Brandon Brown
Welcome to Snyder’s Soapbox! Here I pontificate weekly on a topic related to Major League Baseball. Some of the topics will be urgent matters, some may seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and most will fall somewhere in between. The good thing about this site is that it is free and you can click to leave. If you stay you will become smarter, that’s a money back guarantee. Let’s go.
The person who runs this Major League Baseball account encourages us to watch defensive play, but my mind is hijacked by the madness displayed by Harold Ramírez:
Ah, humanity.
This rarely happens, but I think I was angry when I first saw it. Perhaps slight anger mixed with mild annoyance. It’s simply a ridiculous decision to make as a major league baserunner.
Sliding feet to first should never happen, but sliding is a mistake almost every time, and yet we still see a lot of it. It’s total madness.
Here’s the rule I’m trying to define: A player running from home can only slide to first base to avoid a collision. And that. There is no other circumstance under which a baserunner can do so. I will push for fines and even suspensions. End the madness.
There are some misguided people out there who claim there is some sort of advantage to the runner. They are completely wrong. Brett Gardner is one of those people. He said in 2011 that he could show a video of him diving to first base and prove he was faster. He was wrong. MLB.com’s Mike Petriello used Statcast and found that Gardner had, in fact, slowed down while diving. Others have done studies and it always happens that a runner slows down when sliding. Of course. Since he touches the ground with parts of his body other than his feet, there is more friction. Given that a runner can run past first base, the shortest possible time for the runner to pass the bag is to run straight without slowing down or altering his running motion.
It’s probably cliché to say this at this point, but it’s worth including: If it were faster to dive to first base, why don’t Olympic sprinters dive to the finish line? They study everything possible about running in an attempt to reduce their times by hundredths of a second, and somehow none of them ever realize that they should dive at the finish line? Come on, get real. This slows you down from gliding and diving.
In addition to the slowdown, diving into first base provides an extra opportunity to injure fingers, hands and wrists – not to mention getting your head around someone’s feet. This cannot be proven, but it is certainly much more difficult for referees to make a correct decision when a player dives instead of just running through the bag. They are used to hearing the sound of a ball hitting a glove and a foot stepping on the plate. These two sounds are the determining factor in safely calling or leaving. Diving throws everything away.
I’m trying to think of some advantage and the best I can think of is that a player gets caught up in the moment and desperately tries to do everything he physically can to get to the bag as quickly as he can. The problem here is that it actually slows you down. Just keep running. That’s all you can do.
For the love of all that is holy, baserunners, please stop making fools of yourself and just dig in the bag – again, unless there’s a collision coming up, in which case you will, unfortunately, have to get dirty.
This is the only exception and I am advocating for the harshest penalties possible for all offenders. When it comes to a runner going to first base, it is absolutely necessary to stop the fall.
