We Need to Have a Talk About Willie Mays' Catch

First of all, let me start by wishing the legend Willie Mays a very happy and healthy 90th birthday. This man is one of the greatest baseball players to ever live and I hope we all fully appreciate men like him while they're still with us.

With that said, I kinda feel like a dick having to do this on the man's birthday, but that's when this catch has been plastered all over the TL and I think it's time we all had an adult conversation about it. So I'm going to say something controversial, yet brave: it's not that incredible of a catch.

Now look, given the circumstances — a tied game in the eighth inning of Game 1 of the World Series — it certainly raises the stakes quite a bit. But I'd be willing to venture 75 percent of people who laud this catch as the greatest they've ever seen don't even know that was the situation. They're going purely on the merits of the catch itself, which is what I would like to do as well.

It's a good catch. I would venture to say very good. And again, given the circumstances, it is arguably the *greatest* or most iconic catch of all-time with all things considered. But it's not the *best*.

This video from Foolish Baseball does an outstanding job of breaking down everything you could possibly want to know about the play. The best we can tell from all the footage we have, Mays runs approximately 115 feet in 5.7 seconds to make this catch. Now with the benefit of Statcast, we can plug in those parameters and see how many other catches have been made like that one in today's game. And in instances where outfielders had to cover that much ground in that amount of time, they made the catch 29 percent of the time — 9-for-31. Now that's not to say the catch probability — which accounts for several other factors — is 29 percent, but it gives us a good idea of how often today's big leaguers would make that play.

But people see the over-the-shoulder grab and they go crazy. If you watch closely, though, Mays slows down a bit in order to position himself to make the basket catch. If he had just kept running with his head turned around, he could have made a relatively routine running catch and set his feet to make the throw back into the infield. Andruw Jones — who should be in the Hall of Fame and whose 24.4 dWAR is more than six full wins ahead of Mays' 18.2 — would have been camped under that ball for three seconds.

Again, I love Willie Mays. He's one of the greatest men to ever pick up a baseball bat and his accomplishments are to be celebrated forever. It's just not as great of a catch as the hype indicates.