'Super Rosario' adds huge catch to Oct. reel

Eddie Rosario played an enormous role in pushing the Braves to the World Series, and he may have helped them inch closer to a title on Saturday night.

The MVP of the National League Championship Series kept Truist Park deafeningly loud with a sideways, backhanded catch before crashing into the left-field wall to end the top of the eighth inning of Game 4, robbing Jose Altuve of extra bases.

“I feel right now I am Super Rosario,” he said. “I don't see the ball. I throw the glove and catch the ball. Everybody's happy. I'm happy. It's unbelievable what I did tonight. Wow, what a catch.”

The Astros, no doubt, would not disagree. The catch was a crucial play to help preserve the Braves' one-run lead en route to a 3-2 win, pushing the Series to 3-1 in favor of Atlanta.

“He's an outstanding player, and he's a really good outfielder,” Astros manager Dusty Baker said. “That ball had topspin on it. If that ball had backspin, then the game would have been tied. But he made an outstanding play.”

The drive would have left the yard at 26 Major League parks, including Houston's Minute Maid Park, but in Atlanta, it fell a few feet shy of what would have been a game-tying homer and the 24th of Altuve's postseason career.

As Rosario was racing to make the catch, it appeared that he glanced at the wall, then stuck his glove out in a last-ditch effort to snag the ball. That’s how Jorge Soler, who had just hit the go-ahead homer in the bottom of the seventh, saw it, too.

“When Eddie turned to look at the fence,” Soler recounted, “we thought to ourselves -- or I least I thought, personally -- that ball either hit the fence, or it's gone. Then he just kept running and threw the glove out there and made the catch, and we all looked at each other in amazement, like, ‘Did that just really happen?’ It took us all by surprise, and it was something truly out of a movie.”

“It just happened. That was it,” Rosario said. “I think anyone in that position is just trying to make the play, and that's all I was doing. When the ball was hit, I was just charging as hard as I could, and I was running. So at the last second, I threw my glove at it, and I was able to catch it.”

In the end, all that matters is that he made the catch. But that’s not necessarily how his manager felt watching it with the game on the line.

“I'm not even going to go look at that again,” Braves manager Brian Snitker quipped. “I'm just glad he caught it.

“That's probably not an instructional video we show our Minor Leaguers.”

Rosario, who hit .560 in the NLCS to oust the Dodgers, doubled in the sixth inning for his second hit on Saturday and 23rd of the postseason, the most for a player from Puerto Rico.

“Obviously, it's incredible,” Rosario said of the feat. “I'm proud of myself for the work I've been able to put in. We're just doing the same thing every day.”

The seven-year veteran was acquired by the Braves at the Trade Deadline from Cleveland in exchange for Pablo Sandoval.