Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week, August 25

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.

1. The Marlins Go Inverted
If the Marlins miss the playoffs this year, it will be because their offense couldn’t score enough runs. They’re fifth-worst in the league in run scoring, and that’s despite the contributions of Jorge Soler and Luis Arraez, who have been their best hitters this year. Adding Jake Burger and Josh Bell at the deadline has worked out – both are raking in Miami – but the offense still hasn’t produced; they’re 24th in runs scored in the past month. So they came up with a new plan: switch the good players around.

In recent games, Soler has been leading off and Arraez has batted second. That sounds so weird. The huge guy who smashes homers is hitting with no one on base, and then the hitter with a .400 OBP and no power to speak of goes next? Something strange is afoot.

Old-school baseball fans would probably tell you this is backwards. New-school types might tell you that lineup order doesn’t matter that much. I think there’s a chance that the Marlins were going for a third option. Think of it this way: the thing that makes Arraez unique is the sheer number of singles he hits. Singles are less valuable when no one’s on base; people yell “a walk is as good as a hit” in specific situations because it usually isn’t as good as a hit. But leading off an inning, Arraez’s singles are no better than a walk because they don’t give runners a chance to advance as much.

Meanwhile, Soler has a solid batting eye but intermittent swing-and-miss issues. If you’re pitching to Soler in front of Arraez, are you going to throw him pitches outside the strike zone? Probably not – it’ll never be less painful to give up a home run than leading off, and never more painful to walk him than in front of Captain Singles. So you could see this working out, as strange as it sounds; Soler gets more hittable pitches and Arraez gets more baserunners.

Has it worked? The results are mixed. Pitchers are throwing Soler fewer pitches in the heart of the strike zone and fewer strikes overall, but they’re throwing him more fastballs, a pitch he’s historically feasted on. His line out of the leadoff spot is bizarre: .214/.298/.571 with more homers than singles, and a 31.9% strikeout rate. He’s not getting on base in front of Arraez very often, but that’s because he’s frequently driving himself in before anyone else can.

Would it be nice to hit those homers after Arraez reached? No doubt. But two of the five have been two-run shots, and he’s actually cashing in about as many runners per homer as he did before switching to leadoff. Improbably, he’d only driven Arraez in with a homer three times this year despite batting immediately after him for the majority of the season.

As for Arraez’s half of the equation, the less said the better: he’s hitting .214/.228/.375 since Soler took over leadoff duty on August 8, with a 1.8% walk rate and 3.5% strikeout rate that both sound like made up numbers. So it’s not obvious that this batting order inversion has done anything at all. That doesn’t make me chuckle any less when I see Miami’s lineup, though. The bopper first, the slap hitter second; it makes more sense than you’d think, and yet it’s still working out about as strangely as you can imagine.

2. Eury Pérez Is Not Afraid
Last month, the Marlins demoted Eury Pérez to Double-A. It wasn’t for performance reasons; you don’t demote a guy with a 2.36 ERA and 3.70 FIP very often. It was for maintenance (and potentially service time) reasons, and he pitched only 5.2 innings in his month on the farm. I wasn’t a fan of that move at the time, and I’m sure the players on the team weren’t either. Their odds of reaching the playoffs fell from 64.3% to 26.8% while Pérez was out. Perhaps it was inevitable that he’d need some rest, given that he’s already exceeded his 2022 innings count despite the month off, but the timing would be disappointing to anyone, never mind an ultra-competitive professional athlete breaking into the big leagues.

Great news, though: Pérez is back and showing no signs of a lack of confidence. Last weekend, he faced the red-hot Dodgers in Los Angeles. That isn’t a matchup for the faint of heart, but he was more than up to the task. Playing the first game of a hurricane-related double header, he pitched like he had an appointment to get to later that afternoon. After a nine-pitch battle with Mookie Betts to open the game, he got right down to business. That business? Strikeouts.

Pérez threw only 81 more pitches after that opening duel with Betts. He turned those into 10 strikeouts. He beat Dodgers batters high:

He beat Dodgers batters low:

He went right at them with his dominant fastball:

Heck, he threw his secondaries in the zone and let the Dodgers do their worst:

There are no two ways about it; this was a masterclass. Pérez left the Dodgers dispirited. He walked off the mound looking like someone who knew that what he just accomplished was special, but also somewhat expected:

His final line was gorgeous. Six innings pitched, 10 strikeouts, two hits, no walks, and no runs. It was the best start of his young career, and it came against one of the toughest lineups in all of baseball. The Marlins needed every last little bit of it, too; they could only muster one run against Ryan Pepiot. Pérez was downright electric, and everyone watching the game knew it.

The Marlins didn’t score again. The Dodgers pushed three runs past David Robertson in the eighth inning to win it. Not every story has a happy ending. But in watching Pérez, you can’t help but think that there will be many more opportunities to celebrate in his future.

3. Okay, Maybe Joc Isn’t a Baserunning Genius
I got very excited about Joc Pederson’s baserunning prowess last week, and I think it was with good reason. That sliding leg-swim move was phenomenal, the kind of play that will be on highlight reels after the season. Look at the athlete in full splendor, turning an out into a run with sheer physical brilliance. Yeah, well, this one won’t go on that highlight reel. Let’s pick it up as Pederson’s laser beam line drive smacks into the left field wall:

There are a lot of things to pay attention to on this one, but we might as well start with Kyle Schwarber, another bat-first lefty who sometimes moonlights in the field, showing off the best part of his defense — or if nothing else, the least bad part of it. That’d be his cannon arm; Schwarber was a catcher in college and it showed when he first made it to the bigs. He put up gaudy throwing numbers early in his career, and he’s been worth around 10 runs above average with his throwing arm alone, depending on which system you listen to. Now, he’s also something like 50 runs below average based on the rest of his defense, and his arm strength is down to the 24th percentile, but still, this is a nice catch and release:

That’s a solid turn and an accurate throw, but for most hitters, the result would still be a clean double. But Pederson isn’t particularly fast, and he wasn’t particularly fast out of the box on that one. The combination meant that it wasn’t even a bang-bang play. As you can see from the above GIF, he wasn’t even close to the base when Bryson Stott caught Schwarber’s accurate peg.

That just meant it was time for evasive maneuvers. Again, Pederson’s no stranger to that; he might not be fast, but he’s certainly shifty. His plan: come in sideways (?!) and hope that Stott couldn’t figure out where to tag him:

Amazingly, it almost worked. Stott went for his legs, but Pederson was actually going for a wraparound left-handed tag. If he’d held up just a fraction of an inch sooner, Stott might have found air with his sweep and ended up just another victim of Joc’s unconventional slide game. But no one can cheat death every time, and come on, he was out by so much that you’d need something truly transformational to escape there.

As an added benefit, we got treated to another post-out tableau I’ll remember for a while. If you don’t think about it too hard, you can imagine this as umpire Jacob Metz unleashing a fearsome, anime-esque punch that sent Pederson flying and knocked Stott to his knees in the process:

4. Ha-Seong Kim’s Bunt Bluffs
I’ve had this topic in my notebook for nearly a year now, and while nothing in particular happened this week to make me revisit it, it’s just been on my mind too long not to say something. Ha-Seong Kim pulls off some of the silliest bunt bluffs in the majors, and I love it. Look at this exaggerated fake 3-0 bunt, with no one on base, in freaking Coors Field:

He’s obviously not bunting there. He’s never bunted a ball in play in a 3-0 count in his career. He’s never hit a foul bunt in a 3-0 count in his career. It’s entirely for show, just to mess with the pitcher and maybe change his strike zone a little bit. But he loves doing it! Here’s another one from the past month:

And another from July:

And why not, a montage of his other three bluffs this year:

This little idiosyncrasy first came to my attention in last year’s playoffs. He reached a 3-0 count four times that postseason. Here are three of them:

I guess the idea here is that if you’re taking all the way anyway, you might as well give the pitcher a little bit of eye candy. Kim really doesn’t swing on 3-0. He’s done so exactly once in 67 opportunities during his major league career. It was hardly a ferocious cut:

Maybe it’s all part of some grand plan. He’s reaching 3-0 counts far more frequently this year than ever before, thanks to a new approach at the plate. At some point, pitchers will think “oh, that’s the guy who bluffs bunts and never swings” and start grooving him meatballs. Hey, it worked for teammate Matt Carpenter before.

Mostly, though, I just like watching it. “I’m bunting!” Kim says. “Yeah sure buddy, I bet,” say the pitchers’ actions. But hey, if you’re taking anyway, why not give the fans a little show while you’re at it. Given how well this season has gone for Kim, I don’t think he’s likely to change his plans too much, and they’ll surely involve more fake bunts.

5. High Stakes in Pittsburgh
After an exciting early-season run, the Pirates have regressed hard. They were in first place in the NL Central on June 15, no fooling. Since then, they’ve gone 23-37 and gotten outscored by 68 runs in the process. It’s been grim; their best hitter in that extended stretch is the since-traded Carlos Santana, and their best starter has probably been Johan Oviedo, owner of a 4.74 ERA and 4.84 FIP over that span. It’s bad, is my point.

But there’s still something to play for in Pittsburgh. As I mentioned last week on Effectively Wild, the Pirates have finished behind the Cardinals in the NL Central for 23 straight years. The last time they beat out the Redbirds was in 1999, when their 78-83 record clipped St. Louis’s 75-86 mark. Since then, the Cardinals have been the class of the division, with a competing cast of teams jockeying with them for the first spot. All the other teams have had a taste of divisional glory, but not Pittsburgh.

Despite their recent slide, they have a chance at ending this ignominious streak this year, and for beleaguered Bucs fans, it would be a meaningful silver lining in what’s been a disappointing season. The Cardinals visited Pittsburgh earlier this week with a scant half game separating them. St. Louis has entered the “just throw some kids out there” phase of its season, which is essentially what Pittsburgh’s existence has been for the past five years. It’s a battle on even footing, or at least as even as the footing looks likely to get any time soon in western Pennsylvania.

The Cardinals outspend the Pirates. They out-develop them. Their team-building strategy seems to focus particularly on minimizing down years, which makes it harder for the Pirates to pull a fast one on them. “If not now, then when” sounds hyperbolic, but it might actually apply here. The deck is stacked against the Pirates, but this is their year to beat the house.

They started this recent series off strong, walloping the Cardinals in two straight games by a combined 17-4 score. But the Cardinals scraped out the last game of the set, which pulled them back within 1.5 games. The two teams only meet once more this season, for three games from September 1-3 in St. Louis, and that will go a long way towards determining whether this shocking streak, the longest of its kind in any major North American sport in the modern era, continues.

The Pirates have already clinched the season series over the Cardinals. A few more head-to-head wins might put St. Louis too far behind to recover. And that would lead to another major streak being broken: the Cards haven’t finished in last place in their division since 1990, when they played in a six-team NL East. The Pirates won 95 games that year, incidentally; things looked a lot different back then.

The way things are going, the future feels somewhat ordained; St. Louis will spend a lot and compete for playoff spots every year, and the Pirates will try to scrape their way above .500 on a shoestring budget. But this year, and perhaps this year only, the underdogs have a great shot at taking down the longest-standing bully in baseball.