Chris Coghlan scored the winning run for Florida as the third base coach tried to hold him up in the bottom of the ninth against the Dodgers:

“Joe was telling me stay, but I couldn’t hear him,” Coghlan said. “He was too far up the line, and everybody was yelling.”

…

“When I saw him go back, I was like, ‘I’ve got to score, because he’s going to catch it flat-footed,'” Coghlan said. “He’s got a great arm, but he couldn’t get back far enough to come through it.”

A theme that comes up from time to time on Baseball Musings is pattern recognition. Computer scientists spend a lot of time developing algorithms learn how to recognize patterns in numbers, texts, and images. The human brain does this subconsciously. Coghlan, an outfielder, saw the pattern of Kemp’s catch and the flaw, since that’s how he’s trained. The third base coach, Joe Espada, only saw the depth of the ball to the outfield, and based his decision on that.

I don’t know how one qualifies to be a third base coach in the big leagues, but it strikes me that clubs should test these men for their pattern recognition abilities. They are taking in a lot of information at one time, and those who can process the information quickly and take advantages of anomalies they see (flat footed catch) should do better at holding and sending runners.

The Marlins downed the Dodgers 7-6.