World Series 2021: Was Jorge Soler's Game 4 home run catchable for Yordan Álvarez?
By Jake Mintz
FOX Sports MLB Writer
ATLANTA — Could Yordan have caught it?
Well, that's a complicated and unfair question.
In what might prove to be the defining play of this year’s World Series, Braves slugger Jorge Soler sent Atlanta into pandemonium Saturday night with a game-winning solo dinger in the bottom of the seventh inning. Just moments after Dansby Swanson tied things up with a blast of his own to right field, Soler’s 107 mph laser beam whizzed just beyond the outstretched glove of Houston left fielder Yordan Álvarez and over the fence in left field.
Truist Park went bananas, and an eternal October baseball highlight was born.
Even though Soler’s blast was no cheapie — just peep the .790 expected batting average — it was most definitely not an uncatchable ball, very much not an upper-deck no-doubter. The reverse angle of the home run shows how close Álvarez was to making what would have been an all-time incredible catch.
Alas, it wasn’t to be.
It’s unfair to Álvarez, not to mention the physics of baseball, to utter anything resembling the phrase "he should've caught it." No home run robberies — not even the "easiest" ones — are expected.
Soler’s jack was an absolute screamer, a low-flying aircraft with a relatively close to the ground, 23-degree launch angle. The ball was hardly in the air long enough to make a play on it. This was not a 2011 Nelson Cruz situation.
Also, Alvarez was playing outfield only because there’s no designated hitter in the National League park during the World Series, something destined to change in the near future. He played just 41 games in left field this season, but Houston needs his ALCS MVP-winning bat in the lineup. So the Astros gladly made the no-brainer decision: questionable defense in left (and Kyle Tucker in center, though that doesn’t apply to this play) for one of the best hitters in baseball.
And while Alvarez isn’t the total butcher out in left that he’s made out to be, he’s certainly not winning a Gold Glove anytime soon. He missed most of 2020 after having arthroscopic surgery in both legs. He’s a 6-foot-5, 225-pound redwood tree with a game-changing bat who runs in the 33rd percentile of the league. He's slow, but not snail-level stuff.
So with all due respect to Álvarez — and again, it’s not his fault — he certainly could've caught it. Right? Again, the difference between "should've" and "could've" is huge, but how makable was this play?
Well, MLB doesn’t make its catch probability metrics available to the public, so we can’t know for sure until the gawd herself Sarah Langs tweets it out at some point tomorrow.
But we can hypothesize, and we can argue, and we can dream. I think it’s an undeniable fact that there are a number of living, breathing, active human baseball men who would have made that eye-popping snag for the ages and brought that Soler home run ball back from the Upside Down.
Mookie Betts immediately comes to mind, as does a healthy Mike Trout. Tampa Bay center fielder Kevin Kiermaier has robbed many a home dinger in his accomplished career. You can’t forget Harrison Bader in St. Louis or Ced Mullins in Baltimore. This is exactly the type of play we’ve seen Aaron Judge make a few times up against Yankee Stadium’s right-field short porch. And, of course, Mets icon Endy Chávez essentially made this catch in the 2006 NLCS.
The only issue with all the names I’ve listed, except for Chávez, is that they aren’t left fielders. Left field is usually a retirement home for outfielders, the place you hide your first basemen or designated hitters for a game or two. Whoever wins the Gold Glove award for left field is generally a worse defensive outfielder than the 15th-best center fielder. Houston’s every-day left fielder, Michael Brantley, doesn’t make that play, either.
Interestingly, Eddie Rosario made a somewhat similar but much easier play an inning after Soler’s homer, but I don’t know if he makes the home run rob.
The best defenders in left field this year, by FanGraphs’ defensive metrics, were Eli White and Connor Joe. I’m sure you and all your buddies were sitting around, drinking a few beers postgame arguing about whether Connor Joe makes that play. No? Just me?
To try to see if this play is possible, I went to Statcast’s search function and pulled some levers and pushed some buttons to try to replicate a similar type of batted ball in Atlanta. Turns out it’s incredibly difficult to rob a home run down the left-field line at Truist Park, mostly because the outfield wall doesn’t shrink down to "rob-able" height until the bullpen, about 40 feet from the pole.
Most outfielders play too far away from the foul line to even reach a ball hit as hard as Soler’s. Álvarez was able to get close only because he was shifted heavily to the pull-side and super deep in order to prevent a double. Fielders in a regular alignment don’t even get in the vicinity. Álvarez had to run only about 25 feet or so to reach the fence.
After about a half-hour of searching, I could find only one home run robbery over the short bullpen wall in left at Truist. And it was courtesy of Soler’s teammate, Adam Duvall.
That batted ball from Yan Gomes was much slower than Soler’s homer (93.8 mph to 107) and was hit with a much higher launch angle (34 degrees to 23), which means that Gomes’ flyout was in the air for a few seconds longer, giving Duvall more time to track it down and pull it back.
So does Duvall make the play Álvarez couldn’t? The more I watch the Soler homer, the more I think Duvall does, indeed, make the play. Maybe not every single time, but I think more often than not, he completes the stab.
It was an extremely difficult play, and in no way should Álvarez be blamed for not coming up with it, but in a parallel universe that features Duvall on the Astros or Jose Siri in left field, Game 4 might still be going.
Jake Mintz is the louder half of @CespedesBBQ and a baseball analyst for FOX Sports. He’s an Orioles fan living in New York City, and thus, he leads a lonely existence most Octobers. If he’s not watching baseball, he’s almost certainly riding his bike. You can follow him on Twitter @Jake_Mintz.
