A friend and I went to see the San Francisco Giants play the Milwaukee Brewers in San Francisco last Thursday. Great news: the Giants won with an exciting bottom of the 8th inning. (Not so great for my friend, who grew up in Wisconsin and is a Brewers fan.)
One of the key plays happened late in the game when a fairly heavy set Brewer, Daniel Vogelbach, hit what looked like a double to the right field. He ran through first and on the way to second. But halfway to second, he turned and looked to see whether the right fielder had thrown the ball yet.
That was a key error. That little turn slowed him down slightly–he wasn’t a really fast runner–and he was thrown out in a close call at second base.
Vogelbach ignored the irrelevance of sunk costs.
Once he had made the decision to run through first base and get halfway to second base, he would have had too much momentum if he had decided to turn back to first base. He should have just run to second as fast as he could without looking. Whether or not it was a good decision to go for two bases, by the time he was halfway between first and second, that decision was in the past and irrelevant.
If he wanted to look anywhere, it should have been to the third-base Brewers coach. That would not have slowed him as much and the third-base coach could have signaled whether he needed to slide or take second base standing.
Note: The picture above is of Vogelbach when he was with the Seattle Mariners.
READER COMMENTS
Chris
Sep 4 2021 at 7:10pm
The Braves moved back to Milwaukee!?!
David Henderson
Sep 4 2021 at 8:01pm
LOL. Senior moment, literally. Correction made.
David Henderson
Sep 4 2021 at 8:01pm
Just making sure you’re on your toes. 🙂
steve
Sep 4 2021 at 10:02pm
I think he was just tiring and hoping he could let up. Should have checked with 3rd base coach for that. (I sort of blame this on the current craze for the long ball. Hitting for average and base running are no longer so important.)
Stephen
Sep 5 2021 at 12:03pm
It was the first, and probably will be the only, Giants game that I attended in person this year, and it happened to be this one.
When Daniel Vogelbach came to the plate, he reminded me of Pablo Sandoval, the Giants third baseman who struggled with his weight during their championship years. Before he made the turn at first base, I could see that Vogelbach was angling for a double and I honestly thought that he wasn’t going to make it. (Baseball IMHO is best seen live, not for sentimental Field-of-Dreams reasons, but because the eye can flit quickly back and forth between infield and outfield and grasp the play unfolding better than a closer-in high-res TV view.)
So I think Vogelbach’s mistake was not so much in recognizing sunk cost as that his self-image was at variance with reality. His current profile is 6′, 270 lbs., well over the obese definition for his height. He was on the Mariners through 2019 (and a short stint in 2020), and if the svelter image you posted was taken that recently, he probably thought he was as speedy as he was then and could afford a glance, or even a hesitation, before committing himself to second base. Being fully aware of my own diminishing capabilities is not something I do well, so I felt a twinge of sympathy for Mr. Vogelbach while being glad that the Giants threw him out at second.
Spencer
Sep 5 2021 at 5:37pm
I coach kids’ baseball.
One of the first things I teach kids is that, once you leave a base, there is nothing to see until you are standing on the next base. Looking at anything but the next base will only slow you down.
And I HATE walks. You’ve got seven guys behind you just waiting for something to do. Division of labor.
zeke5123
Sep 6 2021 at 1:07pm
Your scarce resource is outs. Any AB that doesn’t end in an out isa positive AB.
spencer
Sep 13 2021 at 9:45pm
Which is why I HATE walks.
I don’t mind getting them. But for God’s sake, don’t throw them.
If you don’t walk a batter, you’ve generally got (depending on the level of play) at least an even chance of getting an out. As the old saying goes, there’s no defense against a walk.
Joe Kristan
Sep 5 2021 at 11:57pm
The big guy had a better day today.
David Henderson
Sep 6 2021 at 5:39pm
He sure did. I saw it this morning on ESPN.
Evan Sherman
Sep 7 2021 at 9:57am
Totally agree on the technical base-running vis-a-vis sunk cost fallacy here.
That said: More broadly speaking, I wonder if players are coached into more aggressive base-running given the lower batting averages we’ve seen recently. As in, the cost/benefit of risking an extra base may be worth it in more scenarios that it would have been 10 years ago if batting (i.e. hitting) averages are correspondingly lower than they were 10 years ago. If hits are more rare, it may be worth risky base-running to try to stretch less team hits into more team runs over the course of a game, a season, etc.
(Cue the legion of baseball statisticians who can correct or refine my layman generalizations.)
Zeke5123
Sep 7 2021 at 10:52am
Might be wholly off base but while hits are down I thought power was up. So in that way if the average hit is more likely to be an XBH, it seems whether you are on first or second is less important.
Evan Sherman
Sep 7 2021 at 12:06pm
Yes, but that does also depend on definitions of power / XBHs (home runs vs. RBI doubles? etc.). Being on second base instead of first base doesn’t matter if the later batter hits a home run, but it helps a lot if that later battles gets a double. So, to refine the point: It’s possible (? again this is all a fan’s speculation) that players are coached into riskier base-running insofar as that base-running gets them to 2nd base.
Evan Sherman
Sep 7 2021 at 12:07pm
*later batter
Jon Murphy
Sep 7 2021 at 12:51pm
That’s an interesting hypothesis, Evan. I have no idea if it is correct or not. We’d have to look to see if more players are getting thrown out going for extra bases.
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