It's also much, much easier to get to balls in front of you than balls over your head, playing dudes shallow seems to make little sense to me, but I await more learned gentlemen with more evidence to show how wrong I am. I actually found that not to be true. I'll admit that this is all anecdotal and playing CF in Iowa HS ain't exactly the NLC. But other than balls directly behind me, I found going back easier. I think it's that on a ball hit deep, it's a dead sprint until you get there. You either get there or the ball hits the fence. On shallow hits, there's a point at which you need to decide if you're going for it or pulling up and that hesitation felt like it cost me some range. And on almost every short ball, except gappers, you have to play conservative as a ball getting by you is a disaster. I don't know how to possibly measure that and I'll admit I could be totally wrong. But that was definitely my experience in about 100 games in high school OF. did you ever slide into first base