The world saw Memphis Redbirds SS Delvin Perez HR trot gone wrong. Here's what they didn't see | Giannotto

Delvin Perez knew the home run trot had gone horribly wrong before he actually showed it.

If you watch the highlight the whole country saw, the one from Thursday’s Memphis Redbirds game at AutoZone Park that went viral on social media, it appears as if Perez only realized what had happened halfway between third base and home plate.

He had connected on a breaking ball, holding the follow through to admire his work for a few seconds before flipping his bat. “That ball is gone,” he thought, and the purists out there might suggest he was tempting the baseball gods.

Perez, therefore, did not see the ball land in the glove of the Gwinett Stripers left fielder, at the edge of the warning track. Instead he jogged around the bases, even pointing toward left field in celebration as he rounded second and headed for third.

It was there that Perez began to understand what he was doing. Redbirds manager Ben Johnson, who also serves as the team’s third base coach during games, usually shakes hands with a player as he’s coming home after a homerun.

“He didn’t do the handshake,” Perez said.

“And then when I went toward home, I started hearing everybody. ‘That’s not a homer. What are you doing?’ I was like, ‘What? It didn’t go out.’ I couldn’t believe it.”

Most anyone who watched the highlight, be it on Twitter or aggregated on another website or via chat groups, got a good laugh out of it.

Perez, 23, is trying his best to laugh along with you, perhaps because the best way to successfully navigate going viral is often just to lean into the joke.

So when did he understand how quickly his goof had spread?

“Right after the game,” Perez said.

His phone was filled with notifications, from family and friends and “people that I don’t even know.” He was stunned when former New York Mets shortstop Jose Reyes, a shortstop he looked up to for years, posted a clip of the unfortunate blunder to his Instagram.

Perez has retweeted replays of his “home run” and even responded to a few Twitter critics with his bat speed on the pitch (107) and its launch angle (30 degrees). This was about the wind, he insists, not mistaking a fly out swing for a home run swing.

“Next time I’ll hit the ball out,” Perez said laughing.

But it isn’t long before you realize there’s another side to this for him, or really anyone who accidentally has a brush with infamy. You have to laugh about it, but you also can’t dwell on it – even though everybody else might.

“I really don’t want to look at everything because it’s too many,” Perez said. “It’s not something you want to go viral. You want to do good in a sport, but if that’s the way it is, I didn’t mean that. This is not my best season that I have in my career, so I don’t know …”

Perez’s voice trailed off.

He’s a former first-round pick for the St. Louis Cardinals, but that was back in 2016 when he was still a teenager coming out of Luiza, Puerto Rico. Today, closing out a season in which he’s hitting a combined .226 between Double-A Springfield and Triple-A Memphis, he’s scratching and clawing to get to the major leagues.

There’s a version of this story, maybe the most likely version at this point, in which Perez’s biggest professional moment occurred Thursday night. It’s why the trigger for Perez came from Johnson, from not getting a handshake from a member of the St. Louis organization.

Eventually, probably this week, all the attention from this will dissipate. But it’s part of Perez’s identity for the foreseeable future.

He knows this, so he decided to embrace what he did, to take all the razzing from his teammates and all the people judging his entire career on one flub, in stride. If only so that the next player might avoid the same fate.

“I will laugh about this moment. It’s a special moment, even though I didn’t hit it out,” Perez said. “It’s something that I don’t think is going to happen in baseball no more.”

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Memphis Redbirds' Delvin Perez explains viral home run trot gone wrong