Fake It ‘Till You Make It: Alexei Ramirez Fools Announcers With Fake Catch

“Fake it ’till you make it!” isn’t necessarily an advisable strategy for most professions, but for baseball, well, it works just fine. You may not ultimately fool the umpires – the one’s that actually matter – but you could make a couple of announcers sound pretty silly. And if making announcers sound silly isn’t the point of baseball, thEN I’M NOT SURE WHAT IS!!! (Whew, that escalated quickly).

Now that I’ve calmed down a bit, let’s take a look at Alexei Ramirez’s hilarious catch-that-wasn’t, the subsequent selling of the non-catch, and the announcers that totally fell for the bait:

To be fair, if you blinked, you could have missed it. Ramirez puts his glove up to make the catch, but falls just a few inches short of receiving it. However, as he puts his glove back down to his side, the ball bounces down and immediately back up into his glove. The result is slight-of-hand level trickery, that fools everyone, including the announcers.

And to think, he would have gotten away with it two, if it weren’t for those meddling umpires … and their dumb dog!