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[MD Longhorn]

Originally Posted by hit4power

Not a blue so don't generally post here, but I think the reason you've never seen this in baseball is that no one can hit a pop-up high enough to give the runner time to get home and back to 3B. It's 60yds from 3B to home and back and a world class 60 yd dash time is 7 seconds. Allowing an extra second for the time to stop and turn around before sprintinig back to 3B plus assuming less than world class speed and I'd guess that the best 3B-Home-3B time you could hope for is 8 seconds or a bit more. Some quick calculations show that a pop-up with an 8 second hang time has to be hit about 260ft high or over the top of a 17 storey office building. Not saying it couldn't ever be done, but awfully hard. At a MLB game the other day, I counted the hang times (I know, but the physics of stuff like this is interesting to me) of several really high pop-ups and none even got to 6 seconds.

I get your point, but I think you've eliminated a few key factors. First, the runner is leading off, and likely already headed somewhat toward home. Second the runner doesn't have to make it ALL the way back to 3rd to be safe - just has to be close enough so that he can't be thrown out after it's caught.

So consider a "normal" short fly to right - a speedster could easily sprint home and get back close enough to 3rd that he couldn't be thrown out by the right fielder.