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Apr. 18th, 2012 05:31 pmSo, week two of the once a week baseball post that nobody reading cares about.
I haven't watched all that much baseball in the past week, but I caught an inning of the Mets game on the radio at lunch today. They had a first and third situation and it got me reminiscing about the Little League strategy for first and third, one out situation, which is not at all the same as the major league strategy in the same situation, though there are some constants.
First and third is always dangerous, because you have a runner very close to home with no force behind him and no runner behind him, so there's a lot of degrees of freedom in the runners' motion. On a ground ball to the left side of the infield, the infielder has to be very careful to hold the runner on third, typically with a pump fake of some sort, before throwing the runner out at first or second. Unless it's an easy double play ball, when a different kind of haste precludes the pump fake. This kind of dynamic stays the same for Little League and big leagues.
Where things get interesting are in stolen bases. The runner on first, in many cases, would be ceded second base in Little League. This is because Little Leaguers don't have as strong arms as big leaguers. If you had first and third and the runner on first took off for second on a pitch, the catcher and shortstop would have to throw extremely fast to catch the runner on third who waits for the first throw and then takes off for home.
The advantage is so much on the runner that you'd sometimes deliberately have the runner on first run slowly from first to second to try to entice the catcher to make the throw. This can't be taken too far, though, because if the batter puts the ball in the air you might get caught between first and second.
And so a counterplay was developed where instead of the catcher throwing to second base, the shortstop would slip in onto the infield grass and the catcher would throw it to him and he'd immediately throw back, trying to draw the runner on third off by making him think you were throwing to second base.
And the other thing about Little League, besides weaker arms, was less accurate throwing. So that part of the reason to force them to throw to second base was the thirty percent chance the ball would end up in the outfield. And the same thing could happen with the throw to the shortstop on that counterplay, and so you might conceivably as the team at-bat try to get the defensive team to run the counterplay so that when the ball from the overanxious catcher sailed into the outfield you'd score. (I remember we did run-down drills, or 'pickle drills', the practice getting a runner stuck between bases. The runner's strategy is to force as many throws as possible, because the more throws, the more likely a mistake will be made.)
It's just... the levels of feedback and counter-strategy got surprisingly deep without being incoherent or parodic. It was never clear who was outsmarting who until the play was over, and I love baseball as a game of near-simultaneous game theoretic responses.
I haven't watched all that much baseball in the past week, but I caught an inning of the Mets game on the radio at lunch today. They had a first and third situation and it got me reminiscing about the Little League strategy for first and third, one out situation, which is not at all the same as the major league strategy in the same situation, though there are some constants.
First and third is always dangerous, because you have a runner very close to home with no force behind him and no runner behind him, so there's a lot of degrees of freedom in the runners' motion. On a ground ball to the left side of the infield, the infielder has to be very careful to hold the runner on third, typically with a pump fake of some sort, before throwing the runner out at first or second. Unless it's an easy double play ball, when a different kind of haste precludes the pump fake. This kind of dynamic stays the same for Little League and big leagues.
Where things get interesting are in stolen bases. The runner on first, in many cases, would be ceded second base in Little League. This is because Little Leaguers don't have as strong arms as big leaguers. If you had first and third and the runner on first took off for second on a pitch, the catcher and shortstop would have to throw extremely fast to catch the runner on third who waits for the first throw and then takes off for home.
The advantage is so much on the runner that you'd sometimes deliberately have the runner on first run slowly from first to second to try to entice the catcher to make the throw. This can't be taken too far, though, because if the batter puts the ball in the air you might get caught between first and second.
And so a counterplay was developed where instead of the catcher throwing to second base, the shortstop would slip in onto the infield grass and the catcher would throw it to him and he'd immediately throw back, trying to draw the runner on third off by making him think you were throwing to second base.
And the other thing about Little League, besides weaker arms, was less accurate throwing. So that part of the reason to force them to throw to second base was the thirty percent chance the ball would end up in the outfield. And the same thing could happen with the throw to the shortstop on that counterplay, and so you might conceivably as the team at-bat try to get the defensive team to run the counterplay so that when the ball from the overanxious catcher sailed into the outfield you'd score. (I remember we did run-down drills, or 'pickle drills', the practice getting a runner stuck between bases. The runner's strategy is to force as many throws as possible, because the more throws, the more likely a mistake will be made.)
It's just... the levels of feedback and counter-strategy got surprisingly deep without being incoherent or parodic. It was never clear who was outsmarting who until the play was over, and I love baseball as a game of near-simultaneous game theoretic responses.