There is a special thing that happens in professional sports, and baseball is certainly no exemption. When a team is falling and flailing, they desperately reach for something, anything, to catch hold of. Occasionally they’re lucky and, like an unrealistic protagonist in an action film, grab hold of a ledge with the tips of their fingers. Fingers that suddenly have free soloist strength, and a ledge defying all that we know of architecture to stay intact long enough for the hero to pull themself up and out of danger.
It always seems as though there’s a knowledgable, targeted desperation in that moment.