Bryant took the brunt of the collision as his upper body slammed against Heyward’s right shoulder and torso.
The hard-hit line drive looked troublesome from the start.
Jason Heyward tracked the ball from center field and sprinted for the gap. Kris Bryant ran toward the same spot from his position in right field.
Moments later, the outfielders collided. Bryant took the brunt of the impact and dropped to the ground. So did the ball.
It was the scariest moment in a shoddy performance for the Cubs, who lost 10-2 against the Reds in the rubber match of a three-game series.
“It was a tough, bad game,” Joe Maddon said. “We got banged up a little bit. But that stuff happens. It’s part of the season. What you (measure) is how you bounce back from something like that.”
The answer could depend on how quickly Bryant is able to return. He remained under evaluation by the team’s medical staff after the game and was not permitted to speak with reporters.
Maddon said Bryant sustained an injury to his head and neck area. He was not sure whether Bryant would need to go through the league’s concussion protocol and said the postgame evaluation would help determine his status for the upcoming series against the Astros. He was cleared to fly south with the team.
Bryant left the game after the sixth-inning collision, walking slowly off the field alongside a trainer. He fixed his gaze toward the ground in front of him and rubbed his forehead several times before he reached the dugout.
On the play, Heyward said he called for the ball but Bryant never heard him.
“We both fought hard to make a play,” Heyward said during a brief, terse interview with a group of reporters. “We ran into each other.”
Did crowd noise make it difficult to hear one another?
“That’s part of it.”
Was Bryant calling for the ball, too?
“I don’t know.”
Maddon blamed the breakdown on miscommunication in the outfield but acknowledged that noise and wind made for a difficult play.
“It is loud,” Maddon said. “Even when I go out there to see (Bryant), my goodness, everything is right in your face, and I could see where it’d be very difficult to hear one another. It’s just a combination of things. It’s probably the first time I think we’ve done that all year, so it’s going to happen at some point.”
The game marked Bryant’s eighth start in right field this season. He has started 30 games at third base and two games at designated hitter.
Maddon brushed off implications that Bryant’s relative inexperience in right field might have contributed to the collision. The Cubs have shuffled their defensive lineup throughout the season with players frequently rotating positions.
“I don’t think so,” Maddon said when asked whether a mix-and-match defense came with a cost. “I’ve seen some really stable outfielders, guys that are there all the time, do the same thing. They’ve been out there before together. (Heyward) has been in center and ‘KB’ has been in right.
“It’s just, it happened. It happens in our game. It’s going to happen again – hopefully not for a while – but I don’t worry about stuff like that.”
The Cubs committed two errors and surrendered 17 hits. Backup catcher Victor Caratini came in to pitch the ninth, allowing two runs.
“It’s already in the trash can,” Maddon said. “They got us early. Some well-placed ones. If it was a fight, it would have been stopped on cuts, right? That’s the old (Vin) Scully line. It’s just one of those things.
“This whole series, we’ve been giving up a lot of that stuff. So let’s flush it out and move on.”
