Ender Inciarte thought ball 3 was ball 4, was slightly embarrassed, then walked anyway
Look, everybody makes mistakes. Math is hard, and we can't all be expected to remember things all the time.
Add in the prospect of taking part in a baseball game, with all the pressure and expectations and adrenaline that goes with it, and it's easy to understand why things can sometimes go off the script.
In Monday night's Braves-Mets game at Citi Field,
All's well that ends well, though, so naturally Inciarte wound up walking anyway on a subsequent pitch.
He's hardly the first player to suffer the ignominy of forgetting the count. In fact, forgetting things is a big part of the game sometimes. It's an inevitability.
Just like the rest of us leave our phones at home/forget about that big test coming up/lose track of an important email we were supposed to reply to -- to err is human. To err on a baseball diamond, that's a type of human error reserved for a select few, those good enough to compete at the Major League level.
After the game, which the Braves won, 7-3, Atlanta manager Brian Snitker remarked to MLB.com's Daniel Knobler that he heard someone on the bench say, "I did that earlier this year, too."
As for Inciarte, he brushed it off as no big deal:
"That happens to a lot of people. It happened to me one time before, too. I don't know why I thought I already had three balls. It worked out OK."
So Ender, don't fret. Besides, you're already King of the Dekes, so we'll let this one fly.