It's Always Surprising What Matters
One way of thinking about how the week's best play happened..
The most talked-about play this week was Carlos Correa’s astonishing throw home in the first game of the Blue Jays/Twins series. If you missed it, which you probably didn’t:
Twins’ President of Baseball Operations Derek Falvey (and others) compared it to Derek Jeter’s famous flip play, which also featured a shortstop running a long way to make a desperate throw home in the nick of time. The longtime Twins shortstop Roy Smalley called it “one of the best plays I've seen a shortstop make.” The Twins manager Rocco Baldelli called it “a play that I think we will see forever.” The pitcher on the mound, Pablo López, called it unbelievable: “Carlos came from nowhere,” López said.
There’s a lot that’s interesting about that play. The most interesting thing might actually be what López said. Correa did, in fact, come from nowhere, and not necessarily in a great way, but undeniably in a season-altering way.
The Characters We’ll Be Referring To In The Following Descriptions:
Carlos Correa, Minnesota shortstop
Jorge Polanco, Minnesota third baseman
Pablo López, Minnesota pitcher
Kevin Kiermaier, Toronto batter
Bo Bichette, lead Toronto baserunner
Luis Rivera, Toronto third-base coach
Okay now: Going back six years, I found 10 other batted balls that were similar to this one in situations identical to this one, by which I mean slow choppers hit by left-handed batters toward charging third baseman with runners on first and second and two men out in the inning.
Generally speaking, the rule of thumb in infield assignments is that middle infielders move toward the ball. On a ball hit toward the third baseman, for example, the second baseman moves “toward” the ball to cover second base; the shortstop moves “toward” the ball so he can field it, and/or back up the third baseman, and/or cover the vacated third base, as the situation requires.
That’s what we see in most of the 10 other batted balls. Here, for example, see the shortstop run:
On one of the 10 comparable choppers, the shortstop just stood motionless and watched the play. On all of the the other nine, though, the shortstop was moving toward the play when the chopper reached the third baseman—sometimes sprinting, sometimes just casually jogging, sometimes darting over belatedly because he had initially blanked out, but over and over the shortstop moves toward the ball:
By contrast, Correa took a couple steps in and then stopped:
Now, I want to be clear: I’m not saying Correa erred by not backing the third baseman up or going to cover third base. I’ll only say it was not the norm. Maybe the Twins specifically want their shortstop to stay near second base for some reason, maybe Correa had something else in mind, maybe there’s a great reason for where he was, it’s almost always a tiny detail. But just from an “understanding how contingent life really is” perspective: Correa could very easily have been somewhere else the moment the ball got past Polanco, and if he had been it would have changed everything. Because if Correa had backed the play up, Bo Bichette wouldn’t have tried to score at all.
In that alternative scenario, the Blue Jays would have had the bases loaded and Matt Chapman coming up. They would have been down three runs but with a guy who has averaged 26 homers per season in his career up at the plate. They would have been potentially one swing away from taking the lead, flipping the game’s momentum, shutting up the legendarily noisy Twins fans. Maybe Chapman would have struck out; maybe he would have singled to center field to drive in a pair; maybe he would have homered; maybe he would have lined a foul ball off to the right and obliterated the fluttering wings of a passing butterfly. We’ll never know. But we can say that Pablo López would have faced precarity.
Instead, he and the Twins got out of the inning. Correa had accidentally laid a trap. Yummmmmm that run looked so tasty to Bichette that he ran right into the snare.
Twins’ win probability:
· If Bichette stops at third: 78 percent
· If Bichette gets thrown out at home: 86 percent
***
A further twist is this: We can rerun this whole sequence with an even smaller difference, and again change everything.
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