21
The game is now tied 5-5 and the winning run in scoring position at 2nd.
• Mookie then hit his the famous “slow roller” towards first and the rest is
history. Mets win game six.
There is one other talked about mistake and it was managerial. Dave Stapleton was a better defender than Buckner. In fact, in all seven of the Red Sox postseason wins, McNamara replaced Buckner at first base with Stapleton for defensive purposes. Yet in this game he didn’t. Buckner was also painfully hit by a pitch in the top of the 10th so was Buckner playing hurt? With that said, was this a managerial mistake?
The bottom line is that the first mistake is as important as the last mistake no matter how big or small it might seem. A mistake usually prolongs the inning, adds to a pitchers pitch count, tires out the defense, energizes the opposing offense, allows the opponent to advance a base… the list can go on and on. Basically mistakes increase the chances of the opponent scoring a run.
"The relationship between errors
and unearned runs is historically
around 55-57% of errors become unearned runs."**
And these are just the mistakes that are recorded by the official score keeper. It doesn't include the mental mistakes. So I assert that it's higher than 55-57%.
Each team will make mistakes during the course of a game to some degree. They include both physical and mental mistakes in the mistakes category and are not just limit it to physical errors only. It’s the compounding effect of all mistakes made. The goal is to minimize how many will occur and the teams response to them.
In 27 years of coaching baseball I have yet to see just one mistake be the cause of a loss. So don’t blame Bill Buckner for the loss, he had a lot of help.
References:
* List of Major League Baseball perfect games -
Wikipedia & Baseball Almanac
**The Baseball Mistake Index – Beyond the Box
Score (beyondtheboxscore.com)
Images:
-Screen shots taken from YouTube: 1986 World
Series, Game 6: Red Sox @ Mets - MLBClassics
-Bill Buckner: Creative Commons – Photo by
Craig Johnson