Quotes of the Week from Me:

“Our lives are full of so much good, so much uncertainty, all at once.”

“Intent. Behavior. Habits. Practice.”

“Sometimes opportunity just stares at you while it waits for you to engage.”

Quotes of the Week from Others:

“Some people will not hear you regardless of how much, how loud, how truthful, how loving, or how profound you speak. Wish them well and let them go.” – Unknown

“A light here required a shadow there.” – Virginia Woolf

“Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn’t calculate his happiness.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Plan for what is difficult while it is easy, do what is great while it is small.” – Sun Tzu

Quick Optimism:

Dum spiro spero

While I breathe, I hope

Questions of the Week:

What’s a cutoff man?

Back to sports we go. And why not? They are the best. I have found my stride again in staying up too late. This week was the Dallas Mavericks against the Oklahoma City Thunder and last night the Timberwolves against the Nuggets for an incredible Game 7. I’m not even a fan of those teams, but the games were on, they were close, and I had to watch.

Don’t worry, the Yankees played several times this week as well. The game I caught included two Juan Soto homeruns, and I’ve officially fallen in love with our newest superstar. The man is incredible. Just like Judge, and Stanton, and so many others, but Soto makes those guys look like “normal” players. Which is crazy.  

So, what’s a cutoff man? Sometimes it’s your greatest ally, other times a hope and a prayer.

A cutoff man is what an infielder turns into when a baseball is hit into the outfield. Most often necessary when the ball rolls past the outfielders to the fence, it is very important that one of the infielders runs into the shallow outfield to get closer to the outfielder fielding the ball.

Depending on which part of the field the ball is hit, the third baseman, short stop, second baseman, or first baseman run out toward the ball to give the outfielders a shorter distance target that can turn and throw the ball to catch runners at any of the bases.

Yes, I am talking about teamwork and the impressive knowledge that players possess as they instinctually move into position mid play, but I am also talking about contradiction, and here is why.

As athletes and professionals in our respective careers, we are taught to do things at high levels. In baseball, we are supposed to throw as hard as possible. In hockey, players want the fastest slapshot or in soccer, the hardest shot on goal.

Naturally, when I showed up to my first practice in college, I wanted to show my coaches and teammates that I could throw, run, and hit the hardest.

We warmed up and jogged into the outfield to work on deep fly balls and line drives in the gap (balls that split the gap between outfielders and get past them). An upperclassman said the focus was to get to the ball as fast as possible and get rid of it as fast as possible. “Don’t take extra time to throw the ball harder. Just get to it and hit the cutoff man.”

It made sense in some ways, but that logic was typically applied to infielders. Quick hands. Get rid of the ball ASAP. To prove his point, my teammate brought a stopwatch to practice to test the theory. When the cutoff man was in the right position, it was much faster to just get the ball to him ASAP compared to taking extra strides to throw the ball harder with more momentum behind the throw.

Our field was oddly shaped, with right center field being 417 feet. That is larger than nearly every MLB stadium. But as an outfielder, I trained to be able to throw a ball upwards of 350 feet so I was supposed to be able to get it all the way into the infield. It didn’t make sense at first.

Some of the older outfielders threw the ball in so quickly it was as if they weren’t even looking at their target. Once the ball was released, they had done their job and it was up to the next teammate to catch the ball, listen for the catcher’s command, and throw the ball to the base that the runner was attempting to advance to.

Trust. Quick action. Letting go. Hustling. All a recipe for success. What I learned that first day was that if I threw the ball from the fence to the infield on my own, it slowed down significantly as the ball traveled in the air. When someone could catch the ball halfway, turn and throw, the ball traveled faster and could be redirected to the correct base when needed.

Which cutoff men or women do you rely on? Who do you trust with your throws from the fence on their way back to home plate?

Find your cutoffs this Monday.