Corbin Burnes Is a Physics Problem | Baseball Bits

This video is sponsored by SeatGeek. Playoff races are coming down to the wire, and if you're itching to get back out to the ballpark, SeatGeek has you covered. Whether it's baseball, football, basketball, or live music, SeatGeek puts tickets from all over the web in one place to make buying simple. We all like getting a good deal, and SeatGeek makes it easy to score. Just look for the colored dots which rate the ticket value on a scale of 1 to 10. Green means go. You can also see what your view will look like before purchasing. If that all sounds good, you can use code FOOLISH for $20 off your first purchase at SeatGeek. You can do it from your computer, or if you're on mobile, click the link in the description to download the app. Once again, that's code FOOLISH for $20 off your first purchase. Thank you to SeatGeek for sponsoring this video. On May 13th, 2014, Evan Gattis hit the first triple of his MLB career. He shot a Ryan Vogelsang fastball into San Francisco's right centerfield gap, an area known as Triple's Alley. Freddie Freeman scored, as Gattis triumphantly pulled into third standing up. It was a textbook example of one of baseball's most beautiful plays, the big guy triple. And whether it's Daniel Vogelbach huffing and puffing around the base pass, Prince Fielder running full steam ahead with pure determination, or Benji Molina plodding along in pursuit of a cycle, seeing a large man hit a triple is like witnessing an endangered snow leopard in the Himalayas. So precious, so beautiful. Evan Gattis was in his second big league season, before he serendipitously slugged a ball into Triple's Alley. But in his next year, he didn't stop at one triple. He hit 11. And then he never hit one again. Respectfully, Evan Gattis looked like a janitor because he was one. After quitting college baseball, he returned to his hometown of Dallas and worked with his brother as a custodian. And so the story goes. Super Bowl MVP Kurt Warner bagged groceries, World Series champion Evan Gattis cleaned up on aisle 5. During his big league career, Gattis used his janitor idea as his profile pic on social media, a reminder of his tumultuous journey to the big leagues. Gattis waited until May 21, Houston's 42nd game of the season, to hit his first triple of 2015. Facing David Price in Cavernous Camerica Park, he placed the ball perfectly in the right center gap, and the big fella reached third base standing up. Evan Gattis' hulkish size and bushy beard earned him the nickname El Oso Blanco, the white bear. He was listed at 6'4", 270 pounds, but that was most likely based off a measurement when he was drafted. A New York Times profile describes Gattis as 235 during his rookie season with the Braves. But even then, to have double-digit triples at Gattis' size is unheard of. In terms of listed weight, he's 25 pounds heavier than Juan Uribe's 245, and that 245 on Uribe is likely a late career measurement. This is what he looked like in 2001 when he hit 11 triples, and this is what he looked like when he actually weighed 245 pounds. Majestic. And even if we adjust Gattis down to 6'4", 235 pounds, no player with that height and weight has ever hit 10 triples in a season, except the white bear in 2015. The most comparable was Vladimir Guerrero Sr., who was listed at 6'3", a real pipsqueak, that guy. Gattis waited a while for his first triple of the season, but he wouldn't wait long for the next. In the series finale in Detroit, he sliced one down the right field line and was off to the races. Right fielder Rajai Davis was playing shaded to the left and had to run a long way to retrieve the ball, allowing Gattis to reach on his 2nd triple of the season, the 3rd of his career. Ballpark distribution was key for Gattis. He hit 6 of his 11 triples at his home stadium of Minute Maid Park, but his distribution of row triples was brilliant. He hit 2 in Detroit's Comerica and 1 in Kansas City's Kauffman, which have the largest outfields in the American League. Keep in mind, as an AL West player, he only got 1 series per year in these ballparks. Then he hit 1 in interleague play at San Francisco, where they have the famed Triples Alley, and finally hit his 11th and final triple in Seattle. If you're gonna hit a bunch of triples, the ballpark matters. A lot. You probably understand that park factors are used to describe a stadium's offensive environment. The ball doesn't carry in the marine layer of San Diego like it does in the thin air of Denver. And a home run to right field in Yankee Stadium could easily be a fly out in, well, anywhere else. But park factors don't just need to measure the likelihood of home runs, they need to measure the likelihood of all hits, including triples. According to StatCast, the easiest ballparks to hit a triple in are Coors and Comerica, where the rate is approximately twice that of the average ballpark. 19 batters have hit 10 or more triples in a season in the StatCast era, including Gattis. Of those 19, only 4 had a home ballpark situation that was less conducive to triples than the league average. 2015 Kevin Kiermeier as a lefty with Tampa, 2016 Cesar Hernandez as a switch hitter in Philly, 2017 Billy Hamilton as a switch hitter with Cincinnati, and 2018 Yolmer Sanchez as a switch hitter at Guaranteed Rate Field in Chicago's Southside. Gattis had a good setup at Mindenmaid Park in Houston. Among right-handed hitters, it ranked 6th in projected triples rate, 54% more likely than league average. That came into play during Gattis' third triple of the season. Facing the Yankees at home, he pounced on a Michael Pineda pitch and nearly homered, but settled for a triple after a big carom. Look at the big fella fly. You know, it's not often someone hits a triple and gets pinch-ran for. Gattis hit his 4th triple during the very next game. He cranked one 425 feet to the deepest part of the park. Defensive wizard Lorenzo Cain tracked the ball step for step, but had a problem. He had to do something that no other fielder anywhere in MLB would have to do. He had to run up that hill and make a deal with God. There have been ballpark oddities more quirked up than Tows Hill, but none of them were in play so recently. Classic venues like the Baker Bowl and Polo Grounds had extreme dimensions. Old Yankee Stadium had monuments in play until the mid-70s, and Tiger Stadium had a 125 foot flagpole until the Tigers moved in 2000. In addition to a 30 degree incline, Tows Hill featured a pole of its own, but that makes sense. As Benjamin Franklin once said, if you put a pole in play, put it on top of a hill so players will slow down before crashing into it. On his 5th triple of the season, Leonis Martin failed to make the grab, with proximity to Tows Hill possibly throwing him off his game. Gattis rounded 2nd, and all hope for a close play was dashed when the relay throw hit him in the back before it could reach Adrian Beltre in 3rd. Hey how many triples you got? 5. 5? Like the centerfielders who summited Tows Hill, Evan Gattis too had to navigate obstacles in his life. After quitting college baseball, he hit a low point in the summer of 2007, saying, I was in a mental hospital. I couldn't sleep for an entire week and I knew something was wrong with me. So I got admitted. I was so depressed. It wasn't easy for Gattis to talk about, and I understand this is a serious tonal shift in a video that's ostensibly just about a big guy hitting a bunch of triples, but it's part of his story. This is what he overcame to return to baseball, get drafted by the Braves and make the big leagues. He sought help, and with persistence, the obstacles faded away, just like Tows Hill eventually did. Luck was always going to be a factor in Gattis' triple total, and that especially came into play during his 6th triple, where the usually sure-handed Lorenzo Cain failed to come up with the snag in Kaufman. This time, there was no Tows Hill to blame. Fortunately for Eloso Blanco, it was scored a triple rather than an error. Remember those 4 players who hit 10 triples despite their ballpark working against them? Kevin Kiermeier, Cesar Hernandez, Billy Hamilton, and Yolmer Sanchez. How did they do this? They put one foot in front of the other and ran fast. Yolmer was the only player out of that group who didn't have absolutely elite stat cast sprint speed. So speaking of speed, what about Gattis? Surely this lumbering DH won't put up above average sprint speed. Oh no, I was conveniently wrong for the sake of proving a point! Evan Gattis didn't look fast, but at a 27.4 feet per second speed, he was a 64th percentile runner overall, making him the 3rd fastest designated hitter in MLB that season. Don't act so surprised, Polar Bears can run up to 25 miles per hour. But it still makes him a speed outlier in terms of hitting 10 or more triples in a season. The only runner with a worse sprint speed to do so in the stat cast era is Brandon Crawford, who turned 44th percentile sprint speed into 11 triples in 2016. He did this by pulling the majority of his 3 base hits in a triples alley. Not that Gattis didn't have a good situation in MMP. On his 7th triple, he took advantage of the bullpen fence and left center. The large carom allowed him to reach 3rd standing up. That cutout is 25 feet high, approximately 2 thirds of the height of Fenway's Green Monster. Major League Baseball has produced plenty of entertaining outlier seasons. Brady Anderson hit 50 homers in 1996 and never hit more than 21 in the season otherwise. And Burt Campanaris hit 22 in 77, with his next best total being 8. But Evan Gattis hit 11 triples in 2015, 11 times more than his next best total of 1, and then he never tripled again after that. What he did do was win a ring in 2017, leading off the 4th inning, Gattis homered in Game 7 of the ALCS vs the Yankees, giving Houston a lead they wouldn't relinquish. In the World Series vs the Dodgers, he reached base safely 8 times in 15 plate appearances. It was the greatest accomplishment of his career, but that accomplishment would be shrouded in controversy after his time in the big leagues ended. Gattis' 8th triple of 2015 was in the same ballpark as the first of his career, though this time he didn't hit it into triple's alley. Instead, he smacked a 35 degree, 105 mile per hour moonshot that was dropped just at the wall by Giants center fielder Gregor Blanco. The big man kicked it into high gear, sliding safely into 3rd. He was once again fortunate that the fielder failed to make a play, but his luckiest triple would be the last of his career. To say the Houston Astros cheating scandal rocked the baseball world would be an understatement. It brought MLB into the mainstream news, reinvigorating interest in the sport in the process. One of the most important figures in the story was former pitcher Danny Farquhar, who noticed a loud noise coming from the Astros' dugout whenever his catcher signaled for an off-speed or breaking pitch. The Astros had orchestrated a sign-stealing, trashcan-banging scheme that was audible at home during the second half of the 2017 regular season. At the conclusion of the investigation, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred believed that the continued into the corresponding postseason. The clip went viral once all the pieces were put together, and the hitter during Farquhar's at bat was none other than Evan Gattis. Gattis' 9th triple of 2015 came on August 31st vs the Tigers. He placed one perfectly in the right center gap. It certainly helped that J.D. Martinez was the right fielder that day, but it might not have mattered in the end. This triple concluded a stretch of 7 triples and 36 games for Gattis. Triples makes it safe. Triples is the best. By the time the Astros scandal broke into the public sphere, Gattis had already played his final MLB game, and that allowed him to take a less defensive position than his teammates who were still playing and hoping to get paid big money someday. On the Athletics' 755 is Real podcast, he said his Astros team cheated baseball and cheated the fans. You don't need a baseball YouTuber to tell you this, but people contain multitudes. The same janitor with mental health issues who went from quitting baseball to making the big leagues also went along with a cheating conspiracy. How much does that stain his inspirational story? You'll have to decide for yourself. Gattis' 10th triple of the 2015 season was as standard as they come. A wonky outfield wall and a wicked carom was all it took for Gattis to reach 3rd easily. That put him into double digits, a remarkable accomplishment. It really shows how Gattis ran the gamut. Three of his triples relied on big caroms, but to be fair, that's how a lot of triples are hit. He had one where Towshill undoubtedly saved the day, and another where proximity to Towshill could have caused a misplay. Don't forget he was also hit by the relay throw that probably would have hosed him. He had two others where the ball was dropped after hitting the outfielder's glove, but he also had three where there was likely nothing the outfielders could have done in the first place. And yet, none of this can prepare you for the 11th and final triple of Evan Gattis' 2015 season, which, weirdly enough, was hit off Danny Farquhar. Yep, that was scored a hit. If the outfielder doesn't touch the ball, it is almost never scored an error. So, what have we learned here? It's simple. Big guy triples are awesome, and fielding percentage, well, fielding percentage is foolish.