Tip Your Cap

Read this because it will make you a better baseball fan and human being…

Semi-recently I wrote about attending two Washington Nationals/Kansas City Royals games and complained about bad fundamentals, specifically mentioning Royals outfielder MJ Melendez overthrowing the cutoff man and allowing a trail runner to move into scoring position which shouldn’t happen in a junior varsity high school game, much less the Big Leagues.

Then last Thursday the Kansas City Star sports section featured this headline: “Royals fall to St. Louis after Melendez base running mistake.”

So my first thought was, “Jesus H. Christ, what’s he done now?” but after reading the story, the mistake turned out to be writing that headline.

BTW: Generally speaking reporters don’t write the headlines that appear above their stories – that’s done by editors – and at no point in the published story did the reporter call the play a “mistake.”

In the interest of fairness (an urge I only feel occasionally so enjoy it while it lasts) I have decided to defend MJ Melendez and explain why he didn’t make a mistake.

Understanding why Melendez did the right thing will make you a more knowledgeable baseball fan and a better person in general and improve your marriage, add luster to your hair and also cause you to lose 10-to-15 pounds of stubborn belly fat and maybe we should get to the explanation because I think I’ve already oversold this thing.

Here’s what happened

So it’s the fourth inning and the score is 0-0 and MJ Melendez is on second base with two outs. Michael Massey singles to right field and Melendez tries to score, but is thrown out at the plate by Cardinals outfielder Brendan Donavan and the Royals go on to lose 2-1.

The Kansas City Star says Melendez made a mistake. Here’s why it wasn’t and we’ll start with “SOS” which stands for:

• Score

• Outs

• Stage of Game  

(As usual there are exceptions to everything I’m about to say which is pretty much true of everything in baseball so you might as well get used to it and I don’t want to hear any complaining or I’ll turn this car around right now.)

I had to learn all this stuff to be a good third-base coach, which I wanted to be because I wasn’t talented enough to be a good anything-else and if you want to be a good baseball fan and more logical human being, you should learn this stuff, too.

First up…

Score

If you’re down by six runs you don’t take chances to score one run because you need a lot more runs than that, but if the score is 0-0 one run is significant and it’s worth taking risks to score it.

To make good decisions you also need to think about “risk and reward” as in what are you risking and what’s the reward?

Risking an out to score one run and make the score 6-1 isn’t much of a reward so you don’t do it (most of the time). Risking an out so you can take the lead 1-0 is a whole different deal; now the reward is worth the risk.

So based on the 0-0 score, Melendez trying to make it home was a worthwhile risk.

Outs

Here’s the formula and you might want to write this down:

With 0 outs you take zero risk.

If there’s nobody out you might be starting a Big Inning where you put up a “crooked number” (something other than “0” or “1”) so why settle for one run when you might score three, all of which changes if you think one run will be significant and we’ll have more on that later.

With 1 out you take risks to get to one place, third base.

If you can get to third base with less than two outs you can score without a hit on a sac fly or an infield groundout, although once again the thinking can change, depending on the score. If you’re down by six runs you’re going to need a Big Inning so you don’t take risks to get to third base, but if you’re up by six runs go ahead and take a chance at adding a “tack-on run” because you’re not risking that much.

With two outs you take risks to get to two places, second base and home.

With two down you take risks to get to second base because then you’re in scoring position and a single away from scoring (at least theoretically) and singles are the most common hits by far.

For example:

In 2022 there were 25,877 Big League singles and 5,215 Big League home runs so you’re almost five times as likely to hit a single as a homer and while we’re at it, there were 163,465 at-bats so if your game plan revolves around hitting home runs you’re counting on something that happens about three percent of the time.

But how about a really good home-run hitter?

Last season Aaron Judge led the Major Leagues with 62 homers, but also had 570 at-bats which means the best home-run hitter in baseball failed to hit a home run about 90 percent of the time so I wouldn’t bet my house on Aaron hitting one whenever I need him to.

Anyway…

With two outs you also take chances to score because if you stop at third base you need the on-deck hitter to get a hit, so before you throw up a stop sign, you better think about who’s up next. (The story was pretty vague about Royals third base coach Vance Wilson’s role in all this so we’re going to ignore specifics and focus on how third base coaches have to think in general.)

OK, so you got Melendez coming into third and if you throw up the stop sign that means the on-deck hitter has to get another two-out hit and in this case that on-deck hitter was Maikel Garcia who at this moment is a .277 career hitter who hits .203 versus right-handed pitchers and the Cardinals pitcher – Miles Mikolas – is a right-handed pitcher who was having a very good day. (Mikolas would go eight scoreless innings and Garcia would go 0-for-3 with two punchouts.)

Here’s how to think about all that:

If you hold the runner, Garcia has maybe a 20% chance of coming through with a hit – which is probably giving him way too much credit because he hits .203 against all right-handed pitchers and Mikolas is better than average, but 20% makes the math easier so let’s stick with that.  

If the Cardinals outfielder – Brendan Donovan – had to make the same play 10 times and you think he would he throw out Melendez 9 times, you hold the runner and go with the on-deck hitter because that gives you slightly better odds. But if you think Donavan would throw out Melendez 7 or fewer times, you send the runner home.

And just to complicate your thinking in case I haven’t already accomplished that:

Plays at the plate are considered notoriously difficult because it takes at least one long, accurate throw and a lot of long throws bounce at least once and lots of weird things can happen on those bounces and then the ball has to be caught by the catcher who is wearing enough equipment to compete in a Renaissance Festival Joust and he has to catch the ball while wearing a mitt that could also be used as a Flotation Device in the Event of a Water Landing and then the catcher has to turn and make a tag without knowing exactly where the runner is.

Which reminds me…

Throws to home plate from right field are the hardest to handle because the catcher can’t see the runner coming like he can if the throw is from left or center field. If you watch the replay the Cardinals catcher – Wilson Contreras – misses Melendez with his first tag attempt because he has no idea where Melendez is. 

So final answer: based on the number of outs, Melendez did the right thing.

Stage of game

Generally speaking ballgames have nine innings so divide those up into thirds and the first three innings tell you how to play the middle three innings and the middle three innings tell you how to play the final three innings and now let’s take a look at how all that works in Real Life:

If after the first three innings the score is 5-4 you know there’s probably going to be a lot of scoring that day so you don’t want to play for one run because you’re probably going to need a lot of runs to win. (That thinking can change based on bullpens, but we’ve got enough to think about already so we’ll ignore relief pitchers for now.)

Also…

Pitchers don’t have the same stuff every day so after three innings you have an idea if the opposing pitcher is throwing well and Miles Mikolas was, so you really need to push it on the base paths because you’re not going to get a lot of scoring opportunities and when you get one you can’t be passive.

Being cautious on the base paths and hoping for another hit is a bad bet.

And in the fourth inning you also know it’s probably too early to pinch hit for the on-deck hitter and if you’re playing the game correctly you need to know if the manager plans to pinch hit and who the pinch hitter will be and what relief pitcher might be brought in to face the pinch hitter and what the odds are in all those different match-ups.

If you’re not thinking like that, the game is too fast for you and you need to let someone else coach third base.

So…

Based on score, outs and stage of game, MJ Melendez did the right thing and shouldn’t be criticized for it.

How to make good decisions: play the odds

One of the many things I love about baseball is it forces you to be logical when you want to be emotional and being logical can help you in all Walks of Life unless you decide to run for office or become a TV evangelist or a sports-talk radio host because those three professions require you to be hysterical for a living.  

As for the rest of us, think about decision-making this way:

Let’s say you have an option that has a history of working 60% of the time and another option that has a history of working 50% of the time and a third one that has a history of working 40% of the time.

You don’t have to be Stephen Hawking’s smarter brother to figure out you should take the 60% option because it gives you the best chance of success.

But if something works 60% of the time it also fails 40% of the time and when you run into one of those four-out-of-ten failures, second-guessers who didn’t have to make a split-second decision will be happy to tell you that maybe you should have done something different like picking an option that works even less often, which as you might have already noticed, is fucking stupid.

Nothing works 100 percent of the time and you better get used to it and suck it up when the best available move fails.

Baseball players have a saying when an opponent beats the odds by making a miracle catch at the wall or hitting a pitch up around their neck for a home run or throwing out a runner at the plate:

“Tip your cap.”

Just because something doesn’t work doesn’t mean it was a mistake, but writing a headline that blames one guy for a loss is.