A catch that was not a catch tricked the Nationals into running into a silly out

One sequence of events in today’s Nationals-Braves game doesn’t quite qualify as being a comedy of errors, but it’s close. It would have needed at least three more people involved and maybe one more mental mistake to reach the heights of “you’ve never seen anything as farcical as this” on a baseball field but it’s still pretty entertaining.

During the third inning of Tuesday’s game, Juan Soto hit a ball to center where Adam Duvall caught it. Or, at least it seemed like he caught it. It actually bounced off of Ender Inciarte’s glove, and then the wall, and then Duvall caught it.

But that was confusing enough for Trea Turner to think that Adam Duvall caught it outright, which caused him to go back to first base.

Juan Soto, unfortunately, did see that it wasn’t a clean catch and kept running as usual, which meant he passed Turner on the basepath when Turner went back to first and Soto was called out. It’s not quite a situation where better communication or a higher baseball IQ would have been helpful because who was expecting that to go down in the outfield?

Here’s a better view of Soto and Turner mucking it up between bases.

Unfortunate for the Nationals, impressive for the Braves, and Washington ended up with an 8-3 win in the end so it can just be a funny story instead of a contributing factor to a loss against a team in their division.