Am I missing something? Anyone could catch that, with those big gloves of theirs.
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Willie Mays - The Catch
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74 years ago, today.
A) Glove or not, catching a baseball is harder than it looks. Especially while running. And the gloves then aren’t as capacious as the ones they use now.
B) Catching s baseball over the shoulder is very hard because it’s hard to track. As you can see from the film of the catch, he changes course mid run to adjust.
C) Center field in the Polo Ground was abnormally deep. So it was a long way. Mays had to run really far and fast to get to it and caught it on the run.
D) He followed the catch with an amazing throw to the infield which prevented a run. Usually a guy on second would score easily on a ball hit that far.
E) It’s remembered as much as a remarkable “moment” rather than just a difficult play. It led to the Giants winning the series. It was on TV in the earliest days of TV. It was in Manhattan. A few years later the Giants were gone, so it stands out in the memories of Giants fans.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Catch_(baseball)Last edited by Hot Pepsi; 29-09-2018, 21:06.
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Originally posted by Etienne View PostThe closest cricket catch I've seen was one by Rod Marsh in World Series cricket. Marsh ran a very long way back, misjudged it more than Mays and then recovered with an extraordinary backwards dive. He didn't have to throw the ball back though.
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Massively full of shit – me? That's a surprisingly aggressive response.
Yeah, OK, of course I take the point as to quite how incredibly difficult it is to catch a ball coming directly from behind you – that's something familiar from playing cricket and American football in particular. And because of the field placements and the size of cricket grounds, it's something you get more rarely there than a casual observer might think.
The OP wasn't trolling, although I imagine it could have been seen as such – I was hoping for a bit of a discussion about the different skills of baseball and other catching sports, and at least there's been some of that.Last edited by diggedy derek; 02-10-2018, 13:52.
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Well, I read it as trolling from the get go, which no doubt coloured my responses. That said, if you really think that you would have caught that fly ball, your grasp on reality is not as firm as I had previously thought.
Technique in catching sports is a genuinely interesting topic, and two things about baseball that come immediately to mind are the evolution of gloves
and the variations of approach, from Mays' own basket catch
to the casual-looking, one handed "snap" catches now favoured by many better outfielders.
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Well I don't view myself as a troll.
Part of this is the view the camera provides of baseball on the TV, whereby it's hard to properly appreciate the distances they run away from the camera – an unusual view for a sporting event in a way, but one that gives you a pretty good overview of the whole action of the game, perhaps.
What I find interesting in cricket is that, in theory, you'd think catching would be one discipline which any player could improve through sheer hard work, but catching in the present era doesn't seem to have improved nearly to the same degree as the quality of ground fielding.
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That's very true, and something that is much easier to appreciate live.
In the current age of video driven data analysis, MLB's Statcast can quantify many of the key metrics involved in a catch within seconds.
I agree with your observation on cricket and wonder if the improvement in ground fielding is as much (or more) about overall better physical condition and a change in mentality as it is about pure technique. Those factors have much less impact on the quality of catching per se.
Another interesting comparison between baseball and cricket is the impact of fatigue/boredom on fielding. It is quite rare for a baseball player to be in the field for more than 25 or 30 minutes at a time, and normally he will be out there for a much shorter period.
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That's great, that should have that for cricket.
The big change in cricket fielding recently has been T20 of course, which has made taking leaping catches over the boundary and then throwing the ball back relatively commonplace. And I imagine that's partly because they know they can go full tilt in the field for 90 minutes.
One technical thing which has improved massively with cricket fielding is stopping boundaries – it's much more unusual to see fielders letting the ball through their legs etc. Partly that's through fitness, of course, but especially I think with bowlers, who no longer seem constantly knackered and lackadaisical in the field.
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There are people who working on similar systems for cricket, though the fundamental issue is the cost of the initial installation of the necessary cameras and other equipment, which are quite expensive.
There's also the problem that many cricket grounds lack the fully enclosed and relatively high stands that the system currently relies on.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if the Aussies implement something, as they have fewer grounds to deal with and more of them that resemble MLB stadia. Once implemented, the system can also be very useful in analysing bowling, batting and field positioning.
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