What I LEARNED FROM WATCHING THE 2016 BASEBALL PLAYOFFS (PART 2)

   As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series, there were several lessons that I took away from watching the 2016 MLB Postseason. While I covered playing throws on the run in my first post, I'm going to cover the concept of letting the ball travel in this post. As always, I would love your feedback - feel free to get in touch at any time. You can find my contact information on my "About" page. 

Letting the ball travel  - this came up in various ways during the playoffs. Here, while you might think that I'm talking about hitting, I'm actually talking about defense. This comes up on defense in several different ways, but the main way in which I'm referring to it is on tag plays, either pick-offs from pitchers or on throws to 2B. The idea behind this concept is when you're receiving a thrown ball, if you try to catch it way out in front of your body and then try to sweep down at the runner, you're actually taking longer than if you let the ball travel farther before you catch it. The ball itself is moving much more quickly on it's own and you'll end up getting a quicker tag to the runner if you let the ball travel as far as possible to you before making the tag. To pull this off, though, you need a great, accurate throw from whoever is delivering the ball to you. The two main guys that emphasized this for me were Anthony Rizzo and Javy Baez.
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Letting the ball travel - Rizzo - A great video example of Rizzo doing this is here. Notice how Rizzo allows the ball to travel until it gets right on top of the runner, rather than catching the ball out in front. Of course, Rizzo needs a great throw from Hendricks on this, but the concept remains. I'd recommend practicing this with your pitchers and 1B to let the ball travel onto the runner and getting the ball to that perfect spot.

Letting the ball travel - Baez - The other poster boy for this was Javy Baez on his tags at 2B. He and David Ross regularly got runners out that really had no business getting out. One of their keys to getting so many runners out was Baez's technique at 2b - how he tagged players and how he would let the ball travel. The picture on the right shows how far Baez would allow the ball to travel. Notice that the ball is almost by him when he catches it. He puts the tag right on the runner. You can see more of Baez's techniques by checking out the hashtag #javytags on Twitter. I pulled this photo from MLB's tweet here. Again, you need a great throw to make this work, which David Ross provides. When you get that throw, let it travel onto the runner.

Other resources on tag plays -

• Kai Correa's video on tags here. Kai covers how to manage tags & footwork depending on the type of throw down to 2B. 
• Articles about Baez's tags -
  
  • Chicago Tribune - For Javier Baez, making acrobatic tags is 'just natural'
  • ​ESPN - There's no one quicker than Javier Baez when it comes to tagging runners​

Now, related to all of this is the art of tagging. As I mentioned above, one of the key aspects to the tag play was allowing the ball to travel, but another key aspect of it was how the tag was executed itself. I'm going to leave the actual mechanics of the tag play for a future blog post. 

Until next time.
-- Tom

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