Christian Arroyo was the hero in Wednesday’s game against the Atlanta Braves, but the same could not be said about Friday’s contest.
The Red Sox infielder made a baserunning gaffe in the third inning in Boston’s ultimate 5-3 loss to the Kansas City Royals at Kauffman Stadium.
At the time, the Red Sox held a slim 1-0 lead over the Royals with runners on the corners and nobody out. J.D. Martinez hit into a fielder’s choice that tripped up Arroyo who ended up getting thrown at home.
Of course, there’s no way to know if that didn’t happen if that would have impacted the final result.
After the game, manager Alex Cora was asked about it.
“Yeah. One of those you see the ground ball you take off, right? They wanna get one out at the plate, then you still have first and second with one out,” Cora told reporters over Zoom. “He froze with the line drive. He took off, he stopped and then he took off again. We talked about it. If you’re gonna stop just get to the bag. Let them turn a double play, now it’s third with two outs and we’ll take our chances. But it’s one of those, we’ll talk about it. It was a big, big play at the moment, but I think the thought process was to go, but he hesitated.”
Arroyo didn’t sugarcoat anything, either.
“Looking at it, it was kind of an awkward play. Last thing I wanna do is take off on contact and get doubled up at third,” he said. “I kinda looked back and saw that he took a look at me, and I took a step back. As soon as he threw to second I took off, and (Nicky) Lopez just made a good play. There’s really not much to it. I talked with AC and Will (Venable) about it and they said, ‘there’s not really much you can.’ It’s either once the ball’s hit just take off or you kinda just stay. In that situation I was just trying to sneak a run in. Lopez just made a good play right there. Not much else to say. For me, obviously, hindsight 20-20 I wish I would have stayed at third, given us an opportunity to score me from third there. That’s part of the game. … It’s just a tough play, it’t not something that happens all the time.”
A tough play indeed.
The Red Sox look to get in the win column Saturday afternoon against the Royals at 4:10 p.m. ET.
