December Days 05 - Steal (The Eleven of Bases)

[This is part of a series exploring the Baseball Tarot. If you would like to prompt for a part of the game or a card from the deck, there's still plenty of space. Leave a comment with a prompt. All other comments are still welcome, of course.]

This is one of onyxlynx's comment prompts.

The only place a runner is safe is when some part of their body is in contact with the base they have legally obtained. If the runner is off the base, they can be put out at any point in time by being tagged with a ball in play.

However, by leaving the security of the base, the runner is able to shorten the distance between themselves and the next base to obtain, so that on a batted ball, they have a better chance of reaching the next base safely. With the speed the modern professional game achieves, those extra feet a runner can collect for themselves can be the difference between reaching safely, breaking up a defensive pair of force outs (a double play), or watching the double play happen.

The same jeopardy that a runner puts themselves in by leaving the base also means that a runner can attempt to advance to the next base without the cover of a batted ball. A pitcher who delivers their ball slowly, or has a lot of motion in their delivery, may be vulnerable to having runners attempt to take the next base on them. (Faster runners have a better chance of this, but catchers with cannons for arms can regularly deliver a live ball in advance of the runner's arrival even off a slow delivery.) If the runner can advance and touch the next base (and keep in contact with that base continuously) before being tagged with the ball (or the glove containing the ball) by a fielder, then they have successfully "stolen" the next base. Physics dictates that it is easier to go from first to second base (the longer throw) than from second to third (the much shorter throw), but stealing third is something that happens on occasion, and the success rate is nonzero. Occasionally, there are attempts to steal home base, but those are usually in the context of a baseball play called a squeeze - the runner on third attempts to take home base while the batter attempts to make soft contact with the ball (usually holding the bat horizontally and guiding it to the ball, instead of swinging it, known as a bunt) and keep it away from the fielders enough to get the runner from third safely home to score a run.

Steals are ways to try and shake up the game and advance runners and make it easier for singles to score runs. The defense has ways of keeping runners from stealing on them - throwing back to the base the runner is leading from (a pickoff attempt, which can be done by a pitcher or a catcher) to try and catch them leading too far, deliberately throwing a pitch outside of the strike zone so that the catcher can catch and throw to the next base with minimal effort and maximal velocity (a pitchout), or having a catcher who has the aforementioned artillery for their throwing arm or a pitcher who can deliver their pitch quickly to the catcher so that the relay throw arrives with a leisurely second or two to apply the tag. (The umpires have trained a significant amount to be able to be both in position to see and to not be in the way of the play developing - only after being an umpire did I realize how much they make being in the right place at the right time look effortless.)

So, in showing up in a Tarot deck, if you're the offense, steals indicate taking risks with reward at the end, so long as you can read the defense correctly. And that you can react quickly enough if your situation changes where the steal is no longer a good idea. If you're the defense, a steal means that there's something to watch out for - runners don't often telegraph when they're going to steal, but you can gauge their likelihood of stealing by examining their lead, and trying to keep the lead down. That said, focusing too much on the runner is bad - the batter usually is a bigger problem.

December Days 06 - The Hit-and-Run (The Ace of Bats)

[This is part of a series exploring the Baseball Tarot. If you would like to prompt for a part of the game or a card from the deck, there's still plenty of space. Leave a comment with a prompt. All other comments are still welcome, of course.]

Having explored some of the building blocks of offense [Walks, Singles, and Steals], there are many ways in which those three elements can be combined to start or sustain a rally and generate runs. Patient players that may not be the best of hitters or runners can be links in the chain by drawing walks and allowing more powerful hitters to get a chance to bat them in. Fast players can take bases by themselves in steals, extra bases on singles by running hard, and their presence on the base paths can be enough of a distraction so that the pitcher serves up much more easily hittable balls than he would otherwise. Hitters with good sight and positioning can scatter balls around where the fielders aren't (or force the pitcher to throw many more pitches than normal by continually hitting questionable pitches into foul territory, which will not generate an out so long as the fielders cannot catch those foul balls before they touch the ground.) and force a pitcher to either give them a good hittable ball or to accumulate enough balls to draw a walk if their own.

Eventually, intrepid players and managers start finding ways to combine those blocks for greater results. Thus was born the hit-and-run. At it's core, the hit-and-run combines the elements of a single (hitting successfully and safely) with that of the steal (by setting a runner in motion during the delivery of the pitch), with the optimal result being that the runners can collect additional bases or score runs off a single that they would otherwise not be able to do. A successful hit-and-run turns a relatively safe situation of one runner on first base into a highly dangerous situation of a runner on first base and on third, easily able to be scored, even if the defense records an out (or two) on the next batter.

That said, the hit-and-run is a high-risk, high-reward affair. There are many possible failure points along the way. If the hitter misses the pitch, it's a steal, with all the risks associated with that. If the hitter hits, but right at an infielder, the defense records a double play very easily (as any ball caught in the air by the defense requires the runner to return to the last base safely reached before trying to advance). An outfield hit that's caught can also mean the double play, but most likely results in the runner retreating, nothing gained and one out less to try again with. A ground ball to an infielder could still result in a double play anyway, even with the advantage gained by starting early.

So, the hit-and-run tends to come on situations that favor the hitters. These are usually pitches where there are zero or one strike against the batter and two or three balls against the pitcher. The pitcher needs to throw a strike, and they may put the pitch in a place where it will definitely be a called strike, instead of the maybe-yes, maybe-no that hanging around the corners of the strike zone that normally goes on. That pitch is one the batter should be more able to hit, so that would be a possible time to go with the hit-and-run. It won't happen every time, as being predictable is an easy way to lose your baseball game, but managers and coaches and those who study the enormous amount of statistical data that baseball games generate have ideas when it would be good to run out a tactic such as this. Both generally, and within the scenario of the game, the statistics and the feel of the game contribute a lot to the decisions being made from pitch to pitch.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

The card I chose to pair with this is the Ace of Bats. The Aces in the Baseball Tarot Deck are about beginnings, and the hit-and-run is usually employed as a device to get something started, to kickstart the offense into a rally, or to put runners in scoring position (where a single could reasonably be expected to generate a run), or to deny the defense a double-play ball, or to try and energize the players (or home fans) so that they change the dynamic of feelings for the team to get them back into the game mentally.