May 27 marked five years since one of the most ridiculous plays baseball has seen, a sequence in Pittsburgh that turned a routine ground ball into chaos. Javier Báez made the error himself, was called safe, and kept running until he stood on third base after striking out earlier in the at-bat.
The play had everything in the space of a few seconds: a routine grounder, a foolish mistake, the Pirates throwing the ball around, a run scoring, and multiple errors piling up behind him. It looked like kids playing little league baseball, and if the first baseman had simply stepped on first base, the inning was over. Instead, Báez took base after base and turned an ordinary out into an unforgettable moment in Pittsburgh.
The anniversary lands five years later as part of the broader memory of Báez's time with the Cubs, when his game could swing from the impossible to the absurd in a single pitch. Cubs fans eventually got used to that kind of chaos, but this one still stands apart because players can reach first on an error, while Báez was the one who created the mess himself. That distinction is what makes the play so hard to forget, and why it keeps coming back whenever the cubs standings or the team's history is discussed.
For Pittsburgh, it remains a snapshot of how quickly a game can unravel. For Báez, it is still one of the defining clips of his career. Five years ago today, one ground ball became a run, a string of mistakes and a highlight that never really left the sport.
