Beating the tag: Pirates' Marte displays upside of headfirst slide

Someday, when you’re telling your grandkids about baseball in your day, you might have to explain what headfirst sliding was.

Whether a player will continue to slide headfirst now qualifies as a low-grade controversy (at least if the player is good enough). The Astros reportedly outlawed it for their minor leaguers for a time, pulling players from the game if they led with their fingers instead of their toes. The Braves teach their prospects not to slide headfirst, and the Indians lecture theirs.

“I don't like headfirst slides,” Houston manager Bo Porter said last week, perhaps unintentionally putting a spotlight on headfirst sliding prospect George Springer. “I really don’t like headfirst slides.”

Or, someday, when you’re telling your grandkids about baseball in your day, you might have to explain what feet-first sliding was.

There are two ways this sort of thing can go. Everybody can caution up and decide that the three-month injury is practically never worth the extra out. Or, as the game gets faster, stronger, even more lucrative, more competitive, it can go the other way: Feet-firsters could be seen as less gritty, less fiery, less interested in winning.

“Headfirst slides are much more prevalent than they ever have been,” Angels skipper Mike Scioscia recently said.

“Maybe now it's because of swimming pools,” former major leaguer and current Dodgers first-base coach Davey, Lopes, confusingly suggests.

Runners slide headfirst more and, it’s this writer’s sense, those slides are faster, cheaper and more out of control than ever. While teams want to protect their investments, it's hard to think of an example of players choosing the cautious, healthy option, especially when the alternative might help them win. In 50 years, I’d expect, the headfirst slide will be eradicated. Or the headfirst slide will be the only slide we see, and it will be at least 35 percent more physically stressful than the headfirst slides of today.

Whether they’re actually faster is debatable — physicists say yes, research papers say ehhhhhh — but they do offer one advantage that feet-first sliding can’t: Subterfuge.

Just watch Pittsburgh left fielder Starling Marte. He has one of the game’s elite throwing arms, is one of the game’s fastest runners, boosts his OBP in the most selfless way possible, and would probably be one of the league’s better defensive center fielders if teammate Andrew McCutchen didn’t play there; instead, he’s (by some measures) its best defensive left fielder. He can hit the ball a long way.

He’s also one of our nation’s greatest sliders.

In a series against San Francisco this week, his sliding twice flipped calls in his favor, one of those turning a game in the Pirates’ favor.

In the first instance, Marte attempted a steal of second in the third inning. The throw was accurate and strong and beat him by plenty.

Marte identified his doom and adjusted, eluding the tag in a way that is tied to his going in headfirst.

(Whether he actually beat the tag is debatable, to put it kindly. But the call was safe on the field and replays upheld it.)

Later in the series, Marte raced home representing the winning run in extra innings. Again the throw beat him.

But this time his evasive maneuver was subtler. He went in with both arms extended and, as Giants catcher Buster Posey went to put the tag on Marte’ chest/shoulder/face, the Pirates speedster lifted his chest/shoulders/face off the ground, while his arms kept progressing forward and his torso, in a way, didn’t.

By the time his chest did reach Posey’s glove, Marte’s hands had clearly touched home plate. In this case, the call on the field was out, and it’s a call we’re used to: When the ball beats the runner by this margin, the call traditionally goes against him. Seen from the umpire’s place on the field, you can understand why.

But Marte did avoid the tag long enough, and the game’s new technology for making these calls helped get the call right.

* * * * * * *

This isn’t the first time Marte has used headfirst slides to try to evade tags. It’s probably not the first time he has been safe because of it. Each Marte slide is a bit different than the others, adjusting — when possible — to the threat he faces.

Here he is using the raised-chest maneuver to sneak into second against Baltimore earlier this month.

Simply, it’s easier to tag a torso than one skinny little hand — especially when that skinny hand is liable to dodge or disappear. But Marte is able to take advantage of this fact.

He doesn’t do it every time. Sometimes he’ll squirm out of the way or attempt to.

Sometimes he’ll use a more traditional feet-first slide.

Or the most aesthetically pleasing slide, the pat-the-plate slide.

Or, if the tag is off the bag, he’ll go in headfirst but shift his body ever so slightly away from where it is likely to be — in this case, avoiding it by a practically unseeable margin.

Sometimes there’s just nothing to be done. Here, for instance, he goes in headfirst, but the tag is there early enough to get Marte — but not early enough for him to identify it and evade it.

In which case, Marte might have been just as well off going in feet first, saving his pass by the injury gods for another day.

When former major leaguer Omar Vizquel used to defend his frequent dives into first base, he’d claim that diving was disorienting for the umpire and that all the dust and disruption made it harder for the ump to judge a bang-bang play. This wouldn’t be a very good strategy for Vizquel to pursue if he thought he was going to beat the throw, of course, or if he thought he was likely to beat the throw. In those cases, he’d want the umpire to get the best look possible.

So the dive into first is a desperation strategy for players likely to be called out already. Whether umpires would eventually catch on to Vizquel’s strategy and realize that the slide itself was a giveaway is a secondary concern. Plus, replay would seem to close that advantage, which means that somebody should look at whether slides into first are down this year, or whether Vizquel —and others — were merely rationalizing a move that, basically, just feels and looks cool.

Headfirst sliding might carry a similar justification. It’s not the slide to make when the runner is likely to be safe. But when he’s likely to be out, it becomes the only way to turn a certainly bad outcome into a possibly good outcome. It’s hard to imagine athletes ever resisting the urge to try to avoid a tag when they feel they have a chance to do so.

Marte proves that base runners, sensibly, realize that the route to a base doesn’t need to be a straight line, and they maintain an interest in being fast for all 90 feet. Marte approaches the bag each time with the goal of adjusting as needed, making something up at times, but conceding nothing.

It’s part of his toolbag, as they say. It might be the best thing for Marte to take that freedom to improvise away from him, but it’s hard to imagine that not avoiding a tag will ever become instinctual to him.

Ideally, these base runners would be able to distinguish these situations and save their headfirst slides for the moments when the potential injury is (possibly) worth the potential gain. What we don’t know is whether it’s realistic, or wise, to ask players to do this math in the final quarter second of a mad dash.

Their quotes generally suggest it isn’t. In which case, it’ll take a lot more than Bo Porter worrying about it to slow the spread of headfirst slides.

Sam Miller is an author of Baseball Prospectus.
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