Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week, April 17

Another week, another delightful slate of games, which can only mean one thing: It’s time for another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) In Baseball This Week. One of my favorite parts of the early season is rediscovering the small pleasures of watching baseball that I’ve forgotten over the winter. I don’t mean watching Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge play. That’s obviously very enjoyable, but it’s not something I forget about in the offseason. But the feel of the game, the look on players’ faces when something unexpected happens, the pure happiness I get from seeing a bunch of grown-ups throw a ball around for a job? I only have that experience when the games are on, and the feeling is strongest after a prolonged absence. So no stars today, just stuff I watched that gave me a happy (or, in one case, angry) feeling. As always, a shout out to Zach Lowe of The Ringer, who popularized this article format in his seminal basketball column. And a programming note: Five Things won’t be appearing every week this season, to help balance out my workload and allow me to work on other projects here at the site. I’ll likely be off next week – unless the baseball I watch this weekend is just too enjoyable not to write about.

1. Late-Night Hijinks
I associate West Coast games with wackiness. It’s likely because I grew up out East, and was usually halfway asleep and fully loopy when I turned on late-night baseball (or late-night any sport, really; I have fond memories of silly Pac 10 football games at 1 a.m.). But there’s something thrilling about the last game of the day’s slate going into extra innings, whether you live in Portland, Maine or Portland, Oregon. Last week, the Padres and Rockies did their best to deliver.

Thursday evening, the two teams played a desultory eight innings and headed into the ninth knotted up 1-1. Brenton Doyle had opened the scoring with a solo shot in the third, but after the Padres tied the game on a sacrifice fly in the bottom half of that inning, the offense evaporated. Of course, the ninth means instant adrenaline in San Diego. Mason Miller entered and turned the Rockies into windmills:

But the game couldn’t be settled that easily. Victor Vodnik, a fireballer in his own right, wiggled out of trouble to send it to extras. The Rockies then pushed across a run in the top of the 10th despite a dubious slide interference call. They even cut down the zombie runner for the first out of the bottom half of the inning. But the game was far from over. San Diego equalized and then threatened more, putting the winning runner on third, before Vodnik ended the threat. The Rockies then attacked again, scoring on the first batter of the 11th. They got the Padres down to their final out, with runners on the corners. But again, San Diego countered:

The Rockies made an out at the plate in the 12th. The Padres answered with a Fernando Tatis Jr. sac bunt (!). But then Xander Bogaerts sent everyone home:

That was one of the most exciting games I’ve seen all year. But literally the next night, the two were back at it. Down 2-0, Colorado strung together four singles against Adrian Morejon to tie things up in the eighth. Then it was time for another windmill session:

And another tense bottom of the ninth, with a runner reaching immediately to amp up the pressure on the Rockies. This one ended fairly quickly, though:

The last two games of that series weren’t quite so exciting. But Saturday night, the Mariners walked off the Astros in the bottom of the ninth, with J.P. Crawford finishing off a ferocious comeback from a 7-2 deficit in front of a delirious crowd:

If you’re up late and looking for entertainment, just turn on the last game of the day that’s still going. It’s probably going to be pretty good.

2. Bunting, Down, In Extra Innings
You know how I mentioned that the Rockies cut down the lead runner in the 10th inning of that Thursday game? I have to go back and highlight this sequence:

I can’t overstate how bad it is to bunt there. Even if it works, you’re playing for two runs, not one. With a runner on third and one out, teams have scored two or more runs just 18% of the time over the last five years. With a runner on second and no one out, they’ve scored two or more runs 28% of the time. In other words, a successfully executed bunt would lower the team’s chances of winning the game this inning.

Sure, it would make a tie more likely, but if you value a tie as half of a win (seems reasonable to me), this move lowered the Padres’ odds of winning the game by three percentage points. That’s a big negative swing for a successful bunt. And Jake Cronenworth didn’t even get it down! Instead, he pushed the ball directly to Vodnik and cost San Diego about 20 points of winning percentage. You play to win the game – and this bunt definitely did not do that.

To drive the point home further, Cronenworth himself later scored, from first base. The advancement that he was willing to sacrifice one of San Diego’s three remaining outs for? Meaningless in this instance! Cronenworth conceded an out for a tenuously valuable 90 feet, accidentally got negative 90 feet (runner on first instead of second), and then it turned out that the location of the runner never mattered in the first place, because the bases were loaded almost right away.

The math would look a little bit different if Cronenworth were attempting to bunt for a hit, but he wasn’t. He’d squared to bunt in each of the three previous pitches in this plate appearance. The Rockies were playing him to bunt. The runner on second, Luis Campusano, is slow as molasses. It’s probably fair to say that I enjoy getting annoyed by bad bunts, so I’m not sure whether this counts as a Liked or a Didn’t Like, but it was definitely one of the most notable decisions I saw all week.

3. Called Strikeouts
Swinging strikeouts are cool and all, but I can’t get enough of called strikeouts. It feels like a trick. We all know that pitchers can throw the ball past batters despite their best efforts to put a bat on it. Want to see a sweet slider off the plate that no one in the world had any chance of touching? You can watch pretty much any baseball game and see several. But there’s something viscerally appealing about sneaking a pitch in the strike zone by a hitter for strike three. This nasty curveball from Framber Valdez delights me:

That’s 79 miles an hour right down the pipe, and Vinnie Pasquantino couldn’t get the bat off of his shoulders. Valdez tends to work below the zone with his curveball, but he’s an expert at switching eye levels and lobbing hooks down the middle when batters least expect it.

What Valdez is to curveballs, Yoshinobu Yamamoto is to splitters. He led baseball in called strikeouts on a splitter last year, and he’s already snuck four different pitch types past hitters for punchouts in 2026. This splitter against Marcus Semien is my favorite of the year so far:

That couldn’t have been any more centrally located, but Semien just didn’t pick it up. He was absolutely convinced that the pitch was a fastball until it was too late, and since Yamamoto’s splitter drops about a foot and a half more than his four-seamer, Semien’s brain was saying “ball” right up until the pitch bisected the strike zone. I particularly enjoy his Charlie Brown walk-away. What a delightful pitch.

Those guys were just the warmup act, though. Luis Severino notched five looking strikeouts in a single outing against the Rangers on Monday:

You have to feel for the hitters there. Those pitches were breaking in every possible direction. The sweeper that retired Josh Smith seemed to stop and reverse itself midway through its flight. All five batters knew they were out even as they were paralyzed.

And Severino isn’t the only member of the five-punchout club. Ryan Weathers also notched five looking strikeouts in his latest outing. He even got Mike Trout twice, though you’ll just have to trust me on it given how comically zoomed out the Yankee Stadium cameras are:

I think I prefer the aesthetic value of Severino’s menagerie of strikeouts, but I also enjoy how many different ways there are to accomplish this goal. You can change eye levels, like Valdez. You can use tunneling, like Yamamoto. You can throw pitches that run and fade so much that batters misread them, like Severino. Or you can spam secondaries that tickle the bottom of the zone, like Weathers. There are many different ways to get a called strikeout, and I enjoy watching every last one.

4. Front-Door, Right-On-Left Sinkers
Okay, this one’s a very specific acquired taste, but bear with me. Called strikeouts are one of my favorite events to watch, but my favorite individual pitch? It’s every sinker that looks like this:

You’re not supposed to throw sinkers without the platoon advantage. You’re especially not supposed to throw future Hall of Famer Freddie Freeman sinkers without the platoon advantage. But Nolan McLean’s demon sinker moved so much that Freeman tensed like he was going to get hit, locked up, and could only shake his head ruefully as the pitch took a hard right turn and landed squarely in the zone.

Meanwhile, Michael King had Cole Young seeing (and challenging) ghosts with a pitch that could have fit in either of the last two categories:

The batter reaction is what really makes this pitch type for me. Hitters live for in-zone fastballs, particularly with the handedness advantage. It’s funny to see them diving for cover when they get exactly what they were hoping for. Extra points if they realize they’ve been fooled while the ball is still in midair:

I think most baseball progress is good, but please don’t take this delightful pitch away from me. I know that righties shouldn’t throw too many sinkers to left-handed batters. I know how poorly it works out on average. But just look at these beautiful exceptions. Look at these batters recoiling in terror when they should be salivating over the chance to swing at a fastball. Optimize other parts of the game, and leave my front-door sinkers alone.

5. The Best* Challenge of the Year
The most valuable challenge of the year, as measured by run value, is still Eugenio Suárez standing athwart C.B. Bucknor’s strike zone and yelling “Stop!” The second-best is Leo Rivas turning a strikeout into a base-loading walk. The biggest impact on win probability came from Kyle Schwarber loading the bases with a two-run deficit. But the best challenge? That came courtesy of Henry Davis.

Monday evening, the Pirates gave Paul Skenes all the run support he could ask for as they drubbed the Nationals 16-5. It was a spectacularly uncompetitive game; the Pirates led 5-1 after three innings and 15-1 after six. Both teams emptied out the benches and bullpens. Joey Wiemer pitched an inning for the Nats. Evan Sisk, called up from the minors that very day to make his season debut, got the last two innings for the Pirates. His first inning was rocky – he wiggled out of a bases-loaded jam – but then he got cooking.

First batter of the ninth? Vaporized on three straight:

Second batter? Nats “pitcher” Wiemer, summarily dismissed with three curveballs:

Sisk immediately got ahead 0-2 on the next batter, one strike away from an unlikely immaculate inning. And then he overcooked a sweeper, a mile out of the strike zone, to end his chance of retiring the side on nine pitches. Or did he?

No, he totally did. This was not even a little close to being a strike. Davis challenged in the most uncertain way possible. He knew it was a no-hope challenge even as he awaited the results. He shrugged and laughingly explained himself to Luis García Jr. before the decision even came in:

Just so we’re clear, this pitch was really far away, 2.8 inches out of the strike zone, enough that the broadcast didn’t even post the distance:

But what did Davis have to lose? The Pirates still had two challenges left, and they were up 11 runs in the bottom of the ninth. He’s read FanGraphs (maybe?). He’s a rational actor (presumably). He knows that his eyes aren’t good enough to know the strike zone with perfect precision. Why not use a challenge, and see if his own eyes deceived him and that was actually right on the corner?

Maybe that’s a charitable read of the situation. Maybe he knew for sure it wasn’t a strike. But that would be even more fun. A challenge for a challenge’s sake, just to make sure your rookie pitcher knows that you’ve got him? That’s veteran moxie right there. I’m a big advocate of the challenge system. It’s mostly unobtrusive, improves the accuracy of the calls on the field, and, as a bonus, is a fun in-stadium experience. But I didn’t realize until now that I also enjoy performative challenges. Thanks, Henry, for showing me what I was missing out on.

*Late-breaking note: Edgar Quero established a new best challenge yesterday, after this article was submitted, by flipping a walk to a strikeout with the bases loaded in the ninth inning of a tie game. Now, true to form, the White Sox managed to lose anyway, but that doesn’t make Quero’s challenge any less good.