'It Was Like Slow Motion': All the Thoughts and Actions Center Fielders Learn to Fit into 4.4 Seconds

[Matthew Trueblood]

At the crack of the bat, fans and onlookers at Target Field sucked in a sharp breath. In a season of heartbreak, the arc of the line drive screaming toward the wall in right-center field looked terrifyingly like that of a scythe delivering a lethal blow to the helpless Twins' season. For the people inside the play, though, there was nothing but time.

Image courtesy of © Jesse Johnson-Imagn Images

Sport, like war, is all about grace and guile under pressure. That parallel is uncomfortable for many people, because it seems to overdramatize sport or glorify war, but if you refuse those connotations and examine it as a factual contention, it holds up well. Games and fights have always been the surest ways to raise the stakes of our day-to-day lives; they make clear what really lies behind the facades we construct and utilize when things are calm. They test our resiliency, our intelligence, and our courage.

David Halberstam, perhaps the best sports writer of the 20th century, saw those tests as the essential stuff of sports. And he believed, in a way we might now regard as quaint, that you passed or failed based on your ability to meet the moment when it slammed up against you hardest.

"Big games, and late innings and fourth quarters," he once wrote. "That's when the test is real."

In an unsettling, unhappy way, the Twins' contest against the visiting White Sox Tuesday night—an April game between two losing teams, before 11,828 fans—was a big game. The team had just come home from a brutally fruitless trip to Smyrna, Ga., where they were swept by the otherwise inept would-be contender who hosts games there. They'd blown a late lead in the first game of the set, and never bounced back. After the sweep, they were 7-15. It was a minor surprise that no one was fired on the off day as the team trudged home.

Though it was against a truly terrible opponent, the game Rocco Baldelli's team played Tuesday had been an impressive response to their latest flirtation with implosion. Bad Chicago defense and a bad non-call by the umpires had helped them take a 2-1 lead, but sharp defense and poised, unflappable pitching performances had made it stand up, and the Twins finally cracked the thin White Sox pitching staff in the bottom of the eighth, putting up two lovely insurance runs.

And then, suddenly, they were staring another mortifying defeat in the face. The White Sox scored, and they pushed the tying runs into scoring position, and they sent their best hitter (a backhanded compliment, but still) to the plate with the game on the line. Andrew Benintendi did one extraordinary thing we all take for granted, by recognizing and squaring up a 101-mph fastball from Jhoan Duran. He sent a 101-mph projectile of his own toward right-center field, at a launch angle that would give Byron Buxton just 4.4 seconds to flag the ball down. 

For those of us on the outside—the men and women anywhere but the arena, entertained or even engrossed but not actually involved—the suspense was enormous, but short-lived. For all the center fielders involved in the play, though, it felt much longer. These guys process visual information and react to it on a different level than most of us.

"Well, I've learned to almost think he's gonna catch all of them. He's even caught some where I'm like, 'Ah, man, probably not much of a chance on this ball,'" said Baldelli, who is not only Buxton's manager but a former center fielder himself. "And then you start to look. You shift your eyes, on some of these plays. The ball gets hit, you look at him, you watch him go after it, and then at some point, you look at where the baserunners are at, and you start looking at the other outfielders. And then when you look back up, sometimes, he's just kind of there."

That sounds like a manager speaking—taking stock of the situation, zooming out, thinking about everything—but it is, if you read between the lines, also a center fielder. For this caliber of athlete and physical thinker, there's time to assess, adjust, and consider, even on a scalded ball with as much line drive as of fly ball to it. 

"I've got a chance at everything; I've just gotta run," Buxton said after the game. "I knew once he hit it, he hit it good. Not many fans here, so you can hear how loud it comes off the bat, so I knew off the jump I had to get on my horses."

Some of this is hindsight making these guys sound more conscious and multilevel in their thinking than they actually were, in the moment. Of course that's true. It shouldn't diminish our admiration for their ability to compress conscious thought and make a huge series of careful judgments, in specific and highly variable contexts, all without impeding their ability to get their body moving at top speed.

"You're also battling so many other factors," said DaShawn Keirsey Jr., a center fielder by trade who took over in right field as a defensive substitute in that ninth frame. "You're running into the wall, essentially—or towards the wall—so it's not like you just have free rein or room to work with. As outfielders, you're always kind of conscious of that." Again: there's a context in which the fielder has to make their decisions about how to pursue a ball.

Keirsey is only half-right, though. Maybe most outfielders are always conscious of that, but Buxton used to belong to the class of ballhawks so proud and exceptional and stubborn that they would sooner run through a wall than stop short of one and allow a ball to drop unmolested. There are two or three Aaron Rowands for every actual star in such groups, but one other member of that fraternity is the one who looms over Buxton at all times: Willie Mays. From its very best, center field has always asked not only for exceptional speed, arm strength, and ballistic judgment of the ball in flight, but also for fearlessness—even recklessness. Buxton, though, has learned to gird himself against that siren song, so while Keirsey might have been wrong to think the wall crossed his teammate's mind in the past, he's right that it was a consideration Tuesday.

"I took a glance—I can't tell you how far, now, but I took a glance at the wall, and I knew I had a good bit of space for me, if I needed to dive," Buxton said of his pursuit. "And for me, that's all I need to be able to feel safe for myself to do something like that now. Normally, I wouldn't care. I'd just go play Superman. But just trying to be smart about the balls that I go for, and the balls I go after, to make sure that I don't put myself in a bad situation to where I'm not on the field to be able to make plays like that at the end of the game."

It's hard to pinpoint when he snuck in this look, but we do have a close-up angle of him for the final four or five strides before he leaped toward the baseball. He didn't take his eyes off the ball during them. That leads us to another observation: to make a play like this is to gaze slightly and subconsciously into the future. Buxton didn't just need speed to catch the ball Benintendi tattooed to the warning track. He was able, very early, to calculate where he would be ending up if he caught the ball—even though his brain couldn't possibly have verbally communicated that it was performing that calculation. That's what gave him the confidence to tear after the ball and make the leap and sprawl he did: he knew where he was going to be doing that two seconds before he did it.

"The biggest thing was making sure I had a good line to the ball, because the ball didn't get up too high, for me to kind of run up under it," he said of Benintendi's 24° fly ball. "So, just being able to make the right instincts and first step was a big key."

As Keirsey noted, the stakes of that initial read were raised—although the job was also, perhaps, made incrementally easier—by where Buxton was positioned at the time of the pitch.

"When a ball's hit as hard as it was, and he's also—I'm pretty sure he was playing on the other side of the bag, kind of covering that [left-center] gap. But to make that read right off the bat, and then not only to read it, but then to get there," Keirsey said. "It takes a special talent."

It was only sensible that Buxton would be shading Benintendi to spray on the play, especially if Duran was going to throw him fastballs. Because he did so, though, he had lots of ground to cover, and the ball was slicing away from him even as he pursued it.

"With a lefty hitting, it was kind of going back towards right," Buxton said. "It's one of those things where I'm glad I play center, because I didn't see it until I looked at the video and I was like, 'Oh, that was tailing back towards right.' But as a center fielder, I see that ball as straight."

That's a fascinating insight, although (once it's pulled to your attention) not a shocking one. Just as hitters see incoming pitches from specific vantage points that might affect how much a pitch appears to move or how two offerings interact with one another, outfielders have to experience the ball in flight from their own perspective. Buxton might be something almost like a time-traveler, but he's not seeing the ball in 3-D computer vision or from multiple angles. Playing center, the ball might be moving away from you, but it's doing so even as you're chasing it. Often, that makes it easier to read and chase the ball than it is for a corner outfielder, toward whom such balls are usually hooking or slicing in a more noticeable, less easily tracked way.

Buxton can also feel fortunate that he was in position to make the play at all, because whether he was shaded toward left field or not, the young versions of Buxton—the ones from his first few years in the majors, 2015-18—could never have gotten there. Back then, he played too shallow, even (or especially) in situations like the one the team faced Tuesday night in the ninth.

Season	Avg. Starting Dist.
2015	310
2016	313
2017	314
2018	314
2019	321
2020	329
2021	332
2022	330
2023	N/A
2024	321
2025	327

With the tying run on second, Buxton was already playing a step more shallow than he otherwise would have, knowing he might need to charge a single hard to get the ball home in time to prevent the tie. But because that was from a deeper base positioning, he was deep enough to run down Benintendi's drive as it neared the wall.

"There's a few plays—not just this game, but I get mad about balls falling in front of me," Buxton said of his changes in playstyle over the years. "But at the end of the day, I'm still able to go out there day in and day out, and take my position in center. You've gotta give up something to get something, sometimes."

Some portion of the brilliance we see in great center-field defenders, then, comes from good preparation. Still, you can also see the remarkable capacity to slow the play down in hearing Keirsey's up close-and-personal account of the play.

"I was telling him, it's weird, because normally, I'm the one making plays like that," Keirsey said. "I can't say I've ever really been in an outfield with guys who are that good. It was like it was slo-mo. As I'm running, I see him, and he just jumps in the air, and it was like slow motion. It was one of the most incredible catches I've ever seen."

The exhilarating thing for Keirsey, who was like a solid hobbyist painter watching Da Vinci apply brushstrokes in that moment, was that he got to take it in so completely. By the time Buxton caught the ball, Keirsey had gone through his own profound processing of it and was watching his teammate, as he tried to check off the list of things he can do to help on any given play.

"Pretty early, I know that play's not me. So as the corner outfielder—or even in center, for a guy in the corner—I try to help him as far as, he's looking at the ball to make the play, so he's not looking at the wall," Keirsey said. "So I'll try to communicate in that aspect for guys. In that circumstance, he wasn't necessarily getting to the wall, but that's what I'm looking for. I've just gotta watch him, basically."

In the end, we can see Buxton start from that ultimately disadvantageous spot; quickly pick a straight line to the ball, but one that angles him away from the plate and makes the catch daunting; measure a few steps; and snare the ball, with enough suavity to distract you from the moderately violent crash of his landing. What we can't see is all the thoughts that zipped across his mind, and his eyes, and his manager's and fellow outfielder's minds and eyes. Most of us lack not only that grace under pressure, but that raw mental processing power.

Most great center fielders have a trademark catch to save a game much earlier in their career than Buxton did. That was the price of all the injuries he suffered and all the time he lost during his 20s: so many games that might have included a pivotal, long fly to center found someone else patrolling the spot.

"I don't think I've ended a game with a catch like that—especially with everything that's going on, us battling, getting through some tough series," Buxton said later, proving he did and does feel the pressure bearing down on the team—and confirming the realness of the test he passed by catching the ball. "Just trying to get things to fall for us, and have something be able to fall our way was fun. Last weekend, Michael Harris—that's exactly what he did. For me, I'm glad the game's over, but that kind of gets you started on the offensive side. Especially when you have a tough day at the plate, to make a play like that gets you motivated. It gets you back in the dugout to get things going."

Turning defense into offense, in baseball, is a different, more fraught, and less generally believed-in art than doing so in the NBA, the NFL, or even Baldelli's beloved English Premier League. It's direct and real only to whatever extent players can concretize the surge in confidence or focus they gain by making a great play. Great center fielders have a way of making you buy into the notion, though. Buxton clearly believes in it, based on the conviction in his voice when talking about that. Baldelli would only note that those kinds of plays are rare, and that they alter games in and of themselves.

"The athleticism, the range, the body control to make that play—all things that we've seen from him before, and that you don't see every day on the baseball field."

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[Mark G]

Nice article; very complimentary.  It was also the longest sports article I have ever read because of one play (4.4 seconds).  🙃

[Matthew Trueblood]

8 minutes ago, Mark G said:

Nice article; very complimentary.  It was also the longest sports article I have ever read because of one play (4.4 seconds).  🙃

Not the longest one I've written about a single play! But probably close. Haha.

[Doctor Gast]

Great defense is always great to see. Buxton is the best! Those plays fire up a team.

[BillyBallLives]

For 4.4 seconds I thought:

"Bucks career is over. Surely he's injured."

But he jumped up and said.

"We'll see you tomorrow night."

 

[Patzky]

A few seconds at the end of a game between two less than stellar opponents makes a moment for the ages. The mental process and end result analysis transcends the White Sox and the Twins. It really could be a must - read for any outfielder. I was edge of my seat and I knew the result of the play! 

This is why you go to the ballpark. 11,000 got to see Ober battle, Jax overcome, Keaschall excite, and Buck close it down. Hell, you got to see Quero get his first three hit game if you are a Sox fan. And perfect weather!

If Buck ever gets a statue this catch might be the one it's modeled after. 

[woolywoolhouse]

Hopefully it's a spark. I keep waiting for a spark to propel a win streak for this team. If anyone's going to ignite a positive change with a defensive spark this season, it's Buck.

[Blyleven2011]

I don't think of buxton as superman  but I do think he is a breed of a thoroughbred race horse with great speed ...

[tarheeltwinsfan]

Great article Mathew. Well written and fascinating with a wonderful title. "Concretize"? You never cease to amaze me with your choice of words, of which I am unfamiliar. Thanks for increasing my vocabulary. Do you use these words on a regular basis, or do you search for rare words for your articles, just to edify your readers?   Keep these excellent, in-depth articles coming.

[joefish]

50% catch probability? No sweat. 

Oh, maybe for Durhan. 

 

Nice catch. Nice win.

Atta Larnach too.

[joefish]

The start of this season has felt like slow motion.  Time to giddy up.