And you have to give some credit to the Angels there for finding some outs for Fuentes.

Now, I know these situations are often ripe opps for the every man to relic back to his youth baseball days and reort that they hustled all te tim, or that if they were making 5M a year they’d bust ass on every play and basically any other scenario where one postulate what tey would do or they would play, and blah , blah, blah.

I would prefer Reed just get his butt to home plate, butevery player coasts around 3rd whn there’s no play at home. Martin was fine rounding second, it happens 100+ times a week in MLB.

What happened was LAA made a helluva defensive play to throw behind the runner.

Combined with the pickoff play at 2B, LAA made 2 great defensive plays that no other team thinks to make. THAT should be the focus of the article, IMHO … that a team decided to try and get an out without delivering a pitch, and they threw behind a runner saving a run … when everyone else just goes through the defensive motions.

To fault Reed and Martin is somewhat ridiculous because the same scenario plays out hundreds of times without a play behind the runner.

As an analogy, my grandfather slows down while driving when he approaches an intersection, even if he has a green light, or the right a way (no stop sign, no yield, etc) because “you never know”. That’s the mentality a runner would need to have in order to prvent these “behind the runner” plays.

Again, we could fault Reed for not bustin butt, but we’d need to do the same thing for countless runners who coast from 3rd to home, without event. As we often say here at FG, Reed was just “unlucky” … he did the same thing everyoneelse did, but because of strange occurrences got an uncommon result.

This was clearly shown in a replay during the Twins broadcast, unfortunately MLB.com only has the Royals version.

seriously, the entire play was RIGHT in front of martin.