The journeyman Cub outfielder Mike Tauchman’s third-most comparable peer, according to the Baseball Reference player-similarity scores, is a guy you probably don’t remember from the 1990s named Jacob Cruz. Tauchman and Cruz both played for a bunch of teams, including the Giants, and even as brief San Franciscans their statistics were quite similar:
Cruz: 52 games, 124 plate appearances, .210/.317/.333, 0.3 WAR
Tauchman: 64 games, 175 plate appearance, .178/.286/.283, 0.0 WAR
I reached out to Grant Brisbee, Professor of Giants Lore Policy at the Terrence E. Kennedy School, with this prompt:
Since you started following baseball, 753 players have appeared in a Giants uniform. If you were to rank them by Giants Lore Value, you’d presumably have something like Bonds and Posey and Bumgarner and Lincecum at the very top. And maybe Trey Lunsford would be no. 753. Where would Jacob Cruz rank? Where would Mike Tauchman rank?
Dr. Brisbee’s answer: “Jacob Cruz is down toward the bottom. Let’s say 701. Tauchman is up in the 400s. Maybe even 200s, heck, I don’t know what the scale is. But when you say the name you have an instant association with a happy-fun baseball moment.”
That moment was when Tauchman robbed the Dodgers’ Albert Pujols of what would have been a tie-breaking, walk-off home run on May 28, 2021. The Giants won the game in extra innings, which turned the NL West into a real race1, which the Giants would win by a single game—by the Tauchman game, as much as any other.
“That’s a rarer thing than most people think,” Brisbee said of such an association. “Guys can last five years on a team without a moment like that.”
Then, astoundingly, Tauchman almost did it again with a new team. In July this year, he had a walk-off robbery of what would have otherwise been a walk-off home run. Again it was against his team’s arch-rival—the Cardinals—and, again, it nearly swung a playoff spot, as the Cubs finished only one game behind2 the Marlins and Diamondbacks for the last wild card entry. A reader named Mike asked about this:
MIKE ASKS!
Given, as we know, that baseball is very spiritual, I wonder if there is something for you to explore about the Tauchman game-ending walk off home run robbery. And the fact that Tauchman had done something similar just two years ago. There's an added wrinkle here, which is that Elias Sports Bureau (nor any other stat company) keeps track of home run robberies, so we don't even know how many times something like this has happened before.
I do think that what happened with Tauchman (twice!) feels very close to a miracle. But before I get into that, a happy correction to Mike’s question: A stat company does keep track of home run robberies. Sports Info Solutions does, and has since 2004, so we know precisely how many times this has happened in the past two decades. If we limit it to players ending a game by robbing a home run that otherwise would have given the other team the lead, there have been five, including Tauchman’s this year (but not including Tauchman’s in 2021, because that one didn’t end the game). The other four:
Torii Hunter, robbing Richie Sexson, with Francisco Rodríguez on the mound, in April 2008. That day, Hunter had actually been rear-ended in his brand-new Bentley. That sounds like an awful day, but it’s not really, since “repairing your damaged brand-new Bentley” is the super-secret top tier of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. In the same way that Hunter’s car accident sounds like a bummer but was actually not, Francisco Rodríguez allowing a fly ball over the center field wall sounds like a bummer but was actually not.
Carlos Gómez, robbing Joey Votto, with—huh!—Francisco Rodríguez on the mound, in July 2013. This is one of my favorite pieces of single-shot baseball camerawork:
The ball descending past the giant, smiling Votto face; Jean Segura raising his fist to celebrate before Gómez has even landed; the camera quake one second later when the rest of the crowd registers it; but above all the surprise I feel every single time when Gómez leaps into the frame. Gómez, charmingly, jogged all the way into the infield without taking the ball out of his glove, until he finally reached the pitcher’s mound and presented the game ball to Rodríguez. “You did it!” he seemed to be saying, or maybe he was trolling him. (Rodríguez does not appear to have accepted the gift.)
Ender Inciarte, robbing Yoenis Céspedes, with Jim Johnson on the mound, in September 2016. The loss dropped the Mets into a three-way tie for the NL Wild Card spot. After the game, a player in the Atlanta clubhouse was reportedly “singing the theme to the Lion King, Céspedes’ walk-up song, in the shower, loud enough for reporters to hear.”
Keon Broxton, robbing Randal Grichuk, with Corey Knebel on the mound, in July 2017. Broxton had just entered the game as a defensive replacement for Hernán Pérez. Tommy Pham, who was on the Cardinals at the time, said of the catch: "Broxton is a super athlete. I make that play, but not too many guys make that play." Ha.
So that’s five times, although Tauchman and Inciarte are the only ones who’ve done this on the road, where the catch immediately ended the game and a home run would also have immediately ended the game. The others, if they’d allowed the home run, would still have had the bottom of the ninth to try to comeback. Inciarte and Tauchman are the only two whose catches came in a double-walk-off scenario, which to me could be the greatest moment in sports.
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Not long after his catch, Broxton appeared on an MLB Network segment about the art of the home run robbery. He was asked what the secret to a home run robbery is. His answer is revealingly direct: “I just—once the ball is hit, I just run, and once I get close to it I throw the glove up there. If it hits the glove it’s caught.”
Imagine a weird sport where somebody takes off sprinting as fast as they can, holding out a glove, and perhaps at some point diving or leaping into the air with the glove outstretched. The participants of this game find it isn’t very interesting. So to spice it up, they add a hitter, whose job is to try to hit a baseball to exactly where the fielder’s glove is. The highlight goes to the hitter who can hit the ball right into the glove. (This is, essentially, what “throwing a frisbee around in a big open park” becomes.)
Now, great catches are not nearly so simple as “the batter hit the ball into the glove.” They are acts of skill and concentration by the fielder, and of converting that final moment of uncertainty into closure. The fielder has to do the hard thing. But they are also gifts of opportunity. The batter needs to hit a baseball precisely to the end of the fielder’s range to make something special.
The walk-off home run robbery is the purest expression of opportunity finding fielder. And the people who have actually done it—they’re pretty up front about this fact. Let me give you some examples:
Tauchman, after his 2023 catch: “It’s kind of like you have that internal clock or feeling of, ‘I've kind of got to go up now.’ And it kind of just coincided with the ball coming down.”
Tauchman, after his 2021 catch: “The opportunities are so few and far between that when you get a chance at one, it’s pretty cool.”
Broxton in an on-field interview right after the game: “I’m actually just blessed that I was in a position.” And in a clubhouse interview a little later: “It's a blessing, and it's a lot of fun.”
After Gómez made his catch, he celebrated for three leaps—and then stopped to acknowledge providence:
Votto, the batter Gómez had robbed, appreciated what had happened: “The whole thing is really a random occurrence, and it's what makes baseball so special.”
And Sexson, the batter Hunter robbed, appreciated Hunter in a very specific way: “He has a knack for getting that opportunity.”
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I knew a guy whose dad was a doctor. Guy’s dad had told him once that his doctoring job was almost unbearably boring. He would treat patients for the same things over and over, order the tests, prescribe the pills, reassure the patients, write the post-visit notes—or, alternately, find himself unable to do anything about the many incurable ways there are to be hurt or sick. He rarely felt that he was important. But, the doctor told the son, about once a year he’d be in a situation where only he could do something incredible for somebody, like maybe even save their life, and he’d be there to do it. That one day made his whole life feel special3.
The glee that the walk-off home run robbery produces is almost unmatched in ball. “Guys were flying over the railing,” Braves interim manager Brian Snitker said after Inciarte's catch, which improved the Braves’ record to 61-91. “I don't think you could have won the World Series and had a bigger explosion than that right there.” Dansby Swanson ran out to Inciarte and did this never-before-seen knee pump:
It’s not just that it’s a great catch in high stakes. It’s the catharsis of the game being over, of all the shackles coming off. Look at the difference in Tauchman’s reactions between his first catch (which saved but only extended the game) and his second (which saved and *ended* the game):
And, multiplying all this emotion, there is the suspense. The ball in flight carries with it the game’s two most extreme possibilities, but even when it lands it is often hard to tell for several moments what had actually happened. When Inciarte made his catch, Mets fans first erupted in cheers, thinking it was a home run. Ten seconds after Carlos Gómez made his catch, Votto was still pointing frantically out toward him, apparently disbelieving that Gómez really had the ball and asking umpires to confirm. Some Mariners apparently didn’t think Hunter had caught Sexson’s home run until they got back and looked at replays, because Hunter never took the ball out of his glove. The outfielder who robs these home runs not only gets to make the play but, for a brief moment (or more) gets to be the only person who knows it. He gets to be the one who announces it with his leaps and gesticulatin’. He gets to kill the other team, and then he gets to actually tell them they’ve died. It might be too much power for one player to have.
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One of the things that a walk-off home run robbery makes you think about is luck. Surely, as you watch the clips of pitchers looking terrified and then relieved, or of hitters looking triumphant and then deflated, you think: Boy, that pitcher sure got lucky. Boy, that hitter sure got unlucky. “Albert hit a home run,” Walker Buehler said after Tauchman robbed that one. “It just so happened a guy jumped up and caught it.”
But only to a degree. Succeeding but just barely isn’t some form of cheating, and it’s not just some unfun technicality that a home run has to clear the wall annnnd the fielder. The pitcher kept the ball catchable. The batter didn’t get enough of it.
To me, the purest recipients of luck, good and bad, are actually the fielders. They know this. It is an act of absolute generosity that a ball was hit to where they could only just catch it, and in a moment that would undoubtedly never be topped or forgotten. That doesn’t diminish the fielder’s role in the heroic act. It’s just to say that it’s not enough to be talented. It takes billions of years of random chance to create the circumstances for that talent to matter in any perceivable way.
And, just as surely, those who had bad luck know it. Those who had bad luck are all the fielders who didn’t get a potential home run robbery hit to them that day. What a waste of a day spent living with walk-off-home-run-robbery levels of talent yet no walk-off home runs to rob. Maybe another time.
“I’m glad he was in there, for sure,” said Broxton’s manager, Craig Counsell, after the game. “Though Hernán says he would’ve made the play.”
Thanks to Mark Simon at Sports Info Solutions for research assistance.
Yes, the division was already close. But it’s hard to overstate how impossible it seemed that the Giants would be able to keep up with the Dodgers at that point, since they had faced a soft early schedule and gone 0-4 in their first four games against the far-superior Dodgers. Pujols’ home run would have made them 0-5 against the Dodgers, and you couldn’t see how they’d be able to win the NL West going, as seemed plausible in the moment, 0-19 against the Dodgers.
Okay, the playoff tiebreakers all went against the Cubs, so practically speaking Tauchman’s team finished two games out of the playoffs. Still!
This was back when I was a news journalist. Some time later, the son-of-the-doctor guy would tip me off to the biggest scoop of my career. I think when he told me the story about his dad, he might actually have known that was coming.
This was a fun post - thanks Sam.
Also, that is a heckuva cliffhanger buried in a footnote. Are there any hints that would help reveal the greatest scoop of your career?
2021 is still the Year of Ohtani...