JBJ grabs attention with highlight-reel catch
The day after he made the catch of the season — and arguably his career to date — Red Sox center fielder Jackie Bradley Jr. was still breaking it down yesterday. And why not? It was that good, and a catch that good needs a retelling as much as it needs a replay.
“Everything has to go right,” Bradley said about his eighth-inning grab Sunday night that denied New York Yankees rookie sensation Aaron Judge of a tworun homer in what ended as a 3-0 Sox victory. “Make sure you’re able to get back to the wall in time, to time the jump. Sometimes guys will get back there too soon and then they actually jump into the wall which stops them from getting to their apex. Guys will get there too late and not be able to get to it. Just trying to gauge it.
“The angle of the wall makes it a little more difficult. The wall’s kind of slanted downward so I don’t want to necessarily go to the front part of the wall where it’s shorter because then I wouldn’t be able to get to it distance-wise, but I don’t also want to be on the deeper part of it because then I can’t reach my arm over it. So it’s just one of those things where you try to gauge it best as you possibly can and try to make it a timely leap.”
Almost as soon as the ball was hit, Bradley thought he could get to it.
“I knew I had a shot at it about three steps into my route,” he said. “I took two or three steps — obviously right off the bat I knew he struck it well. I got to about three steps and then I turned around and looked at it and that’s when I started to time up my steps to be able to make the leap at the exact same time as I was building momentum to get to the wall.”
Tracking the ball was not a problem.
“I saw the ball, I saw where it was, I saw that I needed to time my leap,” he said. “Mookie (Betts, the right fielder) was saying that, ‘Actually, it didn’t look like you got that high.’ That’s actually good, because sometimes you can jump higher but you don’t want to jump high because then you have to ‘alligatorarm’ it. That all goes into it, trying not to jump too high, changing your eye level. It’s one of those things where everything has to go right.”
Bradley said he had seen a replay “not as often as you would think, maybe three times.”
Enough to place the grab in his personal top five.
Some friends were not convinced.
“Reactions vary — some people are very excited, others that I’ve played ball with say they’re not impressed,” he said. “I don’t know. I guess I have to go above and beyond to impress them.”
Bradley sent a video to his parents, who did not rib him at all.
“They were proud of me,” he said. “My mom was, ‘Congratulations, it’s been fun watching you play.’ My dad was like, ‘ I’m not surprised. Nothing you really do now amazes me, but I’m very proud of you.’ ”