Hosmer At The Plate

First off congrats to the Kansas City Royals on brining a World Championship back to their fans for the first time since 1985.  They never gave up and were the kings of the comeback, winning a World Series in five games that saw them trailing going into the eighth inning four times and trailing going into the ninth inning three times.

Over the last couple days there has been a lot of talk about this play by Hosmer where he scored the game trying run on a Perez groundout with one out in the 9th and whether he should have scored and a lot of people seem to believe that a "decent" throw by Mets' first baseman Lucas Duda would have easily had him at the plate.  I'm not so sure that is true though, but let me explain.

The whole play, from the time the ball was hit into play by Salvador Perez from the time the ball was thrown past Mets' catcher Travis d'Arnaud was all of about six seconds.  And the time from when Duda caught the throw from David Wright and threw it wide of d'Arnaud was less than two seconds.  Hosmer's secondary lead was tracked at about 9.5 feet leaving about 80.5 feet between him and home plate, but then David Wright took more steps than he should have to make the throw to first.  This left Hosmer about 57 feet from home when the ball reached Duda's glove and Hosmer was tracked with a max speed of 19.7 MPH which converts to 28.893 feet per second.  This means that if there had been a full two seconds Hosmer would have covered about 57.786 feet at his max speed and while I highly doubt he was traveling his max speed those full 57 feet, that still makes the play extremely close before d'Arnaud has to put on what would have been a difficult tag on a diving Hosmer.  At the end of the day we will never really know what would have happened if Duda had made the throw to home on target but I am under the belief that Hosmer still would have been safe and still would have tied the game.