Sal Frelick Says Hey: A Heroic Catch on a Momentous Night

Ho hum. It was just another win for the Brewers Tuesday night, as they jumped out to a 6-0 lead on the hapless Angels in Anaheim. In the bottom of the ninth, though, the halos mounted an incursion, putting three runs on the board and forcing Pat Murphy to wheel through two other pitchers and land on his closer, Trevor Megill. With two outs and two on, the home team got its best healthy hitter (get well soon, Mr. Trout), Taylor Ward, to the plate. Ward sliced a vicious drive toward the wall in right-center field, and for just a moment, you had to think: Shoot. Tie game.

"That's what was going through my head: tie score," Murphy admitted after the game.

If you kept your wits about you, though, you could quickly assuage that rising concern. That's because the center fielder on the play was Sal Frelick, and hardly anyone does this better.

Frelick is far from a perfect player. His offense is an area of real concern right now, and even in the field, his weak arm causes problems that sometimes wash out his strengths. When it comes to going back on fly balls, though, he's terrific. For his very young career, he's +7 plays on deep fly balls, according to Sports Info Solutions's Plus/Minus framework. Brewers fans might not even need that numerical reassurance. In a short time, Frelick has piled up the anecdotal evidence, in highly visible and memorable ways.

Remember when he took an extra-base hit away from Marcell Ozuna in his MLB debut last July?

And then remember when, in the very next plate appearance, he robbed Orlando Arcia of a home run?

The questions are rhetorical, of course. Those moments were instant classics, immortalized in the minds of Brewers fans and (since the game was nationally televised) plenty of others, too. Frelick arrived in the majors and immediately showed the ability to literally and figuratively fill up the TV screen. He got a fortuitous opportunity, and he made the most of it without delay. That's exactly how things went for Willie Mays, too.

Obviously, Frelick is nowhere near a Mays-caliber player. Watching him play the outfield, though, we can be reminded of the legacy Mays left on baseball, even as he passes into memory and severs our last superstar link to the game's Golden Era. Mays didn't invent the home run robbery, but he certainly innovated within the field. His most famous catch took away a triple, not a homer, but it was in the spirit of the modern homer snatch: going back on the ball with everything one has and selling out. Frelick loves to do just that.

Ballplayers of the era immediately before Mays were famous for their willingness to destroy their bodies in the pursuit of wins, but hardly any of them were athletic enough to set the stakes as high as he did. Mays was fast, acrobatic, and incredibly strong, given his short stature. Frelick is just one of a great many spiritual descendants of him since, throwing themselves onto turf or rough warning tracks or bouncing themselves off walls to earn extra outs. Like Mays, he loves going back on the ball, and has a gorgeous knack for it--a feel for the ball even when he has to turn his gaze away from it to make up ground, and then a fine sense for the wall and how to decelerate when he gets near it. Like Mays was, he's unwilling to yield even to his own teammates, when he locks his sights on a ball.

Tuesday wasn't even the first time Frelick made a boundary-stretching play to record the final out of a close game. He did so last August, too, against another AL West foe.

There's no replacing Mays, and there must be no forgetting him. He's emblematic of a generation of trailblazers and fighters for equality, as well as of the excellence that makes the game breathtaking, at its best. He revolutionized baseball, and changed how it's played forever. He was a faster, stronger-armed Frelick in the field, and the best hitter in the game for several seasons. He was everywhere you turned, for two solid decades.

For many fans who loved Mays and all he meant to the game, it felt like time itself stopped when the news of his death went out Tuesday night. It certainly felt like baseball should stop. And yet, it went on. It had to. If (as Jackie Robinson, Mays's fierce rival, once said) a life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives, then an incredibly important life like Mays's can't be confined to the time he spent in the spotlight, or even the time he spent in his own skin. Willie Mays helped make baseball the kind of unifying, thrilling thing that transcends time and pulls us into itself, over and over, tying one generation to another. Every time a center fielder sprints back on a high line drive and steals a double with a leap or a twist or a stab or a belly flop, we'll think of Mays.

Major League Baseball set ugly, self-defeating boundaries around itself for the first half of the 20th century, excluding great players like Mays because of the color of their skin. The league looked, back then, a lot more like Sal Frelick than it does now. To see Frelick reach just beyond the boundaries of the park to save a game Tuesday night was to be reminded that when Robinson, Mays, and the rest of that courageous cohort of barrier-breakers burst through those walls of bigotry, they didn't close off the game, the way it had been closed off to them previously.

There's still room for the undersized kid from a Northeastern city. We just have the privilege, now, of watching that kid play and appreciating the way they were influenced (consciously or not) by the astounding talent and fearless style of a Black kid from a now-defunct mining town in Alabama, who had to endure a lot of other grief on the way to greatness. Frelick's play secured another win for a cruising Brewers team, and it also provided fitting punctuation on a bittersweet day for baseball.