I’m going to try to keep this brief-- Joe Posnanski’s current series on
https://theathletic.com/1843357/2020/05/29/60-moments-no-32-eric-hosmer-dashes-home-in-game-5-of-the-2015-world-series/
Baseball’s 60 Greatest Moments listed Eric Hosmer’s game-winning run home in the 2015 World Series as #32 yesterday, and it serves as a very late continuation of the conversations held on "Reader Posts" shortly after the Series (mainly in this thread here: http://boards.billjamesonline.com/showthread.php?5721-re-Hosmer-scoring-on-that-grounder-to-3rd ), and on "Hey Bill" from November 2-5 2015 (you can look that up yourself, in "Hey Bill" archives, no link needed). It was a fascinating discussion because it had the maximum possible disagreement on a judgment call: some people felt it was a no-brainer that Hosmer is dead out running unforced to home plate in that spot 90% of the time or better (and therefore he had no business even trying to score there) and others felt quite strongly that Hosmer had it all the way, that it was a heads-up play on Hosmer’s part, and that even a much better throw from Lucas Duda could not have nailed him. This was Bill’s position, and he didn’t budge from it even after hearing loud and strong arguments to the contrary. Here’s his final word, from "Hey Bill" of 11/5/2015:
A good throw, he's still safe. It's a quarter of a second to catch the ball and apply a tag. By the time the catcher catches the ball--IF he catches the ball, which is questionable, but IF he catches the ball, he doesn't have time to apply a tag.
Joe Pos sees it otherwise. From his current article in The Athletic:
It was a move that would fail probably 80 percent or 90 percent of the time, maybe more. A good throw gets Hosmer by 15 feet. A slightly bad throw still gets him. Your best hope is that the other team is fooled or caught off guard, but Mets first baseman Lucas Duda was not.
My aim here is not to get between these two giants of baseball writing, but simply to bring this new article to your attention, and to reflect on its relevance to another, recent article of mine https://www.billjamesonline.com/the_heavyweight_champ_of_baseball_part_8/?pg=2 , in which I discussed lengthily (and somewhat off the main topic there) a similar play, in which Jackie Robinson played the Eric Hosmer part and Eddie Mathews played the part of David Wright.
The plays are different (that game was a regular season contest in which Mathews was fielding a bunted ball to 3B, and so was much further from the third base bag when he caught it) with one essential similarity: Robinson expressed the point of similarity by saying that Mathews had to choose between keeping him on third base, or throwing out the batter/runner at first base. He couldn’t do both. If Mathews threw to first, then Robinson would score. If he held Robinson to third base, then the batter/runner would be safe at first.
Like the wide range of opinions on the Hosmer run on BJOL, my own opinions on these two very similar plays range so widely as to approach incomprehensibility, even to me. How can I possibly express admiration and awe for Robinson’s daring run while characterizing Hosner’s run as a brainfart? Those were and are my positions: similar plays, identical results, Robinson smart, Hosmer dumb.
Seems sort of inconsistent, don’t it? The simplest reconciliation of these two contrary opinions is to attribute them to rooting interests: I’m a Brooklyn Dodger fan and a New York Mets fan, so the same play for and against my teams will be viewed by me as diametrically opposite.
Except I don’t think so. One key difference between the two runs home is that Jackie Robinson is generally thought to be one of the smartest, quickest, most athletic baserunners of all time, and Eric Hosmer is—well, he’s not Jackie Robinson. What I mostly admired about Robinson in that article last month was his confidence, his knowing exactly what he was capable of doing, and what Eddie Mathews was capable of doing, which is what made the play so smart. But Hosmer, in addition to not being Jackie Robinson, an affliction that so many of us mortals have suffered from, had zero confidence that he could score on that play.
"As soon as he went to throw the ball," [Hosmer] said, "my instinct was to go. It maybe wasn’t the smartest decision in the world. But that’s just how we played. When there were two choices, we made the aggressive move. It’s just what we were about. So he made the move to throw, and I took off. What was going on in my head? I can remember it very clearly. It was: ‘Oh, (bleep)! I guess I’m doing this. I guess this is happening.’ And once you’ve got that in your mind, the only thing to do is put your head down and go."
Before this quote, Pos had quoted the Royals third-base coach identically to Hosmer’s quote. Well, I think the two quotes are identical—it’s hard to be sure, because the key word in both is censored from the quote, but I’m pretty sure it’s the same exact word:
"As soon as he took off, I thought, ‘Oh, (bleep)!'"
Generally, you don’t have everyone on one team thinking "Oh, [bleep]!" or "Oh, #%@&!" or even "Oh, fooey!" when a smart play is being made by a member of that team. I guarantee you, no one on Robinson’s team, or in Robinson’s uniform, ever thought "Oh, [bleep!]" when he tried to take an extra base, not then, not ever. And I will tell you this, if Duda’s throw had been on the money to home plate (as 98% of his throws that season were) and Hosmer had been out, and the Mets went on to win that game and the Series, Hosmer would be immortalized alongside Bill Buckner, Fred Snodgrass, and Bobby Doerr forever.
But he lucked out. He got away with taking a tremendous odds-against gamble. And I credit him with scoring the run, and beating the spirit out of the Mets. Scoring that run took a lot of guts as well as all the good luck in the world.
In closing (thought I’d never get here, right?) I’m reminded of yet another play we’ve often discussed here, also in the ninth inning of a Series-ending game, the play where Mickey Mantle was caught off-base by the Pirates at the end of the 1960 Series. With one out and a man on third, Yogi Berra pulled a sharp ground ball to the Pirates’ first baseman who could have thrown to second base to force Mantle out and then taken the return throw to get Berra and end the Series, 3-6-3. Instead (somewhat inexplicably) the Pirates’ first baseman chose to step on the bag and then to tag Mantle. Almost without fail, a runner trapped in the base path with the first baseman holding the ball is pretty much screwed. He can’t advance to second base because the first baseman can throw 90 feet accurately much quicker than the best runner can run 80 feet, and he can’t get back to first base very well because he has to get there through the first baseman who needs only to lay a glove on him to end the Series.
But somehow Mantle did just that. He got back to first base safely, wriggling past the Pirates’ first baseman holding the ball in his mitt, and the runner on third scored the tying run. (Svet gornischt helfen, as we Latinists say—Mazeroski’s HR came in the bottom half of the inning.) Some folks have attributed Mantle’s escape as brilliance on his part, clever baserunning that few men are capable of, but I’d call it more dumb luck. If you re-ran that play 100 times, I’d guess that Mantle gets tagged out by 98% of big-league first basemen. Maybe 99%.
But like Hosmer, Mantle had the good fortune to pull off a rare play that almost never works, in the final inning of a World Series where, with slightly less good luck, he would be remembered with the All-Time Screwups of World Series History.