re: Interesting Philosophy Mainieri uses

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but you have to be ready to live with the times where you are thrown out too!!

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No doubt. It will happen, but the odds are in your favor. It all goes back to the cliche, playing the percentages. Only, in baseball, it isn't a cliche, it's meaning is literal.

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I'm not a baseball guy, so I don't know the ins and outs of all of this. But I know that Mainairi is a baseball guy, and I'm pretty sure he's thought of the pros and cons a pretty good bit, as well as talked them over with some other pretty smart baseball guys. So I'm guessing that whatever the costs and benefits are, it isn't as cut and dried wrong as it may sound to you.

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Well, I guess my reply to that is that I have never heard of this play being predetermined 100% of the time. Maybe if you are up by a few runs, but as a universal rule (which is the assumption we have made in this thread) I have never really heard of this. I am not questioning the baseball smarts of CPM, but rather just disagreeing with his strategy. Kinda like fouling under 10 seconds if you are up by 3 points to prevent the 3 pointer. Not everyone agrees with it, but its pretty sound strategy in my book.

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but I can't agree with that philosphy in a 1 run game in the 9th.

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+1

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My guess is Mainieri is just throwing his players under the bus. High school teams practice getting the lead runner if the catcher sees it, so I'm sure LSU does too. Good coaches don't throw their players under the bus

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What the frick?

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Wouldn't this be the exact opposite of what he's doing? Sounds like he is taking the blame himself

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What the frick?

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Haha sorry, I meant he is NOT throwing his players under the bus. My mom always told me to proof read my work....i guess she was right.

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I always thought its the short-stop and/or 3rd basemans job to tell the pitcher to throw it to second or first.

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Never heard that one...catcher has the play in front of him and makes the call. Getting the sure out is the money play...you give a team extra outs with a mistake and you will pay the price.

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moneyg

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I would have liked to have seen the throw go to 2nd in that case cause I was watching the game and it looked like it would be in plenty of time.

But pitchers are not used to doing alot of fielding and i would bet the percentages are a bit higher than the 5% you listed as far as something going wrong. You dont see many players with 95 fielding percentages. And pitchers are probably a bit below the average defender..usually. I could easily see a 15% failure rate with a pitcher trying to "hurry" his fielding of a bunt, try to whirl around and "hurry" a throw to second. In fact I would bet it's much closer to 15% than 5%.

That being said, I dont agree with a philosophy of "ALWAYS" throwing to first. Maybe PM meant that in late close games he believes that...in which outs are much more valuable (late in game).

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Also, 90% of the time, you won't be able to get the lead runner on a sac bunt.

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This is true, and why I am always in favor of getting the out at first.

I've seen that throw to second go into centerfield too many times.

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the Boyd's World statistics, you would have to show that there is a 14% chance that the pitcher is going to make a mistake in that situation for it to make sense to ignore the runner. It's hard for me to believe that the described scenario (obvious read, just need to make the throw) has an error rate of 14%. My guess is it wouldn't be close to that.

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I don't know how you're deriving the 14% thing. The point of the mandate is that a runner scores over 70% (72) of the time if he successfully gets to second with nobody out, but scores less than 50% (48) of the time, when there is one out. The RISK is the key here. That is almost a quarter of a percent higher if you are unsuccessful getting the force. And again, the point is to take the decision AWAY FROM the player. Yes, MLB you let the player make the decision if he thinks he can get the out, but in college, as we saw with JL last year, decision making skills need time to be honed as well. Hence the reason they are still playing college.

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Again, you would have to believe that with the infield playing in on the grass, on a ball that does not get through the infield, that the team will not be able to make the play at home 30% of the time (assuming a .300 hitter is at the plate).

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I have no idea what the frick this means. Seriously, I was one class away from a minor in Math and I have no idea what this means. Anyway, when the infield is in, the hitter's average raises 100 pts. Therefore, your .300 hitter is a .400 hitter, again, increasing your odds for scoring on contact. But again, it isn't about that at bat, it's about leaving a guy on third now with 2 outs. Go look at the percentage of scoring again with 2 outs and a runner on third. Also, it makes a college kid make a very tough play.

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you make the throw to 1st in this situation to keep the go-ahead run from being on base this was a solid decision because if that run scores we are playing in the bottom of the ninth in a tie game where as if we get no outs and both runs score we are playing from behind.

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Well, the premise in this discussion is that this is a 100% rule. In SOME cases this is the right play, but to make it a permanent rule is a bad strategy.