A bird narrowly avoided disaster after flying in the path of an Adam Wainwright pitch
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Standing just over 60 feet from home plate, pitchers are tasked with threading a proverbial needle each and every pitch they throw. Pinpoint control and accuracy is key, lest you have a bad time out there.
Monday's 6-2 win by the Royals over the Cardinals featured a close call involving an innocent, probably hungry bird that fluttered about in front of home plate ... you know, typical bird activities.
What's decidedly not "typical bird activities" is the context in which it nearly met its demise. Adam Wainwright had delivered an offspeed pitch mere seconds before the bird's flight path placed it right in front of the plate, and the two very nearly collided as the ball dipped in toward Yadier Molina's glove. To truly make this the perfect convergence of three separate entities, Cheslor Cuthbert actually swung and fouled the pitch off, too:
The combination of an 84-mph pitch nearly colliding with a bird flying at its own speed is almost like the frustrating (or easy, depending on your mathematical prowess) word problem of the "one train departs _ at 60 mph, while another departs _ at 50 mph: when will they pass each other?" variety. Thankfully, nobody has to solve that puzzle, and even more fortuitously, the bird was spared a pretty rough night -- since, as we've seen before, that could have been rough.