Lorenzo Cain and a Brief History of Mad Dashes Home

The World Series is delivering its thrills, but one can still feel a residual tingle from Lorenzo Cain‘s first-to-home dash on Eric Hosmer’s single in the deciding game of the ALCS. Part of that thrill is due to this being a repeat performance by Cain. In the fifth and deciding game of Kansas City’s ALDS, he went first-to-home on a Hosmer single, chipping away at Houston’s 2-0 lead on the way to a 7-2 triumph. Not as dramatic as plating the go-ahead run in the eighth, but it loomed pretty large at the time.

What hasn’t gotten so much attention is the parallel to one of the most fabled plays in baseball history: Enos Slaughter’s Mad Dash Home. In Game Seven of the 1946 World Series, the Red Sox scored two in the top of the eighth to tie the Cardinals 3-3. (Sound familiar?) In the home half, Slaughter got on first for St. Louis, and when Harry “The Hat” Walker laced a two-out hit, Slaughter never slowed down, racing home ahead of the throw to score the decisive run.

The similarities, and differences, between the plays are enlightening. The greatest apparent difference is that Walker was credited with a double. This is widely regarded as a scorekeeper’s mistake. Walker took second on the throw home, and should have had a single, thus making Slaughter’s basepath aggression much clearer. Hosmer left no room for doubt both of his times by staying at first base.

For other matters, it will probably help to look at the plays in question. First, Slaughter in 1946. The quality of the footage is not at all great — you can hear the rattle of the film projector from which it’s taken — but given the age of the play, we are probably a little fortunate to have something this good.

The footage shows Slaughter running with the pitch. We see a close angle on him breaking from first, then cut to a shot behind the plate for Walker’s hit, so it’s not seamless, but it’s clear from how fast Slaughter enters the second shot that he was indeed going.

In his mad dash against the Astros, Cain was also going with the pitch. Against the Blue Jays, he was not. In the latter case, he took a long secondary lead, but ran only on contact. You can see both in this MLB clip, the earlier dash coming near the end. (You are also welcome to marvel at the Statcast numbers it provides.)

One clear difference between 1946 and 2015 is the state of the innings. Slaughter was running home with two outs, the best time for such an act of daring. Given a 4.5 runs-per-game (R/G) environment, Slaughter needed to succeed more than just 29.7% of the time to make it a worthwhile risk.

Cain’s dashes came with, respectively, one and zero outs. Also, the first dash was in the fourth inning, with his team down two, which affects break-even numbers. This made both runs statistically far riskier. The first time, Cain had to succeed at least 75.5% of the time; the second (assuming 4.0 R/G for the closers being in), a whopping 85.7%.

There’s been speculation that third-base coach Mike Jirschele sent Cain both times, and especially versus the Blue Jays, because of the second-guessing he endured when he held Alex Gordon at third in the ninth inning of Game Seven in the World Series last year. FanGraphs has had its say on that play, concluding that Jirschele did right in stopping Gordon. But one can speculate whether a media feeding frenzy or one website influenced Jirschele’s future actions more.

Or perhaps Jirschele believed Cain would make it easily both times, and was borne out both times. The Astros made no play on Cain, and the Blue Jays didn’t make it all that close. Mike Jirschele may just be a really good third-base coach: has anyone thought of that?

One link binding all three dashes is that they were all facilitated by something going amiss on defense. This may come to define the most recent one, as it came to define the oldest one.

In 1946, center fielder Leon Culberson fielded Walker’s hit and threw it in to shortstop Johnny Pesky. Pesky was slow getting the ball home, which Slaughter ruthlessly exploited. For many decades, to the end of Pesky’s life three years ago and beyond, the lamenting refrain from Boston was “Pesky held the ball.” He’d done nothing with it for a fatal split-second, a sin almost as heinous to them as Bill Buckner‘s boot or Mike Torrez’s gopher-ball to Bucky Dent.

Watch the footage above again. I’ve given it lots of looks, and what I see is Pesky turning and double-clutching before he can deliver the ball homeward. It’s a mistake: maybe a physical one, maybe partly a mental one. It is not the brain-lock Boston fans have condemned for generations. As a Yankees fan, I’m not inclined to take it easy on the Red Sox, so perhaps it carries extra weight when I say Pesky did not deserve the 66 years of grief he endured for this.

Lorenzo Cain’s first Mad Dash Home had defensive help of a different sort. Carlos Gomez fell down fielding the single, and got only a weak throw to second base. Cain was so far ahead of that play, there was no throw home. A clean play could have made it interesting at the plate, but with a first-to-home time of 9.25 seconds, maybe Cain just deserved that one.

(By the way, I put a stopwatch to Slaughter’s run, complicated by the camera not being on Walker the instant he made contact. Best I can figure, Slaughter’s first-to-home time was 9.4 seconds. This by a 30-year-old who never had double-digit steals in a season. My tentative conclusion: Slaughter got a whale of a jump.)

Then there was the Toronto game. Return to the replay above, and watch as Bautista makes a good sound play throwing in to second to keep Hosmer from taking two. The problem was, he didn’t think that Cain might take three. And it isn’t like Cain didn’t give advance warning that he could do this.

Will this forever be “Bautista threw to second” the way it was “Pesky held the ball?” The direction of Bautista’s throw did give Cain an extra split-second, though Russell Martin would have had to make a great play to turn back and tag Cain in time. But thanks to Bautista ignoring the chance of Cain heading home, or choosing what seemed the more plausible of scenarios, fans have a “what if” game to play.

What may save Bautista from ignominy is his bat. His two home runs in that game drove in all three runs that Toronto scored. Without his offensive contribution, Kansas City is up 3-0 in the eighth and playing tack-on ball, rather than fighting to regain the lead. Also in that case, the Royals surely aren’t as aggressive and Jirschele holds Cain at third.

I think Jose Bautista will not bear nearly as great a burden as Pesky did, even if he may have been a little more at fault for a mental miscue. History is likely to remember it more as a great play by Lorenzo Cain, along with perhaps a bit of not really needed redemption for Mike Jirschele. That’s probably how the newest Mad Dash Home should be remembered.





A writer for The Hardball Times, Shane has been writing about baseball and science fiction since 1997. His stories have been translated into French, Russian and Japanese, and he was nominated for the 2002 Hugo Award.

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joser
8 years ago

I wouldn’t be surprised if that other camera angle showing Slaughter taking off on the pitch wasn’t from that particular play, and possibly not even from that game. These newsreel summaries weren’t broadcast in real time so they would often edit them to fill in gaps (such as adding the “up the nose” shot of Walker taking a practice swing).

Also, it’s obviously really hard to tell but it almost looks to me like Pesky’s “double clutch” is him looking to third expecting to see Slaughter somewhere in the vicinity of the bag and startled instead to find him already most of the way home. That may have put a hitch in his reaction, if his brain suddenly intervened in the reflexive throwing action while considering whether to throw to first (or second) to get a more likely out on the batter-runner.