The old adage “you can’t predict baseball” got taken to a new level on Tuesday night when the Pittsburgh Pirates traveled to Arizona to take on the Diamondbacks. Pirates infielder Rodolfo Castro tried going from first to third on a single by Oneil Cruz, and thanks to a head-first slide, he safely found himself 90 feet away from scoring.
The issue is that Castro’s slide meant something fell out of his back pocket. That something? Well, it was a cell phone.
This is a first… Rodolfo Castro’s phone fell out of his pocket in the middle of the game
pic.twitter.com/qaPd34qroF
— Bally Sports Arizona (@BALLYSPORTSAZ) August 10, 2022
It was extremely bizarre, and in the aftermath, everyone had exactly one question: How the heck can this happen? Castro was asked about this after the game and explained that it was totally unintentional.
“I don’t think there’s any professional ballplayer that would ever go out there with any intentions of taking a cell phone,” Castro said, per ESPN. “It’s horrible it happened to me. Obviously, it was very unintentional.”
Castro went on to stress that it was both an “accident” and a “mistake,” while Pirates manager Derek Shelton told the press that “You stay around the game and you see things you haven’t seen before. This was just a kid who made a mistake. It’s just one of those things we move forward from and tell him, ‘You can’t do that.”’
As for the game itself, the Diamondbacks went on to win, 6-4.