Hide in the Bush

What is it about baseball that makes the late-inning fielding replacement almost always see the next ball hit? And when a player flubs, bobbles, muffs, kicks or boots a ball, he/she gives off this bad body language vibe, but what they really wish was they could be like a chameleon, in hopes the ball has no way of locating them and yet the ball finds them over and over again?

Yesterday's Fourth of July game at AT&T between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the (home team)San Francisco Giants had an incident where the Giants' left-fielder, Fred Lewis, was having a game in the field he'd just as soon forget. On one play his tippy-toe dance -as teammate Aaron Rowland approached him- following the flight of the ball, lead to the ball bouncing from Lewises glove to Rowand's for an out! On a couple of other occasions the end results were not as fortuitous.

I looked up baseball jargon, in Wikipedia, to see if there were a term for the aformentioned behavior (a ball finding you or hoping the ball wouldn't find you)and came up with a couple you could borrow from but they really didn't fit the description.

Take the field: when the defensive players go to their positions at the beginning of an inning the defense takes the field. No mention is made of hiding in the bush!

Ugly finder: a foul ball hit into a dugout, presumably destined to find "someone" who is ugly or to render him that way if he fails to dodge the ball. (By and large, this one could best describe the fielder who doesn't want to be in the field. He's hoping to dodge the ball, that much is a bullseye!)

(thanks to Wikipedia for baseball jargons)

Kevin Marquez