Austin Jackson and Perfection

One of the great features of baseball is that every game starts with a clean slate. You never quite know what's going to happen. Sure, the Los Angeles Dodgers will probably beat the San Diego Padres tonight, because one team is 71-57 and has Clayton Kershaw on the mound and the other team is 59-66 and is sending Tyson Ross to the hill. But there's a reason they play the game. There's a reason that, as the great Earl Weaver once said, 'you've got to throw the ball over the damn plate and give the other man his chance'. On any given night, in any given at-bat, the unexpected can happen, and as a baseball fan, it's this slim chance that keeps us glued to our seat. Sure, it's not often that we get to see something remarkable, something almost unexplainable, but that's what makes this game so special.

Armando Galarraga entered his start on June 2nd 2010 with some pressure on his shoulders. As Rod Allen said during Galarraga's warm up, he needed to earn the number five spot in the rotation. He'd made just three appearances that season, and was hanging on to his rotation spot by a thread. The game started innocuously enough, Galarraga's pitches had life and he was controlling them well, but he wasn't exactly dominant. The Indians weren't hitting the ball hard, and when they did, it was right at the defense. Suddenly, Galarraga had retired 18 in a row without breaking a sweat. When he coasted through the seventh and eighth innings without reaching a two-ball count on any of the six hitters, it suddenly looked like Armando Galarraga, the 28 year old journeyman, was about to complete a feat that had been done just 20 times in baseball history: a perfect game.

Enter the ninth. At the plate, Mark Grudzielanek, a journeyman shortstop who had enjoyed a long and profitable major league career, that would ultimately end just a week after this game. Grudzielanek hammered the first pitch... and this happened

Without the context, this is an incredible catch, the kind that will make highlight reels and SportsCenter Top 10 and sports writers and fans tweet excitedly. With the context, this is probably one of the best catches you will ever see, and the kind of moment that can make a baseball fan for life. Let's break down the catch.

If you ask most major league hitters where they would like a pitch to be, I guarantee it's not far from that spot. Belt high, right over the middle of the plate, this is a mistake by Galarraga, one of the few he made. The catcher sets up on the inside of the plate, and Galarraga just misses his spot. And to Grudzielanek's credit, he punished it. This was easily the hardest hit ball all night for the Indians. For once, it wasn't right at one of the Tiger position players, it was headed to the left-center field gap, and deep. This is a screengrab of the above gif right after the camera angle changes.

The outfield is shaded to the opposite field, meaning that Austin Jackson, the Tigers center fielder actually starts on the wrong side of the field, and has to go back over to left-center field in order to make the catch. It also looks like he was playing pretty shallow, which is unsurprising given Grudzielanek had a career .393 slugging percentage. I've crudely drawn on a red dot in the approximate place Jackson makes the catch. To my best estimations, there is about five and a half seconds between the moment the ball makes contact with Grudzielanek's bat and the moment it nestles in Jackson's glove. At this point in the play, Jackson has already made several strides towards the ball, so he obviously got a pretty good jump, but he still has well over 100 feet of ground to make up in order to make a play on the ball, never mind the fact he has to judge the trajectory and the distance.

Ultimately, Jackson either misjudges the flight of the ball or has too much distance to cover. His route to the ball wasn't perfect, but it was damn close. Unfortunately, Jackson is right handed, so his glove is on the wrong side to make a good attempt at a catch, to even get his glove on the ball would take an incredible feat of hand-eye co-ordination. In the end, probably out of sheer desperation, Jackson throws his glove out in hope.

Maybe he could have tried a backhanded dive, but he hadn't slowed down from his top velocity and with his back to home plate he would have been looking at some kind of Jim Edmonds-esque miracle to manage to get the ball in his glove having already covered a lot more real estate than Edmonds did. So Jackson flung his glove out and somehow, somehow the ball stuck. The Tigers dugout went berserk, the stadium left it's feet and Armando Galarraga cracked a wry smile. Ultimately, this game would go down in history for all the wrong reasons when Jim Joyce blew the call on the 27th out, costing Galarraga his perfect game, and likely costing Jackson a genuine argument in greatest catch of all time discussions.

Jackson has never managed to live up to his hype as a prospect, and the fielding metrics actually rate him as a below average defender over the past couple of seasons. On June 2nd 2010 however, he made one of the greatest catches, given the circumstances, in baseball history and earned himself immortality with five and a half seconds of magic.