Welcome to another edition of Five Things, where I highlight some strange and amusing happenings from the last week. We’re getting into the rhythm of the season now; 20 games in, you start to get a feel for how watching your team will feel this year. Are they going to be exasperating? Do they look like a fun group? Have a few new players completely changed the vibe from last year? Are they hitting so many homers that they had to make a new dong bonghomer hose?
That’s part of the fun of watching baseball, in my opinion. Playoff odds are one thing, but how you feel watching your guys get from point A to point B matters a lot more in the long run. If you’re reading this article, I’m willing to bet that you’re watching dozens of hours of baseball throughout the year – perhaps even hundreds. The playoffs for your team might last 15 hours of game time. The little things are the point, and there were some great little things this week. As always, I’d like to thank Zach Lowe, whose basketball column inspired this one in both name and content. Let’s get going. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to another edition of Five Things, a weekly look into the most entertaining or downright weirdest stuff I saw while doing my day job: watching an ungodly amount of baseball. As always, a big shout out to ESPN’s Zach Lowe, who started writing a similar column years ago and forever changed the way I watch basketball. This is a long one, so let’s get right into it.
1. Elly, Obviously
I mean, did you think anyone else was leading off here? Elly De La Cruz is the kind of player you’d create in a video game, and he was up to his usual tricks this week. You’ve heard about this one already, I’m sure, but he hit the first inside-the-park homer of the year:
If triples are the most exciting play in baseball, what does that make this? Incidentally, that play is a triple for almost everyone. It’s just that De La Cruz is so dang fast. He went home to home in less than 15 seconds, which is absolutely ridiculous. Set a 15-second timer and try to do something around the house. You probably didn’t get very far into what you were doing in the time it took Elly to get around the bases. Just watching him in motion is a joy:
In fact, De La Cruz is fourth in the majors in average sprint speed so far this year. I mean, obviously he is! Look at him go. The only guys ahead of him are true burners: Trea Turner, currently chasing the record for most consecutive steals; Victor Scott II, who stole 94 bases in the minors last year; and Bobby Witt Jr., one of the best athletes in the majors. Of course, De La Cruz has way more power than that trio, with only Witt coming anywhere near Elly’s level of power.
Oh, right. He hit a massive bomb in this game too:
That’s what 70-grade power looks like: 450 feet, dead center. And I hope the Reds have home insurance because that wall probably needs fixing now. Pitchers are challenging him more this year because he cut down on his swing rate significantly at the end of last season, and he hasn’t yet adjusted by getting aggressive in the strike zone. When he does offer at something, though, he’s making it count. I’m not sure if his approach can stick, but I’m also not sure if opposing teams are going to keep letting him hit mammoth blasts while they find out whether their plan is sustainable. It’s pretty demoralizing to throw strikes to a guy who can casually swat them out of any park in baseball.
Oh yeah, he did this a few days later:
I’m almost at a loss for words on that one. He absolutely destroyed that ball to the opposite field. Across the majors last year, there were fewer than 40 line drives hit harder the opposite way, pretty much all by household names like Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge, and Giancarlo Stanton. This one was hit by the fourth-fastest man in the game. It feels vaguely unfair.
To be clear, it’s still not clear how well this will translate into long-term baseball value. De La Cruz is absolutely mashing so far this year, to the tune of a .318/.375/.659 slash line and a 171 wRC+ entering Friday, but he’s also striking out 35.4% of the time, with his line held up by a .458 BABIP. He looks worse defensively at shortstop than he did last year. But he’s only 22, and he just did all those things up above. I’m pretty excited to watch him try to put it all together.
2. Lamonte Wade, Grinding
Most of the plays that catch my eye in baseball are, by definition, eye-catching. They’re Elly at full speed, or defenders making diving stops, or anything else that makes you stop and stare for a while. But most of baseball isn’t those plays. It’s a long season, and most of it takes place without the bases juiced and the game on the line.
Monday night’s Giants-Nationals clash was one of those quiet times. The Nats put together a three-run inning early against Blake Snell and then piled on against the San Francisco bullpen. Washington took a 6-1 lead into the bottom of the sixth inning, with LaMonte Wade Jr. due up first for the Giants. This was squarely into garbage time; per our win probability odds, the Nats had a 95% chance of hanging on.
There’s not a lot of glory to be found when you’re trailing by five runs late. It still counts, though, and Wade never takes a play off. He faced Derek Law, one of those classic “oh he plays where now?” relievers who sticks around thanks to his excellent stuff but keeps bouncing between teams because of his inability to consistently locate it.
On this particular night, Law was on. He started Wade off with the kitchen sink, a cutter/fastball/changeup combo that ran the count to 1-2 in a hurry:
That’s a tough spot for a hitter, but Wade isn’t the type to give anything up. He switched into defensive mode and fought off Law’s next offering, a surprisingly aggressive fastball:
Wade’s game is heavy on batting eye and patience, built to take advantage of lapses in command from the opposition. That paid off as Law briefly lost command of the zone:
That said, the job wasn’t done. Law regained the strike zone and started attacking the upper third again:
And again:
And again:
Fouling these pitches off matters. Even that last one was too close for comfort. If you want to draw walks and stay in counts, you have to do it. But it’s not glamorous, particularly when the pitcher is hitting his spots. Wade is a great fastball hitter, but part of being a great fastball hitter is staying alive when you don’t catch them clean. Surely, Law would eventually break. And indeed he did, on the 10th pitch of the at-bat:
Hitting is hard! Most of what you do is drudge work. No one wants to foul off a bucketful of 95 mph fastballs when their team is headed for near-certain defeat. But if you want to succeed the way Wade does, by controlling the strike zone and ambushing occasional pitches with power, you can’t take an at-bat off. Law would have beaten plenty of batters on an earlier pitch, but he eventually threw a pretty bad one, 91 mph and with far too much plate. That’ll happen when you have to throw 10 pitches to the same guy.
That at-bat didn’t affect the outcome of the game even a little bit. Law retired the next three batters in order, two via strikeout. He threw another scoreless inning after that for good measure. The Nationals won comfortably, 8-1; no Giants so much as reached second base after Wade’s double. But even though this at-bat didn’t matter in the short run, playing like this in the long run is why Wade has been so successful in the majors. When the game is on the line, he’s Late Night LaMonte. When it’s the lowest-leverage situation you can imagine – down huge to a bad team on a Monday night in April – he’s still working as hard as ever. He’s a joy to watch in good times and bad.
3. The Duality of Corbin Burnes
If you watch Corbin Burnes’ mannerisms, you’re liable to get the impression that he’s a great fielder. This smooth catch against the Red Sox last Tuesday was a great, reflexive play:
His celebration was absolutely wonderful: He completely no-sold it. “Oh, me, catching baseballs? Yeah, that’s just normal, I catch ones like that all the time.” This is the self-assured strut of someone who habitually robs hits:
Burnes is a pitcher, though. They aren’t exactly known for their elite glovework. As best as I can tell, he’s somewhere in the middle of the league defensively. Pitcher defense isn’t particularly well quantified, but he looks average by those metrics, average to my eye, and a Google search for “Corbin Burnes defense” turns up a lot of people writing defenses of his pitching and no one talking about his fielding prowess. He was a Gold Glove finalist once, but didn’t win, and I’m not exactly sure how those awards work anyway.
Does he just act cooler than he is, so to speak? That was my impression after seeing that play; maybe he was just feeling particularly good that day and wanted to have some fun with it. I chuckled a little bit at the play – pitchers, what a funny group! – and went back to watching the game without giving it much thought.
But a few innings later, the ball found Burnes again in a much funnier way. This time, it all started with what looked like an innocent popup to second:
The sun was absolutely blinding at Fenway that afternoon, however. As it turns out, Tony Kemp had been completely bamboozled. The ball was actually making a beeline for Burnes as he stood unawares at the side of the mound. Even as Ryan Mountcastle and Gunnar Henderson turned toward the mound, Burnes sat there coolly. But then the ball got too close:
There was no audible conversation on the field on either broadcast, but I like to imagine Burnes giving a yelp as he got out of the way. It’s so classic. The ball finds you when you’re trying to hide, or trying to look more comfortable than you are. The guy who snags the line drive nonchalantly is also the one ducking away from a harmless popup that he lost track of. Also, he’s maybe the best pitcher in the game. Delightful.
4. On The Other Hand…
I know that I just got finished poking fun at a pitcher’s defensive chops, but we’re going to do another pitcher defense item. Why? Because Bryce Jarvis did this on Wednesday, that’s why:
Jarvis is the very definition of an up-and-down arm. He broke into the majors last year with the Diamondbacks as a long man, throwing 23.2 innings in 11 games. He’s back for more of the same so far this year – eight innings in four appearances. He’s not a star, nor does he ever look likely to be one, despite being a first-round draft pick, ahead of both Slade Cecconi and Brandon Pfaadt on the Arizona board.
Draft picks turn into guys like that all the time. You can’t run a big league organization without the Jarvises of the world, in fact. Those innings aren’t going to fill themselves. The teams who develop C-level guys instead of D-level guys just do better in the long grind of the season.
I’m probably digressing too much, though. Jarvis’ story isn’t particularly remarkable; first-round draft picks don’t pan out as often as you’d think. His athletic talents, on the other hand? They were on full display here. Elehuris Montero’s grounder was hit so softly that Jarvis had to be on a full charge to get to the ball at all:
But getting to the ball was only part of the problem here. It’s not like Montero can fly, but he’s not the slowest runner around either. He could smell an infield hit, too; those weak-contact grounders trigger something in hitter’s brains that says, “Get down the line and claim your luck.” Jarvis had to smoothly pivot from a mad dash for the ball into a throw. Or, well, that’s the theory, at least. In practice, Jarvis ended up with what I like to call falling-backwards-shotput form:
Pitchers miss these throws all the time. They miss them more often than not. Managers would prefer pitchers to hold onto the ball there, if I had to guess. An error seems more likely than an out there, and an injury – hamstrings are tricky beasts – is definitely an option as well. Jarvis is living on the fringes of the majors, though. Every game is a chance to prove himself or be found wanting. Every out makes an extended major league career more likely. Some of them are simply more spectacular than others. And while I’m on the subject, Jarvis should probably buy Christian Walker a drink after he absolutely flattened himself receiving the ball at first base.
5. Tim Anderson, Agent of Chaos
Housing costs in Manhattan are ridiculous these days. Whether you’re looking to lease or own, you’re looking at paying double the national average or more. In price per square foot, it gets even wilder. It’s not a problem for Tim Anderson, though, because he’s living rent free in the Yankees’ heads after Wednesday night.
Anderson didn’t figure into the early parts of Miami’s offensive attack; when he came to the plate in the ninth inning, he was hitless but the team was up 4-2. He led off the inning with an innocuous single to right. Then the fun started. The Yankees decided that Anderson was going to run. He’d swiped a base early the previous night, and this was his first opportunity to double up since then. Dennis Santana checked on him almost right away:
Bryan De La Cruz flied out on the next pitch, but the Yankees were still shook. Before the first pitch to Nick Gordon, Santana threw over again:
Then Trevino faked a back-pick:
Then Santana threw over again:
Now Anderson had the upper hand, but he didn’t take off. In fact, he almost got stuck in between, with enough of a secondary lead that Trevino took yet another bite at the apple:
That was almost a disaster for the Marlins. Anderson was just hanging out pretty far off the base, and only beat the throw due to a combination of a good slide and a missed tag:
Meanwhile, Santana completely lost track of what was going on at home plate. He walked Gordon on the next pitch, an uncompetitive fastball low. To make matters worse, Anderson got such a good jump that he would have stolen second easily even if the pitch had been a strike.
Now he was feeling frisky, and started dancing off of the base in Santana’s line of sight. It nearly led to a balk:
Anderson finally got a clean jump for a steal. At first, it looked like it might not matter:
But as it turns out, Anderson’s speed drove the Yankees over the edge. Take a second and watch Anderson, and you’ll realize that he took a hard turn around third. He was thinking about more than a single base, and when Anthony Volpe didn’t look him back, he went for it:
From an overhead view, things get even clearer. When Anderson took off, Anthony Rizzo realized he had to make a phenomenal scoop and also fire the ball home in a single motion. He went for it, but failed. Anderson had essentially conjured a run out of thin air:
Anderson is off to a pretty miserable start to the season. He was downright awful last year. But wow, he’s fun to watch, whether at the plate, in the field, or on the basepaths. I hope he continues to terrify opposing defenses for years to come.
Welcome to the triumphant return of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week, the longest-named column in baseball. Rogers Hornsby famously stared out his window all winter waiting for baseball to return. I can’t claim to have done the same, but I’m still overjoyed it’s back, and what better way to celebrate than by talking about some weird and delightful things that caught my eye while I soaked in baseball’s opening week? As always, this column is inspired by Zach Lowe’s basketball column of a similar name, which I read religiously.
1. Non-Elite Defenders Making Elite Defensive Plays
Great defenders make great plays. I’m sure you can picture Nolan Arenado making a do-or-die barehanded throw or Kevin Kiermaier tracking down a line drive at a full sprint. That’s why those guys are such storied defenders; they make the exceptional seem expected. There are plenty of other players in baseball, though, and many of them make the exceptional seem, well, exceptional. When someone you wouldn’t expect turns in a web gem, it feels all the better, and this week had a ton of them.
That was brilliant, and it came at the perfect time. Plenty has already been written about it, but that doesn’t make it less impressive. Soto is at best an average outfielder and likely worse than that, and his arm is one of the weaker parts of his game. But he’s capable of brilliance out there from time to time, particularly when accuracy matters, and this one delivered.
But there were so many more! How about Brett Baty doing his best Arenado (or Ke’Bryan Hayes, shout out to the real best third base defender) impression on a tough grounder:
That’s phenomenal work. The combination of a weakly hit ball and fast runner meant that Baty had to make every instant count. Any wasted movement on a gather or pivot would’ve made Matt Vierling safe. This wasn’t your normal plant your feet and make a strong throw kind of out; Baty was either going to fire off balance or eat the ball. Check out his footwork, courtesy of the always-excellent SNY camera crew:
That throw came against his momentum and with his left leg completely airborne. As an added bonus, fellow lightly regarded defender Pete Alonso received the throw perfectly. Baty was a top prospect because of his hitting. If he keeps making plays like this, we might have to tear up that old scouting report.
Speaking of prospects who aren’t known for their fielding, Jordan Walker was one of the worst outfield defenders in baseball last year – understandable for a 21-year-old learning a new position in the major leagues. He’s fast and has a powerful throwing arm, so the building blocks are there, but the numbers don’t lie: He was out of his element in the outfield.
Maybe this year is different, though:
Simply put, that’s a great play. Jackson Merrill’s liner was headed toward the gap, which meant that Walker had to come in almost perpendicular to the ball to make a play. A bad step early in the route likely would’ve left him high and dry. But he got it right and turned a double into an out.
These guys won’t always make the right plays. In fact, they often won’t. That only makes it more fun when they nail it. Even bad major league defenders are capable of brilliance. Stars – they’re absolutely nothing like us!
2. Location, Location, Location
Pop ups are death for hitters. Infield pop ups are particularly so. Every other type of hit has some chance of finding a hole, but the combination of short distance and long hangtime mean that if you hit the ball straight up and it doesn’t go far, you’re going to be out. Batters hit .006/.006/.006 on infield fly balls from 2021 through 2023 – 12,583 pop ups led to 74 hits. You generally need some wild wind, a collision, or perhaps an overzealous pitcher trying to field for himself to have any shot at a hit. Mostly, though, it just turns into an out.
So far, 2024 has had other ideas. In the first five days of games, two infield pop ups turned into singles. One even turned into a double. It’s silly season for bad contact, in other words. It all started with Eddie Rosario:
That’s one of the hardest-hit infield pop ups of the year, one of only two hit at 95 mph or harder. That meant that the Reds had all day to camp under it, but unfortunately for them, it was a windy day in Cincinnati on Saturday. Gameday reported 17 mph winds from right to left, and you can see Santiago Espinal and Christian Encarnacion-Strand struggle to track the ball. If your infield pop up is going to drop, that’s a common way for it to happen.
Another unlikely but possible option is to hit the ball extremely softly, as Matt Carpenter demonstrated on April Fool’s Day:
That was a pop up, but it didn’t go very far up. With the infield playing at medium depth and Graham Pauley guarding third base after an earlier bunt single (yeah, Carpenter had quite a day), there was just no time to get to it. Maybe Matt Waldron could have made a play, but pitchers generally stay out of the way on balls like those for good reason. Even then, it would have required going over the mound and making a running basket catch. Sometimes, your pop ups just land in the exact right spot.
But wait, there’s one more. This one was a real doozy by René Pinto, also on April 1:
This one is the last pop up hit archetype: a Trop ball. There’s no wind in Tampa Bay’s domed stadium, but there is a blindingly white roof. White, conveniently enough, is the color of a baseball. So when you really sky one, as the Rays catcher did here, things can get dicey.
How easy of a play was this? In some ways, it was phenomenally easy. After all, five different fielders had time to converge on the ball, and Corey Seager easily could have made it there if he weren’t covering third. That ball hung in the air for more than six seconds, plenty of time for everyone to judge it. It didn’t carry very far, and there was no pitcher’s mound to stumble on.
Leaguewide, hits like this are the least likely of any pop up to land. Even at the Trop, batters are hitting only .011/.011/.011 on them in the Statcast era. But in other ways, it’s not a probability but a binary. This was Jonah Heim’s ball, but he just plain couldn’t see it:
From there, it was academic. And the Rangers’ diligence in heading for the ball meant that no one was covering second, so Pinto got to jog an extra 90 feet with no one stopping him. That might be the slowest home to first time on an in-play double that I’ve ever seen. That screenshot up above was only a few seconds before the ball landed, and Pinto was still near home plate.
In the long run, these things will even out. Most infield fly balls get caught. But sometimes things get really weird – and weirdness can be sublime. Naturally, Yandy Díaz smoked the next pitch for a 331-foot frozen rope – and made the last out of the game. What a sport.
3. Oneil Cruz Is Chaotic, and Good
I watched Saturday’s Pirates-Marlins tilt closely to write about Jared Jones, but my eyes kept straying. Catch a Pittsburgh game, and I’m pretty sure you’ll feel the same way. Oneil Cruz isn’t always the best player on the field. Sometimes, in fact, he’s a hindrance for Pittsburgh’s chances. But one thing you can never say is that he’s boring.
When Cruz is on the basepaths, his speed means trouble. For who? It’s not always clear, because he’s aggressive to a fault. When he’s on third base and the ball is hit on the ground, you better believe he’s going home:
I think that was a good decision, but it’s close. A perfect throw from Josh Bell probably gets him there; Bell had already thrown out Michael A. Taylor at the plate on a similar play earlier in the game, for example. But the throw wasn’t quite perfect, and Christian Bethancourt couldn’t corral it anyway. Cruz would have been safe even if Bethancourt caught it cleanly, but the ball rolled to the backstop to bring in another run.
In the long run, pressure like that tends to pay off, at least in my opinion. Taylor would have been out at first if Cruz didn’t go for it, and the difference between second and third with two outs (Cruz stays) and first and third with two outs (Cruz tries for home and makes an out) isn’t particularly huge. Sure, it’s a chaotic play, but it’s a positive for the Pirates.
Cruz’s defense is a work in progress, but no one can doubt his tools. Sometimes he’ll make a mess of a play that should be easy:
I’m not in love with his decision to stay back on that ball, but Jesús Sánchez is slow enough that it all should have worked out anyway. But staying back meant Cruz had to crow hop and fire a laser to first. He has a huge arm, but it’s not the most accurate, as you can see here. A different setup would have made that play far easier.
On the other hand, sometimes he’ll make a mess out of a play, only to recover because of that cannon arm. This is definitely not how Tom Emanski would teach it:
Cruz handcuffed himself on the initial attempt; instead of being able to make a clean backhanded pick, he got stuck with the ball coming straight at him and flubbed the scoop. For most players, that would be the end of the play, even with a catcher running. But Cruz has a get out of jail free card: He can pick the ball up barehanded and then unleash havoc. The NL Central has a ton of big shortstop arms: Masyn Winn set the tracked record for an infield assist at the Futures Game last summer, and Elly De La Cruz is no slouch. But Cruz might have them both beat when he can set his feet and get into one. Even flat-footed, that throw got on Connor Joe in a hurry.
This game had a ton of Cruz action; not every Pirates game is like that. I watched Monday’s Pirates-Nats tilt hoping for an encore, but Cruz held onto a ball rather than attempt to turn an outrageous double play and was restrained on the basepaths. At the plate, he’s striking out so much that hard contact is barely keeping him on the right side of a 100 wRC+. His trajectory in the majors is still extremely uncertain. Still, I’m going to keep tuning in and hoping for some excitement. You never know what will happen next when Cruz is on the field.
4. The White Sox Get Feisty
It’s going to be a rough season on the south side. The White Sox are a bad team, they don’t have any obvious reinforcements in sight, and they got swept in the season-opening series against the Tigers. The Braves were due up next – after treating the White Sox like a de facto farm system over the winter – and Atlanta romped to a 9-0 rain-shortened victory Monday.
Tuesday promised more of the same. The temperature at game time was a miserable 44 degrees. Remarkably, 12,300 courageous fans showed up, but not all of them were there for the home team. After all, rooting for a club that seems likely to get battered by the best team in baseball on a frigid Tuesday night doesn’t sound particularly appealing, so a meaningful percentage of the audience was audibly cheering for Atlanta. Things were looking grim, in other words.
Something funny happened, though. The White Sox and their fans made a game out of it. Garrett Crochet spun an absolute gem in his second start of the season: seven innings, eight strikeouts, one walk, and one lone run on a Marcell Ozuna homer. When pinch hitter Paul DeJong smacked a solo shot of his own, it gave Chicago a 2-1 lead with only two frames left to play.
That set the stage for an explosive finish. Almost immediately, Atlanta threatened again. Jarred Kelenic worked a one-out walk in the top of the eighth, bringing Ronald Acuña Jr. to the plate. “MVP! MVP!” The Atlanta fans in attendance made their presence known as Acuña worked a walk to put the tying run in scoring position.
But Chicago’s fans, few though they might be, weren’t going quietly. They drowned out the MVP chant in a series of boos, then started a “Let’s go White Sox” cheer as a counter. After a sleepy start, the game suddenly had some juice.
Michael Kopech came in to relieve John Brebbia after that walk, and he promptly walked Ozzie Albies to load the bases. But Yoán Moncada turned a slick double play to keep the Pale Hose out in front. The dugout loved it:
The Sox tacked on an insurance run in the bottom of the eighth, and it turned out they needed it. Kopech had a tough time closing things out. Ozuna smashed his second solo shot to cut the lead to 3-2 before Kopech walked Michael Harris II after an extended plate appearance in which Harris fouled off a string of high fastballs and spit on a low slider. Orlando Arcia wouldn’t go down quietly, either. Kopech again missed with the one slider he threw, and Arcia eventually slapped a cutter through the infield to put the tying run in scoring position for the second inning in a row.
Was this fated to be a crushing loss? Kopech couldn’t find the zone against Travis d’Arnaud, falling behind 3-1 with four straight elevated fastballs. The slider was totally gone; perhaps the adrenaline that came with the potential for his first big league save was too much. The crowd and players were rowdy now, treating this early April game like one with huge implications. Boos rained down after not particularly close pitches got called balls. Braves fans tried to start their own cheers but got repeatedly drowned out by the Sox faithful.
With Acuña on deck, walking d’Arnaud was unacceptable. Kopech tickled the strike zone on 3-1, which brought it all down to a full count pitch. He hit his spot perfectly, and d’Arnaud could only pop it up:
The crowd roared. The lights dimmed as fireworks went off. Kopech looked relieved more than excited as the team celebrated around him. For a day, at least, Chicago’s best was enough to hold off the best team in baseball.
This isn’t how the year will go for the White Sox. They’re headed straight into a rebuild with an unpopular ownership and front office group. I’m not sure that the fans will be able to muster up the same excitement for a July tilt against the Pirates. For a day, though, the atmosphere felt electric and the underdogs came up big. What a magical sport that lets us find moments of excitement even in seasons of despair.
5. Nolan Jones Tries To Do Too Much Nolan Jones is one of my favorite young players to watch. He’s what you’d get if you took a garden variety power hitting outfielder and stapled a bazooka to his right arm. His outfield defense is below average if you ignore his throws, but you can’t ignore throws. Statcast has him in the 100th percentile for arm strength and runs saved with his arm; in other words, he’s a highlight reel waiting to happen when he picks the ball up. He had 19 outfield assists last year in less than 800 innings, leading baseball while playing 500 fewer innings than second place Lane Thomas.
This year, things haven’t gone quite so well. Jones already has more errors than he did in all of last season. One sequence against the Cubs summed up what I think is going wrong. Everyone knows Jones has a cannon, and so when Christopher Morel singled to left, Ian Happ wasn’t thinking about trying to score from second base:
That’s just smart baserunning. There’s no point in testing the best arm in the game when he’s running toward the ball from a shallow starting position. Only, did you see what happened out in left? Let’s zoom in:
Jones planned to come up firing. He absolutely didn’t need to; as we saw, Happ had already slammed on the brakes. But if you have the best arm in the game, every play probably feels like a chance to throw someone out, the old “every problem looks like a nail to a hammer” issue. He tried to make an infield-style scoop on the run and paid for it. That’s a particularly big error given the game state and location on the field; there’s no one backing Jones up there, and with only one out, it’s not *that* valuable to keep the runner at third anyway.
The ball rolled all the way to the wall, which was bad enough. Happ and trail runner Seiya Suzuki both scored easily. But Jones compounded the error. Let’s see what happened next from Morel’s perspective:
Like Happ, Morel slammed on the brakes as he got to third. After all, Jones has a huge arm and there’s still only one out, so trying to squeeze in the last 90 feet doesn’t make that much sense. Even with his eyes on the play the whole time, he decelerated to a stop. But Jones overcooked his relay throw:
I’m not quite clear about what happened there. That was a situation for a lollipop; the play was over, and all he had to do was return the ball to the infield. Maybe he got a bad grip on the ball, maybe he slipped as he was throwing it, but he just spiked it into the ground and Ryan McMahon couldn’t handle the wild carom.
This feels to me like a clear case of Jones trying to do too much. He appears to be pressing, trying to throw the world out after last year’s phenomenal performance. But part of having a huge arm is knowing when you don’t need to use it. That experience comes with time, and I’m confident that he’ll figure it out, but his aggression has hurt the Rockies so far. Oh, and those other errors? Sometimes you just miss one:
The end of the regular season is always bittersweet for me. On one hand, playoff baseball is one of my favorite times of year. Taking the leisurely pace of the game and injecting it with win-or-go-home drama makes for great viewing. Who could forget last year’s rally goose, or Bryce Harper’s monster NLCS-deciding homer? Who could forget the Astros winning one for Dusty?
But there’s no more regular-season baseball to watch, and that’s also something I love. No-drama afternoons, sixth innings where your team is down five and the announcers are looking for something to talk about — that’s the regular rhythm of my summer, and it’ll be weird to move on without it. So to ease the transition from one style of baseball to another, I gathered a few whimsical things and a few high-drama things and combined them into one, well, Five Things. Read the rest of this entry »
After a week off to recharge my batteries — and watch other sports, gasp — it’s time for another installment of five things that caught my eye in baseball this week. Honestly, this list is almost superfluous at this time of year. The standings are so jammed together that half the games in baseball have playoff implications. Teams are getting hot at the right time or collapsing down the stretch in equal measure. Still, you can’t watch everything, so here are some delightful moments you might have missed.
1. Legends, in the Fall
It’s been a rough year for Adam Wainwright. He has put up by far the worst season of his career — a 7.40 ERA says all you really need to know about it — and the Cardinals have collapsed from the perpetual contention he enjoyed for the vast majority of his career. They’ve seemingly played more meaningless games this year than in Wainwright’s entire previous time with the club. Read the rest of this entry »
Ah, Labor Day. The weather is perfect (unless you’re in New York), there’s a well-placed day off of work, and playoff races are in full swing. It’s a great overall time for sports — football is starting up, and the US Open is headed toward a thunderous final. If your team isn’t in the hunt for October, it can be easy to tune out; I wouldn’t blame you for going somewhere else for your sporting needs. But don’t worry: you can still get your fix of baseball, so long as you’re willing to consume it in five bite-sized increments. Shout out, as always, to Zach Lowe, who was making lists of NBA things he likes and doesn’t like before it was cool. Read the rest of this entry »
Another week, another jam-packed baseball schedule. The biggest story of the week, no doubt, is Shohei Ohtani’s torn UCL, the most profound baseball-related bummer of the year in my opinion. Ohtani is such a globe-spanning superstar that news of this magnitude will naturally overshadow the rest of what’s going on in the sport. But I’m not here to mope. Like Zach Lowe and his seminal Ten Things basketball column, we’re here to celebrate some little oddities. So let’s get down to business. This week’s column is filled with delightful weirdness, and delightfully odd teams, to offset the Ohtani sadness. Do you like bunts? Do you like the Marlins doing weird stuff? Do you like baserunning adventures and underdogs taking on bullies? Then read on, because this column has all of that and more. Read the rest of this entry »
Hello and welcome to another edition of Five Things, a collection of plays I had a blast watching. There was a lot to love in baseball this week: baserunning derring-do, great defense, and tons of exciting young players. There was so much to like, in fact, that I don’t have a single negative thing to say about what I watched on the field. The action was non-stop, and cool plays were everywhere, all the time. I left out an inside-the-park home run, for goodness sake. It might be the dog days of summer, but it was a spectacular week of baseball. So let’s get right to it. Read the rest of this entry »
Another week, another chance to look around baseball and see something that amazes you. That’s part of what I love about the game: weird and wonderful things are always happening. As always, I noted a few that particularly tickled my fancy, and now I’m going to write a bunch of words about them in the hope that you like them too. Shout out, per usual, to Zach Lowe, who came up with this idea for a column years ago and became my favorite basketball writer as a result. Let’s get going.
1. Cavan Biggio’s Instinctual Brilliance
When the Jays’ trio of legacy-admission prospects were breaking into the majors, I was highest on Cavan Biggio relative to industry consensus. I’ve definitely been wrong in that assessment. Bo Bichette and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. turned into stars, but Biggio is more of a luxury backup. He can play a lot of defensive positions, but none of them particularly well, and he’s a league-average hitter. That’s a perfectly serviceable addition to your team, but it’s hardly going to set the league on fire, and he’s been worse than that in 2023.
But my Biggio crush is still around, and you better believe that I’m going to highlight his fun plays. Let’s set the scene: Monday night in Cleveland, a scoreless game in the top of the eighth. Biggio drew a start at second base, and with Daulton Varsho on first, he clubbed a no-doubter to dead center to give the Jays a 2–0 lead. Hey! Biggio heads, unite, he’s back in business. Read the rest of this entry »
Was that as fun for you as it was for me? It’s been a busy month, both personally and for baseball. The All-Star game, the draft, the Trade Value Series (okay fine, that one’s just me), the deadline; it’s been a mile a minute since the Fourth of July. Now we’re slipping back into normal baseball rhythms, with a month’s lull before the September playoff chase heats up again. I’m taking advantage of that break to get back to what I love: paying homage to Zach Lowe and talking about five things in baseball that tickled me. Despite the title, I’m casting a slightly wider net than “this week” – we’ve missed a lot!
1. Patty Bailiff Patrick Bailey got the nickname Patty Barrels for his switch-hitting home run feats in college, but I’m officially revoking that one after he posted a 15 wRC+ for the entire month of July. It’s okay, because he’s not here to hit (though I think his bat is perfectly acceptable and will rebound the rest of the year). He’s here to keep the defense in order and grind opposing running games to a halt.
You think you can run in his courtroom (I’m stretching the analogy here, I know, but I like the sound of it)? He’ll shut you down as quickly as you can say “Rickey Henderson.” Since he debuted, he’s comfortably atop the throwing leaderboard; he’s caught 19 runners stealing, six clear of Shea Langeliers over than span. He has a cannon arm, pinpoint accuracy, and balletic footwork. He’s somehow always in a good throwing position despite also being a superlative receiver. This is what 80-grade catcher defense looks like.
To celebrate being clear of that terrible July, Bailey put on a show Tuesday night against the Diamondbacks. He started the game on the bench for a well-deserved rest, but entered the game as a defensive replacement when the Giants took a slim 4-3 lead into the eighth. He got things going right away by giving Jace Peterson a rude welcome back to the Bay:
That’s outrageous. No time to collect himself, no time to get out of his crouch, no time to even think; he gunned Peterson down remorselessly anyway. That looked like a clean steal when the ball reached home plate despite the failed bunt attempt, but Bailey is just too good:
That right there is a great day for a defensive replacement. How many catchers come in and immediately erase a baserunner? He wasn’t done, though. In the ninth inning, Arizona put another baserunner on, but Bailey wasn’t having any of it:
That’s absolutely incredible. Two innings, two baserunners erased, and one of them a game clincher. Just perfection. Take a look at it from another glorious angle:
I don’t really have anything else to say. Bailey might be the best defender in baseball right now. He’s winning games with his throwing arm, which is what pitchers are supposed to do, not catchers. The Giants wouldn’t be nearly this good without him.
2. The Versatile Reds
Cincinnati is in a pitched battle for the top spot in the NL Central. I’ve written about them frequently this year, largely because they’re so dang fun. It’s not just the sheer youthful exuberance of the Reds that draws me in, though. I also love their avant-garde approach to lineup construction, enabled by an embarrassment of middle infield riches and a few versatile corner types.
Here’s an example off the top of my head. On July 6, they pulled out a narrow victory over the Nationals, 5-4 in 10 innings. That’s not particularly notable; the Nats aren’t what you’d call “good” this season, even though they’re not the complete laughingstock that some feared before the season. No, what I loved about this game was that Cincinnati used multiple players at every defensive position.
Take a look at this delightful chaos:
That’s right: Kevin Newman, of all people, started at first base. He got replaced defensively by Spencer Steer, then Joey Votto, then Steer again after Votto himself got replaced. Newman got pulled from the game because the Reds pinch hit for Luke Maile with TJ Friedl, then left Friedl in the game in center field. That meant they needed a new catcher, and Curt Casali subbed into Newman’s lineup spot. Easy peasy.
Only, they pinch hit for Casali too (with Votto). That meant that DH Tyler Stephenson had to surrender his DH duties and don the tools of ignorance. But that meant the team needed to put a pitcher into the lineup. Sure, no problem; Jonathan India made the last out of the inning where Votto pinch hit, so the team simply pulled him for the pitcher’s spot.
But wait, who plays second base? That would be Matt McLain, who shifted over from shortstop. Naturally, then, Elly De La Cruz moved from third to short, and Steer, who had started the game in left before moving to first base, slid over to third with Votto replacing him.
Following so far? Good, good. Things were pretty much standard from here until the bottom of the 10th, when the Reds brought in their defensive replacements. Steer moved back to first, Nick Senzel moved from right field to third, and Jake Fraley took over in right. Just your standard LF-1B-3B-1B line for Steer.
If you’ve been following along, you’ll realize I left two positions unmentioned. After Friedl pinch hit, he stayed in the game as a center fielder, but the Reds didn’t remove their original center fielder from the game. Senzel merely slid from center to right, which meant Will Benson had to move from right to left, which was the impetus for moving Steer from left field to the infield in the first place. It all makes sense when you follow through on it, but no one is making these kinds of hockey-style bulk substitutions in the universal DH era. No one except the Reds, that is.
3. Miguel Rojas, Savvy to the End Miguel Rojas was never much of an offensive threat, and he’s been outright awful this year. Honestly, “awful” might be too kind to him. He’s hitting .223/.275/.285. He hit his first homer of the year on Wednesday, and it’s August. That’s not when you’re supposed to hit your first home run. The Dodgers went out and traded for Amed Rosario, and they have to be hoping to ease Rojas out of the lineup sooner rather than later.
That seems like a reasonable plan to me, but I want to give a quick nod to his career before he’s relegated to the dustbin of history. I loved watching Rojas on a series of awful Marlins teams, and it wasn’t because of his uncanny ability to rack up one to two Wins Above Replacement year in and year out. In one specific phase of the game, and one specific phase only, he resembles Mookie Betts. That phase? Self-assuredly smooth actions on defense.
I’m mentioning this not to say that the Dodgers should keep playing him, but rather because a play he made a few weeks ago made all my old memories of Rojas come rushing back. It wasn’t exactly a highlight reel play. You might miss it if you weren’t looking for it. But his footwork and instincts are smooth like creamy peanut butter:
There are a ton of ways to get that play wrong. You could charge the ball; in double play situations, it’s generally a good idea to go and get the ball to save precious fractions of a second. But that wouldn’t work here, because there was no chance of turning two if multiple throws were needed. Charge this one, and you’re looking at one out maximum. You could angle your body wrong; to make this play, you need to catch the ball with your weight carrying you towards first base. You could get the footwork wrong; the timing was so tight that the foot that hits second base needs to be your plant foot for the throw to first.
All of that was automatic for Rojas. The Orioles broadcast isolated Rojas on a replay that really drives his skill home:
Those choppy steps are all part of the plan. Even the way he fields the ball is deliberate; the footwork means there’s no need for a barehanded stab, but the transfer needs to be immediate, and Rojas dropped down on the throw to accommodate that and also to avoid a sliding Colton Cowser. He did it with no time to spare whatsoever; it was a bang-bang play at both bases. If his internal clock was even slightly off, the Dodgers might have ended up with no outs instead of two. But his clock wasn’t off. It’s never off.
Modern baseball statistics are really good at measuring how valuable Rojas’ defense is, and it’s not valuable enough to offset his anemic offensive skills. But they can’t measure the sheer joy I get out of watching his defense. Even Betts himself just sat there and admired it from a front row seat. I hope we get plenty more plays like this from him before his offense plays him off the field.
4. Manny Being Manny
This probably won’t surprise you given my general taste in baseball players, but I love Manny Machado. I love his defense and his easy power. I love his mannerisms on the field. I loved when he sulked performatively every time the Padres shifted him into shallow right field. I love his 80s-TV-villain demeanor at the plate. As it turns out, I also love watching him take pitches.
When Machado is taking all the way, you’ll know it immediately:
Nope, probably not swinging at that one. He didn’t even keep his hand on the bat! He’d clearly made the decision to take no matter what, and it was a savvy decision; José Berríos had been wild all inning. But there’s no pretense of standing in at all. He’s up there completely uninterested in the pitch – maybe he’s thinking about the weather, or why the money in Canada is all plasticky-feeling.
With that delightful take out of the way, he stood in for the next pitch and at least looked like he was considering taking action:
Berríos looked befuddled on the mound. Was Machado just not going to swing? There’s something about his languid pre-pitch demeanor that makes it feel like he’s barely deigning to pay attention to what’s going on. But that’s just a cover; throw him something he’s interested in, and it’s go time:
That’s a ferocious hack; the barrel of the bat almost made it to the outfield. Imagine how much force he must have been swinging with to shatter the bat so completely and still muscle the ball for a bloop single.
The dichotomy between rest and action is baseball in a nutshell – Willie Mays described the sport as “violence under wraps.” But no one playing today epitomizes that for me quite like Machado. He can shut it down completely for a pitch, then crank it up to max effort to brute force a ball to the outfield, then take it all the way back down for a businesslike acknowledgement of his success:
5. George Kirby’s Alien Precision
As the saying goes, to err is human. Baseball has a great way of reminding us of that. The best hitters make outs 60% of the time. The best pitchers give up the occasional mammoth home run. Sure-handed defenders make errors, contact wizards whiff, and elite baserunners get thrown out. The sport is hard!
Don’t tell George Kirby that, though. He has otherworldly command – he’s running a 2.7% walk rate! – and it was on full display in his start against the Twins on July 20. Check out this sequence against Alex Kirilloff, for example:
I left out two fishing expeditions on 0-2 and 1-2 to make the GIF a reasonable length, but you get the idea: Kirby has the ball on a string. That slider away/slider down combination is ludicrous; they’re both perfectly located. Then he dots the same corner with a fastball, and has a breaker-for-a-strike wrinkle in his bag too? Come on, that’s overkill.
He had a whole bagful of those perfectly-placed pitches that day. Check out this smash cut of four strikeouts:
That fastball goes where Kirby tells it to. If you’re keeping score at home, he’s perfectly capable of dotting both edges with it, and he can move it up and down as appropriate. Oh yeah – he’s regularly hitting 97 mph. Seems pretty good to me!
When Kirby’s as on as he was in this game, it feels like he’s just toying with hitters. As he chugged towards the conclusion of this seven inning, 10 strikeout gem, he eschewed his secondary pitches and painted with his fastball. First to Byron Buxton to get an easy pop out:
Kirby will probably always give up his fair share of home runs, but that’s a small price to pay for his clinical command. There will be no walks. There will be plenty of disbelieving batters. It isn’t how most pitchers succeed, but it’s undeniably fun to watch.
