Earlier, I wrote about Alex Gordon’s Little League triple that just maybe could or should have been a Little League home run. I didn’t dive deeply into the numbers; if you want to do that, here’s a tremendously informed and nuanced discussion of the play.
I do want to revisit one bit of my essay, though:
But something did bother me about the whole thing. I’ve seen a lot of baseball games. I don’t know how many, but I’ve been pretty obsessive about baseball for about 35 years, and we had two super-stations on our cable package in 1977 or ’78. My very rough estimate is that I’ve seen at least 45,000 innings of baseball. When Gordon’s liner got past Gregor Blanco, I thought triple. When Gordon’s liner then got kicked along the warning track by Juan Perez, I thought holy shit he’s going to score.
Okay, I actually yelled that. Sue me. The dog slept through the whole thing anyway.
So when the camera brought us back to Gordon stopping at third base, I was surprised. When the replays showed just how mad a dash home would have been, I just assumed that my 45,000 innings had misled me; that those two misadventures in the outfield hadn’t taken as long as I’d thought.
What I could have done (but didn’t) was actually look for some comparisons. There’s been a great deal of discussion of Gordon’s abbreviated trip around the bases, and at which point Brandon Crawford was ready to unleash a probably strong and accurate throw to Buster Posey.
But what about our perceptions? I wasn’t the only one who thought Gordon would try to score. And that was based on how long it took the Giants – specifically, left fielder Perez – to initially secure the baseball. But were our perceptions accurate? Our excitement certainly might have gotten the better of our judgment.
Thanks to the wonders of MLBAM, I looked at a dozen inside-the-park home runs, and simply counted the number of seconds between when the bat struck the ball and when an outfielder finally secured said ball. Granted, my measurements were terribly imprecise ... but they were precise enough, I think, to test the perceptions.
Actually, I looked at dozen attempted inside-the-park home runs. Plus Gordon’s non-attempt, which included (approximately!) nine seconds between ball-bat and Perez-ball. Jumping ahead, I can tell you that nine seconds is at the bottom of the range for inside-the-park home runs. When it’s 12 or 13 seconds, the hitter can practically jog between third and home; this happened three times. When it’s 11 seconds, he didn’t have to slide; this happened twice.
The really interesting intervals are 9 and 10 seconds. Then it’s all about the speed of the runner and the accuracy and strength and distance of the throws.
There were four 10-second intervals; three times the runner was safe, but Gregor Blanco got thrown out on the other one.
There were three 9-second intervals; twice the runner was safe, but Starling Marte was thrown out on the other one. But when the outfielder finally picked up Marte’s hit, he was in the left-field corner, only about 330 feet from the plate. In the other two cases, the outfielder was in deepest center field, roughly 400 feet away.
When Juan Perez finally grabbed the ball in the ninth inning of Game 7, he was probably around 380 feet away from the plate.
So yes, I think our perceptions were accurate. While there have certainly been any number of nine-second intervals that did not result in attempted inside-the-park home runs – I don’t have any idea how to find those – if we’ve seen enough baseball games, we have seen runners try to score on plays approximately like this, temporally.
Again, I don’t mean to suggest that Gordon should have scored, or should have tried to score. We’ve already hashed all that out, in various places. I do mean to suggest that our baseball instincts were not deceiving us, and that guys do sometimes score on plays much like this one.
