Much exuberant ink has been spilled over Asdrubal Cabrera's unassisted triple play in yesterday's Indians-Blue Jays game, only the fourteenth in MLB history. That rarity makes it memorable, but I'm not sure there's a ton of athleticism involved--the Unassisted Triple Play (or UTP for short) is more luck of circumstance than anything.
To set the stage: the Blue Jays had men on first and second, with nobody out in the fifth, the count 1-0. With both runners taking off on the pitch, Lyle Overbay (an excellent contact hitter) hit a sinking liner to Cabrera, who was racing towards second to cover the steal (or, perhaps, reacting to the ball). He scooped up the pitch off the dirt, then (instead of flipping the ball to Peralta, who was standing at short) he got up to tag the bag, then the runner. Unassisted triple play.
The UTP seems less an amazing athletic play than an accident of circumstance, albeit one that happens very rarely. Cabrera is the perfect example of how this happens: the other team needs to be doing the hit and run with men on first and second, and the batter needs to hit a liner to the second baseman just as he's racing to cover the bag. The same thing can happen with the bases loaded and a sharp liner to third, or on a low liner behind second to the centerfielder that he catches, then follows his momentum by making the same play as Cabrera (touch second, then tag runner).
Without all these things happening together, and Cabrera being in the right place at the right time, it doesn't happen. If the hit and run's not on, the ball might go into the OF or Cabrera might catch the ball for a double play. And if he'd done what most players might have, had they landed a little farther from the bag, which is to flip the ball to Peralta, we wouldn't be having this conversation, either. There's some athleticism involved in Cabrera half-diving to snag the ball before it hit the dirt, but I'd have been more impressed by him laying out to catch a screaming liner.
Similar arguments can be made for hitting for the cycle--which at least reflects a player with the power to hit a homer, the speed to hit a triple, and the consistency to collect four hits--but there's really nothing that baseball-impressive in the UTP, except for the fact that it doesn't happen very often. Randy Johnson threw a fastball that killed a bird a few years back, and that hasn't happened for a long time (if ever), and people made a similar hulabaloo about that.
Really, the UTP isn't unassisted at all: it requires all of the game circumstances outlined above, from the situation on the bases to the run-friendly count, to the manager calling the hit-and run (a stratagem entirely dependent upon the score, the inning, and the player at bat). All of these things came together to assist Cabrera in making his UTP, which really isn't so unassisted after all.
As proof of the relatively tame nature of this play in the mind of Cabrera, he tossed the ball into the stands as he trotted back into the dugout. Had he really been completely amazed by his performance, he likely would have kept it.
And, oh yeah, the Indians ended up losing the game, 3-0 in 10 innings. That's the most important stat line of them all.
Keywords: Asdrubal Cabrera, baseball history, Cleveland Indians, Toronto Blue Jays, unassisted triple play
