one of the most extreme high-ball pitchers in the league! An astounding 60% of balls in play against Clippard this year were in the air, and that’s because he constantly pounds the top of the strike zone. Cain, of course, knows this, and Cain also knows that high pitches are hard to bunt!

So far, none of this makes any sense. But wait! We still have our friend, element of surprise! There was absolutely no chance Cain would square around to bunt in this situation, like no way, so when Cain does square around to bunt, who’s gonna see it coming? Easy base hit. That’s how he got Bauer and the Indians last September.

Except:

Tyler Clippard threw the high pitch. Cain tried to bunt anyway, because it’s Lorenzo Cain bunting. This next image should explain itself:

It was the second-highest pitch bunted at all season. Only five pitches bunted at in the last seven years have been higher. Stripping away the context of the game entirely, it was one of the worst bunt attempts in recent history. It also completely removed the element of surprise from the equation. The infield, now, had seen Cain attempt a bunt. Unlike the pitch before, the infield was now prepared for a bunt. Cain attempted another anyway. It didn’t work. The Royals won the ballgame. Cain swore off bunting forever.

You might think of the Royals as an extremely bunt-heavy team. While they’re certainly not averse to it, they’re far from the top of the leaderboard, and they attempted fewer sac bunts than the Blue Jays this season. You might think of bunting as stupid to begin with, but it has its uses, and the funny thing is, this game actually featured a number of excellent bunts. In the 11th inning, Juan Lagares, a good bunter, led off the inning with a perfectly placed bunt down the third base line. Wilmer Flores moved him over with a rare, wise sacrifice bunt. Alcides Escobar had another rare, wise sacrifice bunt in the 12th. Cain’s attempt certainly was rare.

Someone asked me in my afternoon chat yesterday what the meaning of life is. That’s an absurd, impossible, complex question, of course, but one that I think we all have our own little go-to answers for. My answer to that question is always that the meaning of life is to make mistakes. Not just to make mistakes, but to always reflect upon and learn from them. Self-betterment through personal experience, essentially. It’s far from a revolutionary concept, but it’s something I like to keep in the forefront of my mind as I go through life making mistake after mistake. Yesterday, Lorenzo Cain made a mistake, and he learned from it. Thankfully for him, his mistake ended up being inconsequential. Now, he’ll never bunt again. That’s what he took away from last night’s game. What we can take away is that, on a night with a first-pitch inside-the-park home run to lead off the World Series, a delay of game caused by a power outage to a FOX News truck and an after-midnight standoff between Bartolo Colon and Chris Young, the most peculiar thing may have been a trivial, three-pitch strikeout by Lorenzo Cain in a scoreless eighth inning. Who’s ready to do this again?