[El Gato]

If you follow baseball you will have many times seen a situation where a pitcher has a potential base stealer standing on first. The pitcher looks to third then throws to first hoping to catch the guy off the base and get an out. It never works. It’s been tried ump-teen million times, and it never works

Two points.

Actually it does occassionaly work, in the sense of the runner getting tagged out.

But that is not the point of the attempt. The point is to force the runner to not lead off so far as to make a successful steal likely. Getting him out with the throw to the first baseman is just gravey, when it occurs.

In this case, we really do want the runner picked off, but just keeping the issue in play, is also useful.

[rxsid]

Yes, indeed. And great follow-up analogy!