What do Eric Bruntlett, Asdrubal Cabrera, Troy Tulowitzki, Rafael Furcal and Randy Velarde have in common? They're all MLB infielders, they're the five MLB players to have accomplished the mythical unassisted triple play since the year 2000, and, most obviously, they're all a part of my latest highlight reel from the new MLB Film Room.
It took a little bit of searching, a couple of extra clicks to apply filters, and that was that. I randomly put together a quick montage of every unassisted triple play in post-2000 MLB, thanks to the awesome new platform.
This and so much more is available thanks to the revamped digital archives of Major League Baseball, powered by Google Cloud, which Eric Fisher of SportBusiness says contains over 3.5 million clips and dozens of filters through which you can navigate the library and find the exact play you're looking for.
And these filters are deep: you can search by player name -- be it the hitter, the pitcher, any of the baserunners, or the primary fielder -- or by their handedness, position or team. You can then sort clips by the result of the play, be it a home run, a strikeout, a foul tip, an error after a pickoff attempt at second base, a knuckle ball that resulted in a called strike where the runner on first was subsequently caught stealing... you get the idea. It covers practically all the bases I can think of (no pun intended). This depth of searching "only" goes back to 2017, the season from which every single pitch thrown is available to watch, as well as in all subsequent seasons. You can't use these specific "play" filters on seasons before 2017.
However, as Fisher notes, there are various plays, events and interviews available dating back to 1929 -- including the aforementioned quintuplet of triple plays -- within the database. You can search these plays by player, team and season. Want to find highlights of Roger Maris in 1961? Easy. Want to see the unbelievable displays of power throughout the career of Willie Mays that were lost in the shadow of his basket catch? Done. It's a bottomless hole that is extremely hard to resist diving into, as I'm currently finding out.
The post-2000 unassisted triple play list was a convenient one for me to use, as highlight reels can only be made up of five clips or fewer. Still, for someone who has no video editing skills -- you're looking at one example right now -- it's a quick way to share baseball history and trivia with friends in an entertaining fashion.
Fisher spoke with Vasanth Williams, MLB's chief product officer and executive vice president of technology, strategy and innovation.
"We want to build a next-generation baseball video product that makes it easy for fans to find, watch, create, and share baseball videos," Williams said. "We don't want baseball to be an aberration, but rather in line with how they already consume media and video."
Try it out for yourself, but make sure your boss isn't nearby (or monitoring your work-from-home performance). It's an abyss of pure baseball joy.
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