Kansas City Royals Prospect Is All Over Internet For Insane Catch, But Did He Actually Make It?

Kansas City Royals prospect John Rave is going viral on Wednesday for a crazy catch he made on Tuesday night, but did he actually make the catch?

As you can see in the Tweet below from Sports Illustrated, Rave tracks down the ball and deflects it multiples times before securing it.

Royals prospect John Rave made a preposterous juggling catch at the wall Tuesday night 😱 https://t.co/CM218cJsuK

(via @OMAStormChasers) pic.twitter.com/eyIyPJH5cy
— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) August 9, 2023

The question is this: Did this ball hit the wall before Rave secured it? No one can seem to tell.

An article from Yahoo! on the play makes no mention of touching the wall:

The ball squirted out of Rave’s glove and hit him in the shoulder, then popped up in the air and hit the back of Rave’s glove. As he was falling backward, Rave snared the ball with his left hand.

This was an incredible bare-handed catch.

While the article above actually does mention the ball touching the wall, calling it a catch anyways.

The ball landed in the heel of Rave’s glove and bounced out when he went to brace himself against the chain-link fence. Then it bounced off his shoulder, off the wall and his wrist before Rave, in the process of falling to the ground, secured it in his bare hand. That’s some serious concentration.

It very well may be some concentration, but if that ball touched the wall, it's not a catch.

What do you think? We'll have to continue to research it.

At the major league level, the Royals are taking on the Boston Red Sox on Wednesday night.

First pitch is 7:10 p.m. ET.

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