Re-visiting Pete Crow-Armstrong's gaffe from earlier in this Cubs-Cardinals series

A few decades ago when I was coaching American Legion ball in Kansas – you remember American Legion ball – we had a couple of mantras we constantly drilled into our players. This may be a good time to acquaint Pete Crow-Armstrong in particular and the Chicago Cubs, in general, with those mantras.

• Mantra 1: Think about the play before it happens.
• Mantra 2: Everybody reminds everybody how many outs there are before every play.

The language may vary, but my hunch is every coach of any experience has pummeled home to players some variant of those same mantras. I’ve no doubt that over the course of his still-young career, Pete Crow -Armstrong has received both of them to and beyond the point of boredom.

Yet in a desultory visitors clubhouse following Tuesday’s infuriating 8-7 loss to the Cardinals, PCA essentially owned up to violating at least part of Mantra 2. “Simple as that,” he told reporters. “We give outs every out and I gave two outs.”

Crow-Armstrong was talking about the fourth inning play when he raced to the wall in center to shag down a fly ball only to forget that when the play began there was just one out and speedy Masyn Winn was at second base. Seeing Crow-Armstrong casually drop his arm, turn and leisurely step toward the dugout as if he had just recorded the inning’s third out, Winn tagged up, barreled around third base and came around to score, a rare two-base sacrifice fly.

The next batter struck out, a whiff that should have, would have, stranded Winn at third…if Crow-Armstrong had known how many outs there were and hustled the ball back in as should have been his pre-determined priority.

Pete Crow-Armstrong owned his mistakes following the Cubs' loss

As noted, Crow-Armstrong acknowledged part of his error. He said he mistakenly signaled to his other outfielders before the play that there were two out. Assuming he did so, the questions then become: What did the other outfielders signal to him? And was he paying any attention to their signals? And did Seiya Suzuki in left and/or Kyle Tucker in right correct him when he gave them what they knew to be wrong information? Those are all rhetorical questions; the answer to each is obviously no.

Conclusion: Somebody in the Cubs outfield – probably the entirety of the outfield – was going through the motions of following Mantra 2 Tuesday. It cost the team a run and since the Cubs lost by one run…well, you can deduce the rest.

The thing is that Mantra 2 and Mantra 1 are inextricably related and know no age or skill level. Whether it's MLB, the minors, travel ball, American Legion or Little League, you must be prepared to know what to do with the ball before it’s put in play because there’s no time to do so afterward…and your analysis has to be based on correct information. That’s the intersection of Mantras 1 and 2 in a nutshell.  

If you don’t know how many outs there are, the odds of screwing up are substantial. If you tell your teammates wrong information and they fail to correct you, we have a major team breakdown. PCA is to blame first, but Suzuki and Tucker share some measure of blame for their failure to correct their teammate when he held up two fingers. All three violated the mantras.

Playing baseball as a team rather than an individual sport is what often separates consistent winners from skilled but under-performing wannabes. We are in the process of taking the measure of the NL Central division leaders regarding where they fall on the wannabe-to-winner scale. To date the data is not encouraging.

Is this also a coaching issue? Yes, to a degree. One hopes and assumes that Craig Counsell and his minions have driven the same mantras home…because those mantras never go out of date at any level of the game.

At the end of the play, however, it’s the players who have to activate their brains to prepare to make the play before it happens, to correct any mis-information they are given by a teammate in advance of the play, and then to execute properly.

It’s a team game.