On Defense you've heard over and over again the importance of knowing the situation and knowing where to throw the ball. However, here are 4 videos of big league players playing the game inside the game on defense. These videos show 4 different plays where the baserunner was put in a tough position. Remember that the majority of base runners are scared to make a mistake and will therefore error on the side of caution. If you cannot make a play on the ball and have the opportunity to create doubt in a base runners mind take advantage of the opportunity. Let's quickly go through a few ways to do this.
1. Steal with ball put in play. Middle infielders can either bluff a double play turn or act like the ball was an infield pop up. The middle infielders need to work together to create confusion.
2. Outfielders: your number one goal is obviously to catch the ball in the air. If you are not going to catch the ball and there are runners on base with less then two outs if you can make it look like you are going to catch the ball it can hold the runner long enough so that he is unable to advance more then one base. Ichiro does this to perfection in these two clips.
There are a few more examples that I will revisit in a later post but these 4 videos show big league players being heads up. Remember that 99% of base runners are not great at running the bases and they can be easily mislead into making errors in judgement when running the bases.
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