College Baseball is Back!
If you want to play baseball in college, you better get used to playing in the cold. The season EARLY (California Junior College starts in January!) and no matter where you are in the country, you're going to play some games in cold baseball weather.
With the season starting in late January and February, you often see A LOT of bad baseball early. Just look at some of the scores. You'll see games get into the 20's when teams from the South kick around teams from the Northeast that get on a real baseball field for the first time just hours before Opening Day.
All this to say, it should come as no surprise when you see physical mistakes made in early season college games. I always tell players there is a reason big leaguers play a whole month of games that don't count before they start their season. It's hard to track a baseball around a field at 95mph. Coaches will live with the physical errors, especially early on. The mental errors, like the one below, are the ones that will get you glued to the pine for a prolonged period.
The Situation
I summarized this play on Instagram a couple weeks ago. This is from the first weekend of the college season. Georgia played Wright State (Dayton, OH) in Athens, GA in a 3 game series. Georgia won the first two games and was going for a sweep, but found themselves down 6-3 in the 9th inning, with 1 out, and runners on 1st and 2nd. Here is the play:
There are not words I can use to describe how egregious this baserunning mistake is. Coach Hodson actually sent me this video and said "top 10 dumbest baserunning moves I've seen." I'd tend to agree. Some young players might see this and say "he's trying to be aggressive on the bases and it's just an aggressive mistake." There is a time and a place to err on the side of being aggressive. This was not it. Let's go through the reasons.
Never Make 3rd Out at 3rd Base
This is commonly taught at the youth level, but I think few players understand WHY you don't make the 3rd out at 3rd. It's because with two outs, you generally need a hit to score a run anyways. You can't hit a sac-fly or RBI groundout. It takes a hit to score the run. Obviously, getting to 3rd does bring scoring on a wild pitch or passed ball into play, but when you get to high levels of baseball, those are few and far between.
The Score
In this scenario, Georgia is down by three runs. This means the tying run is at the plate, not on the bases. What is the reward of this player making it to 3rd base? Absolutely NOTHING. Bumping up to 3rd when the tying run is still in the box is a high risk, ZERO reward play. Georgia would have had the same odds of tying the game with or without their runner advancing to 3rd on the play.
The only scenario where this would have been semi-acceptable is if the tying run had been on first and you were trying to get that guy to 2nd (scoring position) with two outs. Then Georgia would have just needed a single to tie the game. But that depends on who's coming up to bat for the team, which leads us to our next point...
The Hitter
This out on the bases was made with Georgia's 3rd hitter coming up to bat. A guy who hit 16 home runs last year and with a home run could have tied the game. Even if it was the tying run on first, you want to give this guy a chance to swing the bat and not open up 1st base for the opponent to potentially walk him.
Summary
These are the kind of mistakes showcase baseball leads to. When players are just being told to show off their physical skills and that always erring on the side of being aggressive is "correct", you see mistakes like this. Context is king. The beauty of the game of baseball is learning when to put pressure on a team by attacking the game or being passive depending on the scenario. In the context here, as the better baseball team (Georgia is now 15-3), they had Wright State up against the wall and being over aggressive on the bases let them off the hook. Coaches are going to play players they can trust. Mistakes like this are an easy way to get you glued to the bench for an extended period.
