BOSTON -- Red Sox outfielder Jackie Bradley Jr. made another spectacular catch Friday night against Baltimore, robbing right-fielder Joey Rickard of an extra base hit in the eighth inning with Boston leading 4-2. Baltimore had a runner on first with two outs when Rickard lifted a Brandon Workman cutter 388 feet to dead center. Bradley Jr. leaped up against the wall to prevent at least one run from scoring and preserve Boston’s lead. “I just ran back and got a feel for where I was on the wall. Timed it up and made the catch,” Bradley Jr. said. Left-fielder Andrew Benintendi said after the game that he thought Bradley Jr. jumped too early on the play. The man who made the play disagreed. “I didn’t feel like I jumped too soon,” Bradley Jr. said. “I’d rather jump too soon than jump too late in that situation. Especially knowing I can dig my foot into the wall and push myself back up if I needed to. I made sure I got up there before it was too late.” Boston won, 6-4, behind a dominant performance from Eduardo Rodriguez. Bradley Jr. didn’t think the catch ranked among the best of his career. “It’s an alright play,” he said.<doc-sep>Jackie Bradley Jr. made another spectacular catch — a maximum air-timed leap up against The Wall in center field, snatching the ball as his foot made contact — for the final out of the eighth inning in the Red Sox’ 6-4 victory against the Orioles Friday night. He was not all that impressed. “Nah, it’s just an all right play,” Bradley said. “Just ran back and got a feel for where I was on the wall and timed it up, made the catch.” Bradley was 0-for-3 with a sacrifice fly. His offense — .149 batting average — has yet to catch on fire obviously, so until it does, he will take the defense. “You have to,” Bradley said. “If you’re not doing it on one side of the ball, you have to do it on the other. The other way. You have to do your job.” The home run by Andrew Benintendi was his first since Aug. 31 of last year. Including the postseason, he had gone 194 at-bats without a homer. He is hitting .342 (13-for-38) over his last nine games. … Mitch Moreland stayed hot, going 2-for-4 with a double and a single. He has 10 extra-base hits on the season. … Xander Bogaerts had three hits, a season high. He’s reached base in his last 10 games, hit in nine and 12 of 13 this season. SALE PUSHED BACK The Red Sox have decided to go with six starters one more time, and that means the scrutiny for Chris Sale‘s next start will take place under the bright lights of Yankee Stadium. Hector Velazquez will likely be the choice to start Monday’s Patriots Day morning game as the Red Sox take advantage of the rare two off days in one week scheduling quirk of this opening homestand. Sale, whose turn to start is Monday according to the five-game clock, will instead make his fourth start against the Yankees Tuesday night. After three starts this season in which his velocity as well as his performance has been suspect (0-3, 9.00 ERA), Sale will test his stuff against a Yankees lineup that is still good despite a number of injuries to key performers. “We’re going with six starters,” manager Alex Cora said before Friday night’s game against the Orioles. “After the off day on Thursday, we’ve played how many, 20-something in a row? So that’s the last time we can actually give those guys a breather. It’s by design. There’s nothing going on. Hopefully Hector, we don’t have to use him a lot over the next few days, and he’ll be the guy on Monday.” Cora said the sketchy weather forecast for Monday did not play a factor in using a sixth starter on that day. NUNEZ STARTS AT SECOND Eduardo Nunez started at second base Friday, the night after Dustin Pedroia played his second game of the season. Pedroia played the first two games of the homestand, but had a day off in between. He has yet to play back-to-back games. “He’s good, just stay away from him in the early part of the game today,” Cora said.”If we need him late, we’ll use him. Tomorrow we play, he should be back tomorrow. But nothing wrong with him. He actually did a good job yesterday. That was pretty cool for him to be involved and we’re very pleased where he’s at right now.” Pedroia was chipper after Thursday night’s game. “He feels that he can play 162,” Cora said. “We’ve just got to be careful with him. It’s smart from our end. We can’t push him that hard. It’s different. You can go to Double A, Triple A, but at this level, there’s a lot of stuff going on and the game is faster, and your moves are quicker, and it’s a lot different. We’ll take care of him and see where it takes us, and hopefully whenever we can just say, hey, go ahead. But we’ve still go to take care of him. “He’s excited to be back. For how great it was last year, I bet for him it was tough. Not tough in a bad way, but it’s kind of like, ‘Damn, I wanted to be part of it.’ He knows that he can contribute this year and he wants to be part of something special. ROTATION WOES With all the excitement from the Red Sox’ rally Thursday night, not much was made of Nathan Eovaldi‘s subpar outing (five runs, five innings), just the latest in a long string of such starts from a rotation that carried an 8.79 ERA and 1.869 WHIP into Friday night’s start by Eduardo Rodriguez. Cora is well aware of what’s happening, or not happening, with the rotation. “Yeah, I mean, they know it — we go 10 games in a row with a quality start and that’s kind of like nothing for those guys, with the track record, they can do a lot better as far as like quality starts,” the manager said. “We do that and we get rolling. They know it. It’s not like … yesterday, if you look back, it’s one pitch, boom, two pitches, boom. We haven’t stopped doing that the whole time. The home runs, it’s all over the league, I guess, from what I read today, home runs, strikeouts and walks. We’re paying the price. We leave the ball out over the plate and they’re hitting home runs so if we start pitching better, we should be fine. The bullpen is doing great. Like I said before, coming into the season, that was the question mark and we haven’t heard anything about the bullpen in 12 days, 13 days, whatever it is.” A year ago, the team was 11-2 in its first 13 games, a far cry from the 4-9 record it carried into the series opener against the Orioles. “I mean, we know the record and we know we’re not playing well — it’s not about the record, it’s about how you’re playing,” Cora said. “If we start comparing from last year, and this and that, well, offensively we’re a lot better than last year at this point. We just haven’t pitched. We haven’t played defense as consistent. That’s about it. I don’t have the numbers. I’m not getting into it. but if you look at the offense, it’s a lot better than last year. Last year, it was 1-0, 2-1, down five in the eighth against Tampa and we score six. We haven’t pitched, that’s the bottom line.”<doc-sep>
Jackie Bradley Jr.'s wall-climbing catch is the reverse of Marcell Ozuna's wall-climb failure, and that's totally fine Baseball, like life in general, is filled with highs and lows -- but if you expected everything to go according to plan all the time, you'd be disappointed quite frequently. In Friday night's 6-4 win over the Orioles, Red Sox outfielder Jackie Bradley Jr. made a highlight-reel catch by climbing up the wall in dead center field to pull in a would-be extra-base hit from Joey Rickard to end the inning. It was really an astounding, max-effort play: That's the pinnacle of outfielder achievement, at least regarding amazing catches. It's also the polar opposite of this sequence, which happened to Cardinals outfielder Marcell Ozuna earlier in the week. "See, what had happened was..." - Marcell Ozuna, probably. pic.twitter.com/1pHXLaeDOq — Cut4 (@Cut4) April 10, 2019 And that's totally fine. Obviously, Ozuna did not intend for this play to unfold the way it did. It was unfortunate, but part of what draws us back to baseball, day after day, season after season, is the hope of things turning out in our favor. It's why the players play the game, too -- they expect to fail more than they succeed. Remember, a .300 batting average (which is still valued in some circles) means you failed seven times out of 10 trips to the plate. You're not going to make every stellar play in the field. If you did, you'd be a robot, and robots don't play baseball (yet). That's why, to sum things up, it's totally fine -- and, really, exemplary of the nature of this sport -- that Bradley made his play and Ozuna did not make his. It's why they play, and it's why we watch.