On Tuesday night, the A's Yoenis Cespedes had an outfield assist that's gotten a lot of attention this week. In case you hadn't already seen it, or didn't click on any of those six links to other websites where you could see it, here it is:
I love this play. My favorite plays in baseball are all tag plays: pick-offs, run-downs, steal attempts, and (most of all) outfield assists. At no other point in a game is there as much simultaneous action as when a runner decides to challenge a fielder's arm. The outfielder chasing the ball into a corner or sitting back on a pop-up to set up a throw home, the runner using the base as starting blocks and watching out of the corner of an eye for ball to hit mitt, or chugging around second looking for third on a hit-and-run. Players a full hundred yards away from each other are locked in battle. Base coaches wave their arms, infielders position for the relay, everyone is standing.
I love outfield assists. My YouTube history is as embarrassing as any millennial male's, in my case mostly because of how many videos I've watched of nothing but outfield assists. But if you have already seen this "All Time," "For the Ages," "Unbelievable" outfield assist on another site (or six), prepare for the least impressed poster you've seen yet.
Cespedes' throw is great. It's great because it was so long, because it was so accurate, because it saved a run against a division rival. But I don't understand why it's gone viral. It was long, but somewhere between many and most throws from center to home, or right to third, are longer. And often thrown on a line--it's pretty simple physics that a ball thrown 300 feet along a high-arching path like Cespdes' had to have been thrown slower than a ball that travels 300 feet on a level trajectory. Simple in concept, at least. But why not complicate it with some actual calculation?
My first question was, how fast did that ball travel relative to the ground? This is definitely a convenient way to ask the question, since ignoring the arc means the trig textbook can stay on the shelf. But it's also the relevant one, since the fielder's object is to get the ball across the field as quickly as possible.
So, it's just a matter of distance divided by time. First up, time. I replayed the YC video three or four times with the stopwatch on my phone getting about 2.8s from YC's hand to Derek Norris' glove. But not only is that not precise enough, hand-timing is terribly inaccurate. Hand-timing is what lets every high school runningback think they run a 4.4 40-yd dash. What I really need is a frame-by-frame slomo replay with a real-time stopwatch to mark exactly how long the ball took from hand-to-glove. I used SnagIt to pull an mp4 of the play, but then couldn't find a player that could show a timestamp with even tenths of a second. Eventually I placed a browser-based stopwatch next to the player window to make the stopwatch part of the video capture and was able to zero in on 2.796s (but I still say hand-timing is terrible).
As for distance, I first went with the 318-foot number that other reports have been using. Although that puts the average ground velocity at 77.55 mph for the full flight, when I started using ballpark overlays from hittrackeronline.com, I suspected the 318-ft figure was off. Here's the overlay for Angel Stadium. The warning track, grass, and foul line meet at a point 275 feet from home plate--a point about 10 feet in front of where Cespedes uncorked (see below).
Calling the throw 285 feet, the average ground velocity falls to 69.50 mph.
But, is that bad? Good? Was the arc necessary to get a throw all the way home from that distance? How long should a throw from 285 feet out take? With a stopwatch already set up next to a video archive, and my SnagIt software installed, it was time to dive into that embarrassing YouTube history for some context. Longer throws will lose more to air resistance (and necessary arc) than shorter throws, and balls that bounce will slow down more than those that hang in the air. Those factors might make this an imperfect measure of release velocity, but if we want to evaluate the ability to get a ball from A to B, it's hard to argue against.
Let's break down some film.
First up, Yasiel Puig
Fastest: 82.48 (Marlon Byrd @ 3B, 225 feet)
Best 3: 81.57 average
Puig's highlight reel is short, for now, because he was only called up a year ago. Thanks to these throws to third and first, I had to diagram a ballpark on graph paper to triangulate distances not measured to home. Drawing it out meant sinking even more time into this useless project, but I figure I can make up for that by using it to break down lots and lots and lots of film.
I quickly learned that the closer the throw is to the warning track, the easier it is to estimate the distance, and the less error in the estimate matters. In other cases, like this one, I can't tell if Puig is 150 feet away and throwing 80mph, or 180ft away and huffing it in at 95mph. So I left it out.
Next I went to Josh Reddick. As a Rangers fan I'm familiar with the A's and regarded Reddick as the best arm in the Oakland outfield (as does Bob Melvin, apparently, who puts him and not Cespedes in RF). This "arm compilation" video might the best portfolio of anyone in the majors. It's an exhilarating two and a half minutes.
Fastest: 83.78 (Aubrey Huff at home, 290 feet)
Best 3: 83.06 average
Staying the AL West, and going back to Cuba, I was really curious to see how Leonys Martin fared in this. Just like it takes the repetition of seeing tens of thousands of pitches for a hitter to recognize the spin on a breaking ball from the "normal" fastball spin, after watching so many games with MLB.tv over the past few years--and almost half in Rangers ballpark--I have well-established expectations for things like how long an infielder has to get the throw to first when you can't see the runner, or how a ball that leaves the frame too quickly is probably an infield pop-up, etc. These are subtle things, but they form the necessary basis for really appreciating greatness. That sense of how long an infielder has to get a throw to first? It's what makes me appreciate Mike Trout's speed when I see him already two steps past the base when the throw arrives. The ball that exits the screen so quickly I assume it had to have gone straight up? Giancarlo Stanton does that and it's a 450-foot line drive. All that to say, I know Leonys Martin's arm is special because I know (or knew) how quickly a camera in the upper deck of Rangers Ballpark pans from right field to third base on 1st-to-3rd hit-and-runs. With Martin, they can't keep up.
Fastest: 83.62 (Yunel Escobar at home, 260 feet)
Best 3: 82.75 average
Those are the three active players I analyzed (sorry for not counting you, Ichiro). For balance, I looked at three players who are either retired or should be.
Bo Jackson
Fastest: 84.83
Best 3: 81.60 average
Somewhere long down the list of "what if?" questions to ask about Bo is "what if we had video of his throw to get Harold Reynolds?" Joe Posnanski wrote a great piece about that throw on Wednesday, and how the mystery around it is what makes it memorable. Now on to more scrutiny and demystification...
Rick Ankiel
Fastest: 85.62 (throw home, runner retreating, 325 feet)
Best 3: 85.32 average
Ankiel has four throws faster than any clocked by the younger three, and three that I estimated at 325 feet or more, each of which arrived in the air. The fact that no out was recorded here keeps this from really counting as a highlight, but my gosh.
Ichiro
Fastest: 91.18
Best 3: 90.82 average
Ichiro clocks the six fastest throws I found. Four of these averaged over 90mph relative to the ground, and Ankiel is the only other to even top 85. As much as the "five tools" are celebrated, it's hard to imagine a player doing more to absolutely max out four of them (speed, arm, hitting for average, fielding) without being in the conversation for "GOAT" status.
After all the videos I watched, Yoenis Cespedes' throw that I "wouldn't believe" was the 48th-fastest out of 51 highlights.
Other notes:
- Too few videos showed the release of the throw before cutting away to the runner. It's what I love about these plays--all the pieces moving at once--but it also makes it harder for producers to know which camera to use, or for me to nerd out clocking these things.
- What is the point of a slow-motion replay of an outfield assist highlight? The real-time speed is what makes it so impressive. A lot of times the only replay that showed both the throw and the catch (needed to figure out the time and speed) was the slow-motion replay.
- Watching throws to the plate over and over, I saw a lot of nasty collisions with catchers that already look barbaric just two months into being banned. Good riddance.
- If you're interested in seeing my raw data, I'd be happy to share it with you. The timestamps I'm confident in, as long as the video is real-time. The distance estimates are just that--estimates. My spreadsheet has all relevant information I could gather for each throw I coded, like opponent, runner, date, stadium, so if you want to question my distance estimate for any given play you'll be able to match it up to video.
I love this play. My favorite plays in baseball are all tag plays: pick-offs, run-downs, steal attempts, and (most of all) outfield assists. At no other point in a game is there as much simultaneous action as when a runner decides to challenge a fielder's arm. The outfielder chasing the ball into a corner or sitting back on a pop-up to set up a throw home, the runner using the base as starting blocks and watching out of the corner of an eye for ball to hit mitt, or chugging around second looking for third on a hit-and-run. Players a full hundred yards away from each other are locked in battle. Base coaches wave their arms, infielders position for the relay, everyone is standing.
I love outfield assists. My YouTube history is as embarrassing as any millennial male's, in my case mostly because of how many videos I've watched of nothing but outfield assists. But if you have already seen this "All Time," "For the Ages," "Unbelievable" outfield assist on another site (or six), prepare for the least impressed poster you've seen yet.
Cespedes' throw is great. It's great because it was so long, because it was so accurate, because it saved a run against a division rival. But I don't understand why it's gone viral. It was long, but somewhere between many and most throws from center to home, or right to third, are longer. And often thrown on a line--it's pretty simple physics that a ball thrown 300 feet along a high-arching path like Cespdes' had to have been thrown slower than a ball that travels 300 feet on a level trajectory. Simple in concept, at least. But why not complicate it with some actual calculation?
My first question was, how fast did that ball travel relative to the ground? This is definitely a convenient way to ask the question, since ignoring the arc means the trig textbook can stay on the shelf. But it's also the relevant one, since the fielder's object is to get the ball across the field as quickly as possible.
So, it's just a matter of distance divided by time. First up, time. I replayed the YC video three or four times with the stopwatch on my phone getting about 2.8s from YC's hand to Derek Norris' glove. But not only is that not precise enough, hand-timing is terribly inaccurate. Hand-timing is what lets every high school runningback think they run a 4.4 40-yd dash. What I really need is a frame-by-frame slomo replay with a real-time stopwatch to mark exactly how long the ball took from hand-to-glove. I used SnagIt to pull an mp4 of the play, but then couldn't find a player that could show a timestamp with even tenths of a second. Eventually I placed a browser-based stopwatch next to the player window to make the stopwatch part of the video capture and was able to zero in on 2.796s (but I still say hand-timing is terrible).
As for distance, I first went with the 318-foot number that other reports have been using. Although that puts the average ground velocity at 77.55 mph for the full flight, when I started using ballpark overlays from hittrackeronline.com, I suspected the 318-ft figure was off. Here's the overlay for Angel Stadium. The warning track, grass, and foul line meet at a point 275 feet from home plate--a point about 10 feet in front of where Cespedes uncorked (see below).
Calling the throw 285 feet, the average ground velocity falls to 69.50 mph.
But, is that bad? Good? Was the arc necessary to get a throw all the way home from that distance? How long should a throw from 285 feet out take? With a stopwatch already set up next to a video archive, and my SnagIt software installed, it was time to dive into that embarrassing YouTube history for some context. Longer throws will lose more to air resistance (and necessary arc) than shorter throws, and balls that bounce will slow down more than those that hang in the air. Those factors might make this an imperfect measure of release velocity, but if we want to evaluate the ability to get a ball from A to B, it's hard to argue against.
Let's break down some film.
Fastest: 82.48 (Marlon Byrd @ 3B, 225 feet)
Best 3: 81.57 average
Puig's highlight reel is short, for now, because he was only called up a year ago. Thanks to these throws to third and first, I had to diagram a ballpark on graph paper to triangulate distances not measured to home. Drawing it out meant sinking even more time into this useless project, but I figure I can make up for that by using it to break down lots and lots and lots of film.
I quickly learned that the closer the throw is to the warning track, the easier it is to estimate the distance, and the less error in the estimate matters. In other cases, like this one, I can't tell if Puig is 150 feet away and throwing 80mph, or 180ft away and huffing it in at 95mph. So I left it out.
Next I went to Josh Reddick. As a Rangers fan I'm familiar with the A's and regarded Reddick as the best arm in the Oakland outfield (as does Bob Melvin, apparently, who puts him and not Cespedes in RF). This "arm compilation" video might the best portfolio of anyone in the majors. It's an exhilarating two and a half minutes.
Fastest: 83.78 (Aubrey Huff at home, 290 feet)
Best 3: 83.06 average
Staying the AL West, and going back to Cuba, I was really curious to see how Leonys Martin fared in this. Just like it takes the repetition of seeing tens of thousands of pitches for a hitter to recognize the spin on a breaking ball from the "normal" fastball spin, after watching so many games with MLB.tv over the past few years--and almost half in Rangers ballpark--I have well-established expectations for things like how long an infielder has to get the throw to first when you can't see the runner, or how a ball that leaves the frame too quickly is probably an infield pop-up, etc. These are subtle things, but they form the necessary basis for really appreciating greatness. That sense of how long an infielder has to get a throw to first? It's what makes me appreciate Mike Trout's speed when I see him already two steps past the base when the throw arrives. The ball that exits the screen so quickly I assume it had to have gone straight up? Giancarlo Stanton does that and it's a 450-foot line drive. All that to say, I know Leonys Martin's arm is special because I know (or knew) how quickly a camera in the upper deck of Rangers Ballpark pans from right field to third base on 1st-to-3rd hit-and-runs. With Martin, they can't keep up.
Fastest: 83.62 (Yunel Escobar at home, 260 feet)
Best 3: 82.75 average
Those are the three active players I analyzed (sorry for not counting you, Ichiro). For balance, I looked at three players who are either retired or should be.
Bo Jackson
Fastest: 84.83
Best 3: 81.60 average
Somewhere long down the list of "what if?" questions to ask about Bo is "what if we had video of his throw to get Harold Reynolds?" Joe Posnanski wrote a great piece about that throw on Wednesday, and how the mystery around it is what makes it memorable. Now on to more scrutiny and demystification...
Rick Ankiel
Fastest: 85.62 (throw home, runner retreating, 325 feet)
Best 3: 85.32 average
Ankiel has four throws faster than any clocked by the younger three, and three that I estimated at 325 feet or more, each of which arrived in the air. The fact that no out was recorded here keeps this from really counting as a highlight, but my gosh.
Ichiro
Fastest: 91.18
Best 3: 90.82 average
Ichiro clocks the six fastest throws I found. Four of these averaged over 90mph relative to the ground, and Ankiel is the only other to even top 85. As much as the "five tools" are celebrated, it's hard to imagine a player doing more to absolutely max out four of them (speed, arm, hitting for average, fielding) without being in the conversation for "GOAT" status.
After all the videos I watched, Yoenis Cespedes' throw that I "wouldn't believe" was the 48th-fastest out of 51 highlights.
Other notes:
- Too few videos showed the release of the throw before cutting away to the runner. It's what I love about these plays--all the pieces moving at once--but it also makes it harder for producers to know which camera to use, or for me to nerd out clocking these things.
- What is the point of a slow-motion replay of an outfield assist highlight? The real-time speed is what makes it so impressive. A lot of times the only replay that showed both the throw and the catch (needed to figure out the time and speed) was the slow-motion replay.
- Watching throws to the plate over and over, I saw a lot of nasty collisions with catchers that already look barbaric just two months into being banned. Good riddance.
- If you're interested in seeing my raw data, I'd be happy to share it with you. The timestamps I'm confident in, as long as the video is real-time. The distance estimates are just that--estimates. My spreadsheet has all relevant information I could gather for each throw I coded, like opponent, runner, date, stadium, so if you want to question my distance estimate for any given play you'll be able to match it up to video.
posted by J. Edward Guthrie at
2:53 AM
|
0 comments
