Home plate angle of Padres' walk-off loss to Brewers heaps added blame on Jake Cronenworth

Watching Jackson Chourio’s walk-off single from the standard television angle made the ending look agonizingly close. Watching it from behind home plate makes it look worse for Jake Cronenworth.

A video circulating on social media appears to show the Padres second baseman breaking toward the middle later than expected. By the time Cronenworth launches into his dive, Chourio’s line drive is already screaming toward the second-base dirt. His glove misses it, the ball reaches center field and the Brewers celebrate a 4-3 win that pushes the Friars into an 0-2 NLDS hole.

We should be careful with giving this the Zapruder-film treatment. Chourio smoked the ball at 109.5 mph off a 101.3 mph Mason Miller fastball. It doesn’t matter what camera angle you use, it’s far from a routine grounder. Slow-motion video can make a split-second reaction look far more leisurely than they feel on the field.

Cronenworth believed he read it well.

“He smashed it, but I thought I got a good jump on it,” Cronenworth said after the loss.

The home-plate angle makes that assessment harder to accept.

Jake Cronenworth’s apparent hesitation added another mistake to a brutal Padres night

This would be easier to dismiss as an impossible play if Cronenworth had not already had a miserable afternoon.

He went 0-for-4 at the plate and was charged with two errors. His seventh-inning throwing error allowed Milwaukee to cut San Diego’s lead to 3-2. Then came the ninth inning, when the Padres needed one more out and Cronenworth could not reach the ball that ended the game.

The walk-off is not all on him. Miller walked Christian Yelich, Sal Frelick and Gary Sánchez to load the bases. Craig Stammen left his closer in after he lost the strike zone. Manny Machado had already run the Padres out of what could have been a promising inning in the seventh as well.

There are plenty of fingerprints on this one. Cronenworth’s are among them.

This new angle tells us a bit more. The original broadcast gave us a desperate dive that came up inches short. The view from home plate raises the question to why was the dive so desperate in the first place?

Maybe Miller’s velocity shortened the reaction window beyond anything the camera can convey. A 109.5 mph missile doesn’t leave an infielder a grace period. Regardless, the play still looked late.

Padres veterans cannot keep leave the season in Mason Miller’s hands

Miller deserves the loss and the blown save. He said so himself. Walking the bases loaded turned one Chourio single into a season-altering disaster. The Padres’ veterans also spent the afternoon stripping away his margin for error.

Machado’s baserunning mistake killed a chance to build on a 3-1 lead. Cronenworth’s seventh-inning error handed a run back. By the time Chourio stepped into the box, one hard-hit ball erased the entire afternoon.

The home-plate video will not prove Cronenworth should have made the play. What it proves is how merciless the postseason can be when a team stacks one mistake on top of another. 

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