Harris evokes memories of The Catch with all-world play

It had already been a terrific game, and a dramatic one, between the Braves and the Phillies before there was one out in the top of the ninth. The Braves on Monday had come all the way back from a four-run deficit -- on a night when they could have gone down 0-2 in a best-of-five series -- to take a 5-4 lead. But Game 2 of the National League Division Series was about to get even better as soon as Nick Castellanos blasted a ball toward deep right-center in Truist Park with Bryce Harper on first.

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What happened next would only take 13 seconds. And what really happened in those next 13 seconds was baseball.

Michael Harris II, the Braves' center fielder, was a streak of light chasing the ball that Castellanos had just hit off Raisel Iglesias, and Harper was running toward second base -- all of that was just the beginning of one of the great endings any October game had ever seen.

Somehow, Harris tracked the ball down and then went up, left hand reaching out for the wall, timing his leap perfectly. When the ball was in his glove Ronald Acuña Jr., who had come running from right field, dropped to his knees and raised his arms because of what we’d all just seen.

"I knew off the bat it was going to be close to the fence, so I knew once I went back, I wasn't stopping,” Harris said after the game. “I was going to do anything I could to get a glove on it."

By now, it was seven seconds from when Castellanos had hit the ball.

Then everything was happening at once at Truist Park.

Harris turned in a blink and whipped the ball back toward the infield, not knowing that Harper had gone around second base, just the ballplayer in him knowing that the ball needed to be back in the infield -- and right now. This was what it was like once in the World Series when Willie Mays ran down Vic Wertz’s ball in the old Polo Grounds, still the most legendary October catch of them all, and Mays was the one wheeling and throwing back toward the infield because the ballplayer in him remembered Larry Doby was on second base.

Harper was four strides toward third base. Maybe five. But he must have felt as if he were a mile from first, knowing he had to tag second on his way back there.

"I probably shouldn’t have gone over second base," Harper said. "But I made a decision, and I’ll live with that."

He didn’t think Harris was going to make the catch. But catches like this always seem to get made in October, even before Willie Mays. Now Michael Harris II had made one of them.

But as Harris’ relay throw went bouncing past Braves second baseman Ozzie Albies, it seemed that Harper would make it back, and the game would continue, despite the electrifying second out that Harris had just made.

Only then here came Austin Riley, not having to run nearly as far as Harris had run for Castellanos’ ball, but running to back up the play anyway, not very long after he had just hit the two-run homer to put the Braves ahead in the bottom of the eighth. Then Riley was scooping up Harris’ throw with his glove hand like it was just another slow roller to his left before firing a strike to Matt Olson. Harper had gone into his slide by then. Too late. Riley’s throw had clearly doubled him off. Never once in postseason history had there ever been an 8-5-3 double play. No postseason game ended on any kind of double play started by an outfielder.

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Until now. Until what had just happened in the top of the ninth at Truist Park. Harris-to-Riley-to-Olson.

"It looked like it was going to be a ball in the gap. Harper was trying to be aggressive in a one-run ballgame," Riley said. "It was just about backing up the play and being in the right place at the right time."

I was once sitting behind home plate at a Spring Training game in Jupiter, Fla., with John Mozeliak, the Cardinals’ president of baseball operations, after a ball hit up the gap with a runner on base. When the ball was back in the infield that day he said, “One of the beauties of this game, and there are a lot of them, is that once a ball is in play like that, everybody on the field is in motion.”

It was that way in Atlanta on the Monday night when the Braves made it official -- with an exclamation point -- that they had come all the way back to even the NLDS against the Phillies. Harris ran to the wall and his glove turned out to be where what would have been a game-tying double, at least, had gone to die. He turned and threw like Willie Mays did that day at the Polo Grounds. Albies was running from second, trying to be a cutoff man. But Riley was over from third to back him up as Harper was busting it to get back to first, just a step -- and a second -- too late.

Thirteen seconds that will be remembered in Atlanta. Baseball happened.