Just a quick note: I’m now a regular co-host on the Athletic’s baseball podcast, The Windup. I’m on with Grant Brisbee and Andy McCullough every other Wednesday, including this most recent one. It’s as fun as you’d imagine; telling stories and talking about baseball. Here’s a direct link to the latest one.
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Today’s post is a grab bag of moments that stuck with me over the past month. They are not important! They are:
DJ LeMahieu Pointing Toward The Existence Of A Potential New Boner
A Pitch Catching Or Not Catching The Corner In Slow Motion
Willson Contreras Finding Where All The Water Went
The Spaghetti Move
1. New Ways To Lose A Home Run
When you’re raised on baseball lore, you learn of the weird ways that over-the-wall home runs have been unexpectedly downgraded. Robin Ventura lost a home run (he got a single) because his teammates mobbed him while he was running the bases. Lou Gehrig lost a homer (he got a triple) because a baserunner ahead of him, thinking the ball had been caught, had abandoned the bases and returned to the dugout. Joe Adcock lost a walk-off home run (he got a double) because he passed Hank Aaron on the basepaths. When those things happen, they go into the big bag o’ stories.
Another one didn’t happen. But it could have, and someday might still.
On July 31, DJ LeMahieu hit a grand slam. The umpires initially ruled it a double—and LeMahieu stopped at second base—before a replay review revealed it was definitely over the wall, a home run.
You’ve probably seen the custom in the replay era in which ballplayers on the field, seeing a conclusive replay shown on the scoreboard, start prematurely moving around as though the issue has been settled. As in: The stadium replay shows a runner was clearly tagged, so (while New York is still reviewing it) the fielders all walk off the field, confident the inning is over. Or the stadium replay shows that the runner who’d been called out was clearly safe, so—before it’s official—he begins removing his elbow and ankle guards while standing on his base.
DJ LeMahieu, standing on second, watching the replay, seeing his homer impending, started running home, even though the actual umpires were actually still waiting for the replay room to actually rule:
A cut to the Yankees dugout a second later showed Anthony Volpe waving LeMahieu home. Behind Volpe in the dugout, Aaron Judge had a calm hand up, seemingly signaling for LeMahieu to stop. Judge was correct! LeMahieu did stop, and, for good measure, took a step back so he was standing on third base when the ruling came in. Then the ruling came in and then he jogged the rest of the way home.
Had he not took that step back to third base, it seems really likely he could have lost his home run. To score a run, the batter has to touch all four bases in order, no matter what. If LeMahieu had only touched third base while play was stopped for the umpire review, I can’t see how it would have counted as touching third base. No actions during that timeout would be official. There’s a good argument that LeMahieu, in such a scenario, could have been called out for not touching third base, and given only a double.
Technically, from the sport’s perspective, in the canon, I think LeMahieu officially teleported from second to third, which might be a first in baseball history. But there’s no rule that says you can’t teleport between bases. There’s only a rule that you must touch all the bases in order, which LeMahieu did, despite Anthony Volpe’s bad influence. Phew. Always be careful what you do in a state of total certainty!
2. New Perspectives On The Strike Zone
What’s your read on this pitch—is it just off the plate, or does it just catch the black?
Do you have a call? How many times did you watch it before you were confident in your call?
I’ll give you a freeze frame of the pitch, see if it makes you any more confident. Here you go:
If you’re confident in either direction, wow! I am not. I thought it missed off the plate, slightly. But, in fact, it caught the plate, unambiguously, according to the pitch-tracking dot on the TV broadcast:
Even though the rulebook strike zone is three dimensions, I think we mostly consider the challenge of it—from the umpire’s perspective—to be two-dimensional. A pitch is too high or too low; it’s over the plate or it’s not. We presume it must be hard for the umpire to measure these two dimensions with perfect accuracy, and hence there are missed calls.
But the hardest dimension to get right has to be the third one. The pitch we’re talking about here caught the edge of the plate only by a little bit—but, more importantly, only for a little bit. Imagine a plate-width tunnel that goes from home plate to the pitcher’s mound; this pitch starts out on one side of the tunnel, then passes through the tunnel, then emerges out the other side of the tunnel—and the umpire has to decide whether the last step happened, say, four feet in front of him (making it a strike) or, say, four feet and two inches in front of him (which would make it a ball).
I don’t believe there has ever been even a broadcast camera that could accurately show us, the viewers, whether a pitch was a strike in all three dimensions. That’s why we need the strike zone dots, that’s why we need the Statcast 3-D strike zone graphics. Even the gold standard camera angle, the above-the-plate-looking-down shot, slowed down and paused frame by frame, distorts that third dimension. The frame I showed you above felt like the right one to freeze on, but, in fact, the pitch is probably actually crossing the plate at some point in the frame that came one tick earlier. Here’s that one:
The brain and angle trick us into thinking the blur is still approaching the plate in that frame—but it’s actually probably hovering right over the front of the plate right there. Now it’s a little easier to see how it could have caught a corner. And it’s very easy to appreciate how an umpire could miss such a call. It was a strike by an inch in one dimension and by an inch in another one.
And that’s just a fastball! It’s a Chris Sale freaky-release-angle fastball cutting all the way across the zone at a relatively steep angle, but still, it’s just a fastball, a relatively straight pitch. Imagine trying to make the same decisions on a sweeping slider thrown from a cross-fire delivery out of a 6-foot-7 pitcher’s extension. Seems impossible.
3. New Splash Hits
On July 13, Willson Contreras hit a home run to right field at St. Louis’ Busch Stadium. As the ball landed just over the edge of the right field wall, it revealed a stunning surprise: There’s a secret body of water out there.
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