ST. LOUIS — Second baseman Dan Uggla returned to the Braves lineup Sunday for the first time in 10 games, and it took an injury to Tyler Pastornicky to make it happen.
Pastornicky had a sore left calf after jumping for a ball late in Saturday’s game. He gave the Braves a scare when he appeared to be favoring his surgically repaired left knee after jumping for a ball and landing hard, but the knee was fine when a Braves trainer examined him after the game as a precautionary measure.
Pastornicky is expected to be back in the lineup Monday. He started six of seven games including the previous four in a row, as Braves manager Fredi Gonzalez has given Pastornicky a chance to show what he can do in place of the long-slumping Uggla.
Pastornicky was 4-for-12 with a walk and a .385 on-base percentage in his four consecutive starts before sitting out Sunday’s game to rest the calf.
“It’s definitely feeling better,” he said Sunday morning, when his calf was wrapped but he took part in batting practice and other pregame work.
While others were concerned seeing him limp late in Saturday’s game, Pastornicky said he knew it wasn’t a knee injury like the one he suffered in August when he collided with Jason Heyward. He tore his left anterior cruciate ligament and had season-ending surgery.
“I know the difference from last year, what it feels like, and it definitely wasn’t that,” Pastornicky said. “I just kind of came down on it, and it wouldn’t loosen up after that. Just give it a day.”
Coincidentally, there was an incident in the fourth inning Saturday eerily similar to the play that caused the Pastornicky-Heyward collision last season. With runners on the corners and one out Saturday, Yadier Molina hit a pop fly to shallow right field, and Pastornicky drifted out toward the ball while Heyward came in from right field.
Pastornicky caught it with Heyward several feet away, and the second baseman wasn’t able to set in time to make a strong-enough throw to t he plate to get the speedy Wong, who tagged up and scored. For the Braves, at least a collision was avoided, but it appeared they would’ve had a better chance to prevent Wong from scoring if the strong-armed Heyward had caught the ball.
“That’s a tough play because my momentum’s going back and I’m concentrating on just catching the ball,” Pastornicky said. “I didn’t hear him calling me off and he didn’t call me off, so you try to catch it and then you see what happens. He’s tagging and I didn’t have any momentum, so you’ve got to try to re-gather and make a good throw.”
To avoid a repeat of last year’s collision, Heyward has let Pastornicky know that the second baseman will always hear him shouting if the big right fielder is going to try to make the catch. Pastornicky said despite the ball being in the same spot as last year’s, he wasn’t thinking about a potential collision Saturday.
“You try not to think about that,” he said. “Like I said, the only thing I was really concentrating on was getting there and catching the ball, because I didn’t know how far back he was or what kind of jump he got on the ball. So I was just trying to catch the ball…. We had one play earlier where I did hear him when I was going back, so I know I’ll hear him.”
