I’m rather unlikely to post about sports, but you have to watch this. I’m not even a baseball fan, which I feel a bit sacrilegious saying as I sit just a few miles from Wrigley Field, but unless you know absolutely nothing about baseball, you should watch this.
El Mago magic!
Have you ever seen anything like this?! pic.twitter.com/aHQs6eAxCG
— MLB (@MLB) May 27, 2021
{ 22 comments }
HARMON DOW 05.27.21 at 7:06 pm
See, if you were a Cubs fan, you wouldn’t be surprised at anything Javi Báez does. You’d be surprised if he doesn’t.
AWOL 05.27.21 at 7:13 pm
Horrific mental lapse by the first baseman.
jsrtheta 05.27.21 at 7:42 pm
I lived two blocks away from Wrigley Field. Hell, I even worked at Murphy’s Bleachers!
But the Cubs never played like this.
BruceJ 05.27.21 at 8:08 pm
Well, I can honestly say now I’ve seen someone steal first base…
Brett 05.27.21 at 9:14 pm
I didn’t even know you could steal first base. That was awesome.
Alan White 05.27.21 at 10:24 pm
That is amazing–thanks for posting it!
William Berry 05.28.21 at 3:23 am
What AWOL said.
This is an amazing play only to the extent of how ridiculously misplayed it was defensively.
@Brett: the hitter didn’t really steal first base. The first baseman had abandoned the bag by not touching it. After receiving the throw from 3B he had only to step on the bag for the hitter to be out. He would then have had plenty of time to nail the runner from third, if he were still trying to steal home (which he probably wouldn’t have attempted, but for the weird play of the first baseman).
William Berry 05.28.21 at 5:06 am
Correction to my previous comment:
There were two outs. All Craig had to do was step on the bag. Then it wouldn’t matter what the runner at third base did.
J-D 05.28.21 at 9:21 am
My level of baseball knowledge was sufficient to almost understand this.
So I looked up base stealing on Wikipedia and discovered, among other things, that officially ‘stealing first’ does not exist because it’s always officially scored as something else.
Also that baseball has official statisticians whose job it is to record officially who gets the credit (or, I suppose, the blame) for events during the game. Does any other sport have anything similar?
Matt 05.28.21 at 11:44 am
Also that baseball has official statisticians whose job it is to record officially who gets the credit (or, I suppose, the blame) for events during the game. Does any other sport have anything similar?
I assume you mean the “official scorer” at each stadium? In most major N. American sports there are official scorers who note and assign credit or blame – in basketball, assists, points, rebounds, steals, turn-overs, etc. This is done in the first case by people at the stadium, but sometimes these can be overturned on review. (It doesn’t happen often.) Basketball has become incredibly sophisticated in tracking nearly everything that happens, to the point where there is more information than people can really use, but not all of it is goes into “official” statistics. Lots of it is used for “advanced stats” that try to assign credit for team success in more advanced (and controversial) ways. There is also official scorers in (American) football, in Hockey, etc. It would be a surprise to me if there were not such people in soccer, Rugby, AFL, cricket, etc., but I don’t have any first-hand information on that.
byomtov 05.28.21 at 2:01 pm
It’s logically impossible to steal first, because stealing a base means advancing to the next base while the pitcher is throwing, or about to throw, to the batter.
There is no one able to advance to first base this way, because no one is “on home plate”.
And yes, baseball keeps careful track of everything, and has for a long time, even when the assignment of blame makes no difference whatsoever to the score of the game.
The box score and several of the first performance measures were invented by Henry Chadwick in the 19th century.
J, not that one 05.28.21 at 2:12 pm
Wow. That’s like fifth grade levels of play by the first baseman. The batter did exactly the right thing.
J, not that one 05.28.21 at 2:24 pm
The more I watch it, the stupider it gets. Baez’s play only makes sense if the ball was foul. Why did he think he had the ball in the first place?
I did think the runner was out at home, though.
J, not that one 05.28.21 at 4:20 pm
On second thought, it also makes sense if the ball got into the outfield, giving the batter time to round first and head toward second, at which point the first baseman caught the ball and correctly headed toward the plate with it to toss to the catcher as soon as he safely could, only to be thwarted by a strangely clothed streaker in the base path with whom security would surely deal quickly enough.
Sorry about the multiple posts.
LFC 05.29.21 at 1:33 am
Wm Berry @8 says all the first baseman had to do was step on the bag. Agreed, but the first baseman also could have touched Baez with his (the first baseman’s) glove with the ball in it. Seems that wd have been very possible if he’d made the effort, and that also would have resulted in the out. (If I’m remembering some basic baseball rules correctly.)
BJN 05.29.21 at 3:18 pm
While it has its own scoring designation, if the pitcher throws strike three and the catcher can’t catch the ball, the runner is allowed to run to first base (as long as no runner is already there), which is very much like stealing first. It’s still recorded as a strikeout even though no out is made, so a pitcher can get 4 strikeouts in an inning
J-D 05.30.21 at 1:04 am
What I see is consistent with the following explanation:
The first baseman was confident that, despite all the dodging, the batter-runner (a new term I just picked up from Wikipedia) could not get away from him. He (the first baseman) was sure that he could get the out by tagging the batter-runner, so there was no need to go to a lot of effort to catch him more quickly; the dodging was a waste of effort, just delaying the inevitable.
This explanation can be reconciled with the obvious fact that the batter-runner did get past the first baseman and avoid being tagged out, by the additional explanation that the first baseman’s attention was briefly but massively diverted from the batter-runner by the arrival, unexpected by him, of the runner from third base at home, and that the batter-runner was able to exploit this distraction to his advantage because he was better prepared mentally.
LFC 05.30.21 at 7:10 pm
J-D @17
That’s right, I think, on some level, but what strikes me from having watched the clip only a couple of times — I didn’t study it, just watched it casually — is that the first baseman was playing with fire by being so cat-and-mouse-ish. If he’d just gone after Baez and tagged him, instead of loping down the first base line while Baez tried to dodge him, this wouldn’t have happened.
P.s. I’m definitely not a serious baseball fan (though I am a US-ian). First basemen maybe are often casual and cat-and-mouse-ish in this situation. But with a runner on third and the inning apparently almost over, he should have run after Baez briskly, tagged him, and finished it. IMO.
P.p.s. Sure, his attention was diverted by the guy on third running to home plate, but these players are being paid enormous amounts of money to do what they do, presumably competently. We’re all human and we all make mistakes (or errors, as they’re called in baseball), but this was just bad play.
J, not that one 05.30.21 at 8:49 pm
I was wondering whether tagging and rundowns are more common in street ball than refereed leagues. The first thing I learned when I started playing in the latter was what a force out is, and that rundowns are strongly discouraged (not least because they risk injury). After years of gym class and summer camp play and instruction from my dad, I had no idea. I’m pretty sure my dad even told me it was okay to throw the wiffleball at my brother if I thought I could get him out that way.
J-D 05.30.21 at 11:58 pm
The explanation was not intended to be exculpatory.
LFC 05.31.21 at 1:48 pm
@ J, not that one
I don’t know, but if I had to take a guess I’d say the answer to your question is yes.
Alan White 06.01.21 at 2:01 am
Run-downs in the pros almost always occur from failed attempts to steal from on-base. Tags are then necessary because unless the runner is tagged off-base, then arriving on-base either advancing or not they are deemed safe. There is the odd occasion that the runner avoids the tag but the base is already occupied by a teammate, then the runner is deemed out. What’s so unusual about this OP case is that the defensive first baseman tried to chase the batter back to home, where of course he could not be safe at all even if he made it (he could be safe at first without being tagged, and then amazingly was, and advanced to second on a bad throw). This was as others say all on the defense first baseman, who just lost his mind!
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