Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week, April 21

Welcome back to another installment of five things that caught my attention in baseball this week. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but I got the idea from the estimable Zach Lowe, who writes a similar column about basketball every week that I absolutely love. Now that the sugar rush of home openers and new players is starting to wear off, we’re into the grind of the regular season.

But the grind of the regular season is awesome. There’s so much going on, all the time, that there’s always something worth paying attention to. It’s just a matter of keeping your eyes open – and watching an ungodly amount of baseball, of course, which is the best part of my job.

1. Government Catcher Overreach
Nobody likes to be interfered with when they’re at work. I can’t stand it when it’s noisy outside, or when my internet is on the fritz. I don’t even like it when someone buzzes into my apartment when I’m mid-paragraph. I’m busy here! Leave me alone. Baseball players are made of hardier stuff than I am, though; they have their fair share of over-served fans and over-zealous hecklers on their case every day at work and seem to deal with it just fine.

That’s all indirect interference, though. Imagine how you’d feel if the long arm glove of the law Matt Thaiss kept you from doing what you wanted to. Last Saturday, two Boston hitters had that very experience. It all started with a foul bunt. Raimel Tapia was trying to advance the runner on first with the Red Sox trailing by a run in the bottom of the eighth, but he couldn’t do it. After a foul bunt, he swung away and fouled off another ball to reach 0-2. Then he lofted a fly ball to left that Tyler Wade Taylor Ward flagged down just shy of the Monster:

But wait! Watch that replay again, and you can see umpire Cory Blaser gesturing animatedly just before the camera pans to follow the ball. He was calling catcher’s interference; Tapia went to first automatically. The replay showed that Thaiss was far enough forward that he caught Tapia’s bat before Tapia made contact:

That put the Angels in hot water. After Ryan Tepera struck out Triston Casas, he faced Reese McGuire. On 1-0, McGuire swung at a juicy changeup, and, well:

Again! This one was even more obvious than the first, particularly in slow motion:

The Angels didn’t so much as complain on that one. Both runners who were interfered with scored, and they provided the two-run margin of victory for Boston. Hey, sometimes getting interfered with isn’t so bad – just so long as big government Cory Blaser is there to provide restitution.

2. The Roller Coaster Red Sox
That game ended in a Boston victory, but like so much about the team this year, it was anything but simple. The Red Sox are 10-10, but that .500 mark doesn’t reflect how it feels to watch one of their games. You’re just as likely to see a spectacular play or a rollicking comeback as you are a gaffe or decisive loss. Sometimes you’ll see both in the same game! Check out this spectacular defensive play by Enrique Hernández:

That’s Superman stuff right there. Not many shortstops make this throw, and fewer still make it look so pretty:

Stick around, though, and you might see him stand flat-footed while a grounder skips right past him, thanks to a shockingly poor read off the bat:

No team has committed more errors that the Red Sox this year. They’ve made their fair share of spectacular plays, too, though. Overall, Statcast rates them as the 20th-best defense, closer to the middle of the pack than the bottom. Their hitters have mimicked those highs and lows. Masataka Yoshida is off to a glacial start, but Alex Verdugo is mashing. Adam Duvall was on fire until he got hurt. That’s normal this early in the year, but it somehow feels exacerbated in Boston.

It’s not just individual performances: their games are filled with peaks and valleys, with oddball circumstances around every corner. That catcher’s interference game was obviously strange. Their annual Patriot’s Day game featured copious rain delays, a heroic 6.1 inning relief appearance by Kutter Crawford, and a furious ninth-inning rally that fell just short. That’s just business as usual these days in Boston, where weird is normal.

Victories are slugfests. Defeats might be 1-0 nail-biters or 10-4 blowouts. Indeed, 10-4 was the final count on Wednesday in their loss against Minnesota, but despite the lopsided score, the Sox managed to load the bases with no one out in the ninth inning to make things interesting. They came back the next day and won 11-5 while letting the Twins load the bases in the ninth themselves, keeping the alternating cycle of highs and lows going. Even their walk-off celebrations are strange. Their Tuesday victory had to be reviewed, which meant a bunch of awkward milling about waiting for an umpire to listen to someone in another state:

And then, of course, an umpire talking juxtaposed with an on-field party:

Thus far, the twisting path has left the team in last place in the competitive AL East despite a decent record. I know I’ll be tuning in to see if they can turn things around. If nothing else, their season so far suggests that they’ll be an entertaining watch. Just don’t forget to pack some Tums.

3. Travis Jankowski, Bunt Bully
After an exuberant opening weekend, the Rangers offense has been up and down. They’ve put up 48 runs in six games against the Royals, but have struggled aside from those two series. Corey Seager’s injury certainly didn’t help; every offense looks worse when you take away its best hitter. And they weren’t a deep unit to begin with, which is how you end up with Travis Jankowski, who signed a minor league contract with Texas this offseason, batting second for a playoff contender.

In the long run, Jankowski is miscast in that spot. He came into the year with a career 77 wRC+ in more than a thousand plate appearances. His career line doesn’t look like a fluke; he doesn’t hit for enough power or reach base at a high enough clip to make the whole package hum. But when the Rangers have needed him most, he’s put up the best stretch of his career.

In 36 plate appearances, Jankowski is hitting .300/.400/.467. He’s not doing it with home runs – he hasn’t hit one this year. He still has gap-to-gap power, though, and hey, when you’re hot, you’re hot. Take a look at this perfectly placed double:

Saying this is all a hot streak doesn’t give Jankowski enough credit. He’s making his own luck, too. Here’s the first play of Monday’s Royals-Rangers tilt:

Sure, he’s not Seager, but Jankowski saw an opening in Hunter Dozier’s errant throw. On the first pitch, he pounced, in his own way:

It might not look like much, but I love this play. No one on the field was less interested in making a tricky fielding play than Dozier. It’s likely that no one was more in their own head than Dozier. Finally, c’mon, he’s Travis Jankowski! A sacrifice bunt wasn’t the end of the world in this situation, even if Dozier rose to the occasion.

In the long run, Jankowski isn’t going to deliver top-of-lineup production. So what? For a depth-strapped team like the Rangers to make a playoff run, they need either perfect health or contributions from unexpected places. The first has predictably eluded them, but Jankowski is handling the second part for now.

4. Jeremy Peña Loves Free Bases
Jeremy Peña can absolutely fly, but he didn’t show it last year in the majors. Despite playing the entire season, he swiped only 11 bags. He was only caught twice, and he racked up solid baserunning value overall, but steals simply didn’t look like a big part of what he brought to the table.

As it turns out, all he needed was a sea change in the rules, a change that has unleashed a flood of newly-minted base stealers. Peña is a member of that group; give him a walking lead and keep pitchers from checking in on him too closely, and he’ll take off with the best of them.

That’s nothing special in go-go 2023, but I enjoyed Peña’s three stolen bases on Sunday so much that I had to write about them. To start things off, he vacuumed up a freebie against Andrew Heaney in the bottom of the second inning:

Heaney hadn’t thrown over this entire plate appearance, and Peña hadn’t even bluffed going. When Heaney glanced over at first and then back to the plate, though, it was all systems go. That was the first time that Heaney had glanced back at first base after coming set all plate appearance. When that glance didn’t end in a throw, Peña was off to the races:

That’s all on Heaney if you want to assign blame, or all down to Peña’s observational skills if you’re into handing out credit. But Peña took things up a notch in the fourth inning. He reached base after being hit in the toe, which you’d think would curtail any extracurricular activities. You’d be wrong, though, because Peña came up running. Same glance-and-reset action by Heaney, same result:

I’m not going to bother showing the reverse angle, because it was identical to the first. Heaney got taken for a ride, more or less, and Jonah Heim didn’t have much of a chance. Two stolen bases off of the same lefty starter, while he’s staring you right in the face? That’s good living. But if two is good, can I interest you in three? Here’s the next pitch:

Oof. Heim didn’t even attempt a throw there, which was a good decision; all he could have done was throw the ball into left field. Heaney probably wasn’t thinking much about the runner – third base isn’t particularly important when there are already two outs – but that was so easy for Peña that he almost had no choice but to take it.

There’s probably some breakeven point past which stolen bases will feel tiresome. Pitchers haven’t come up with a counter yet; we’re holding steady around 1.4 steals per game this season, with a success rate over 80%. Too much of a good thing can be bad. I’m not there yet, though, particularly when it’s fun young players doing the stealing. Pitchers, don’t let your guard down: Jeremy Peña is liable to pick up a read and steal three bases off of you.

5. Steals Aren’t Automatic
Okay, fine, I just spent a whole section talking about how steals feel automatic this year. Don’t tell the Brewers that, though. Milwaukee has been pressing the issue early and often, with seven players combining for 15 steals, 10th-most in baseball. They’ve done it with a combination of classic steals and choreographed plays. How’s their success rate? Let’s just say it’s not 100%. I had to reach back before this week to find the best evidence of it, but I think it’s worth it.

The classic little league play, a delayed steal of second base with the runner on third bolting home as the catcher throws down, is a questionable decision in a major league game in the first place. That play works a lot better when you try it against 11-year-olds instead of big leaguers, never mind a major league infield jam-packed with Gold Glovers and anchored by a catcher with a well-earned reputation for controlling the running game. The Brewers tried it against the Cardinals, and it didn’t work like you draw it up at home:

Pitchers are handing out steals like candy this year. Jordan Hicks isn’t exactly the hardest pitcher to steal on, and he’s also liable to throw a wild pitch at any second. If Brian Anderson took off normally, he probably would have stolen the base without a throw. But he wasn’t trying a straight steal. He was trying to bait a defensive miscue, and Willson Contreras wasn’t having any of it.

That play wasn’t particularly close to scoring a run. Contreras took his time looking Garrett Mitchell back to third, and the play doesn’t work if Mitchell can’t bolt for home right away. In theory, Contreras taking his time there should have given Anderson a chance to take second easily, but the steal was so delayed that Anderson was nowhere near second base even after Contreras held the ball for three seconds.

Sadly, neither broadcast provided an alternate angle of this play – it was a meaningless out in a 4-0 game, after all. That’s a shame, because I really want to know what Anderson was doing out there. Was he having a snack? Was he sitting cross-legged starting at Contreras? Perhaps he was pondering the great mysteries of life. Whatever he was doing, he hung out between first and second base in no man’s land for an interminable amount of time. I’m sure he wanted to draw a throw, but at some point you have to commit to one base or the other.

There’s a lot to like in this GIF, though, even if it doesn’t have the angle I was hoping for. Check out Tommy Edman sneaking a few peeks toward third to make sure the runner isn’t going. Between his vigilance and Contreras’s bluff to third, Mitchell had no shot at coming home. Speaking of bluffs, Contreras’s initial pump fake to second base likely helped to slow Anderson to a halt, even though we can’t see it for sure. Even after Paul Goldschmidt applied the inning-ending tag, he assumed nothing and checked home in case Anderson was ruled safe. The Cardinals get a lot of praise for their fundamental infield defense, and plays like this are a big reason why.

None of that is even my favorite part, though. I can’t stop watching Hicks, crouching and confused out on the mound throughout the play. He thinks a throw is coming to second base, so he ducks and turns. But wait! No baseball. Did it go to third? He peeks over there too, realizes it must still be at home plate, and starts to get out of his crouch – only to see Contreras rise and fire in his direction. Back to the crouch!

That’s all the observations I have time for today, but don’t fret. There’s plenty of baseball on, whenever you want it, all season. It’s even getting warm enough that you might not need a jacket to take in a game in person: