Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week, May 1

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) In Baseball This Week. This column isn’t running every week this year, which means the title is more of a suggestion than a rule. There are some plays from last week, some plays from this week, and future editions will probably break that convention even a little more. I can’t imagine that’s all that big of a deal. After all, “I Liked” is a bigger part of why I enjoy writing this series than “This Week.” So sit back, relax, and check out some of the most delightful baseball happenings of the second half of April. And of course, thanks again to Zach Lowe of The Ringer, the progenitor of the “X Things I Liked This Week” format and my inspiration for this column.

1. Inevitability
If you tune into a baseball broadcast with a runner on third base and less than two outs, you’re liable to hear a discussion of an “undefendable play.” That play is some variation on a safety squeeze: The batter bunts, the runner gets down the line as far as he can safely and waits to see where the bunt is headed before committing, and the defense has very little hope of making a tag play in time. Batters have attempted 24 of these bunts in 2026, and defenders have only retired the lead runner four times. Safety squeezes were equally hard to stop in 2025, this hilarious double play notwithstanding. But maybe they’re even better than those success rates would imply. Maybe there’s some kind of supernatural force that makes safety squeezes work. How else do you explain this nonsense?

Taylor Walls is the most prolific safety squeeze bunter in baseball, and he tried it in extras against the Pirates last week:

Yohan Ramírez made an excellent play there. He no doubt had this particular play on his mind – this is Walls’s seventh squeeze attempt in the last two years. Ramírez made an extra effort to get himself into a good fielding position after throwing the pitch, and he knew what to do immediately. He charged, called off catcher Henry Davis, and delivered an accurate shovel with plenty of time:

But clearly, the baseball gods wanted that run to count. How else can you explain what happened next? Ramírez caught Walls leaning off of first, threw over, and all hell broke loose:

Sorry, that was only some hell. I said all hell broke loose:

The Pirates made a litany of mistakes there. Ramírez should have gone to second base, not first. Spencer Horwitz should have come off the bag to smother that ball instead of trying to pick it clean. Bryan Reynolds was far enough from the line, and slow enough off the jump, that he and Horwitz got to the ball at the same time even though Horwitz started flat-footed in the infield and the ball rolled all the way to the cut-in deep in right field foul territory.

But maybe that’s not the true fault here. Maybe that run was just destined to score. Man on third and one out? The Rays have a method for converting that into an out and a run. They did exactly that here, just with a few extra steps. Maybe the safety squeeze really is undefendable.

2. Accuracy
When lefties punch grounders the other way, they tend not to have much control over where the ball is headed. Those are mishits, mostly; they’re trying to hit the ball in the air to right, not on the ground to left. Watch this perfect-game-breaking infield single by Alec Burleson from Monday night, and you can see what I mean:

That ball was hit weakly, and straight into the ground. It reached third baseman Nick Gonzales on five hops, and even though Burleson gets down the line like a man who is unsure whether both of his shoes are tied, he beat the throw anyway.

By itself, that’s not a particularly remarkable play. There were some nice aesthetic touches – Burleson’s little hop as he realized this was going to be a footrace, his emphatic safe signal, and the half-beat where Gonzales appeared to be deciding if it was even worth trying to make this throw. But plays like that aren’t exactly rare. If Burleson was done, he wouldn’t be in this column.

Obviously, then, he wasn’t done. The next time he batted, he hit the ball even more softly than before:

First of all, amazing. Second of all, amazing! Gonzales couldn’t believe it. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a ball hug the chalk that far down the line before:

Burleson wasn’t trying to do that. He wasn’t trying to do anything like that. And for the record, I appreciate that neither broadcast went with the old “you couldn’t roll it out there any better” trope. That’s not true. You couldn’t roll it out there anywhere close to as well as Burleson did. Ask a bocce player whether they could land the ball on a thin chalk line 80 feet away.

The first infield single broke up a perfect game. The second one came in the middle of a four-run rally that flipped the game from a 2-0 Pirates lead to a 4-2 Cardinals win. Those are two of Burleson’s three infield hits this year. When you’re the recipient of that much good fortune, it’s time to celebrate. That’s just what the Cardinals did:

3. Repetition
As I mentioned in the last edition of Five Things, I love watching called strikeouts. I find myself following along with the pitcher when I watch games – after all, we’re seeing the field from the pitcher’s perspective – and every called strikeout makes me feel like I am (along with the pitcher) getting away with something. But if one looking strikeout is good, three must be better. An entire inning of called strikeouts is rare, though it’s not impossible, of course. Because Mason Miller accomplished it a few weeks ago:

That was cool – and I especially loved Don Orsillo saying, “You don’t challenge the reaper,” after Cole Young fruitlessly tried to extend the game by challenging a pitch several inches in the zone – but we can do better. Only a few days later, Yoshinobu Yamamoto one-upped him. A perfect inning with three called strikeouts? Pretty good. Three straight called strikeouts, but all on fastballs? Ludicrous:

What were the Giants doing? Well, they got set up. Yamamoto’s splitter tunnels well with his fastball, and he loves to start it low in the zone. Drew Gilbert had laid off a splitter in the dirt one pitch prior to striking out:

Then he saw the same pitch – right up until it wasn’t the same pitch:

Patrick Bailey laid off an even better splitter two pitches prior to his strikeout. He’d seen a ton of splitters all day, and hadn’t made contact with a single one. He was expecting anything low in the zone to be some kind of downward-breaking secondary. But instead, a four-seamer held plane and carved him up.

Willy Adames fell victim to a different act of deception. Yamamoto set him up with a tight slider that broke toward the left-handed batter’s box and barely held the zone:

That had Adames looking outside, and thinking outside. And then Yamamoto started his next pitch on a trajectory that would take it way off the plate away. Adames gave up on it right out of Yamamoto’s hand – and then the sinker took a hard right turn and ended up splitting the middle of the plate:

Pitching is incredibly hard, but Yamamoto sometimes makes it look incredibly easy. Oh, and shout out to Kyle Finnegan, who accomplished something similar and simultaneously funnier a few days later. He, too, struck out three batters looking in the same inning. Just one minor problem: He faced five batters that inning, and the other two cracked a double and a homer. Live by trying to sneak something down the middle for a called strike, die by trying to sneak something down the middle for a called strike:

4. Close Calls
Dillon Dingler can’t catch a break this year. He’s absolutely destroying the ball so far, with the seventh-best xwOBA in all of baseball. He’s barely striking out, and he’s barreling the ball up at more than double his prior career rate. Somehow, though, he’s only 59th in wOBA, because these rockets he’s hitting keep finding a glove. Take a look at what should have been a clean double:

That’s just outrageous. That’s a home run in a third of the stadiums in the majors. Even when the ball stays in the park, that’s not one that fielders typically run down. Kyle Isbel had to cover 110 feet, running away from the ball and looking over his shoulder to track it. He also had to deal with an irregular wall, the cut of the warning track, and a 6-foot-4, 250-pound Jac Caglianone coming directly at him. Oh, and he had to slide, too, because otherwise he was going to slam into that wall at full speed.

This reverse angle feels almost like watching a car crash:

There’s not enough space there for these two huge guys! Why is he sliding? Why are there walls? How can this be safe?!? Look at how much momentum Isbel had – he slid about two body lengths and still hit the wall hard.

Even more impressively, this catch came directly after a long rain delay. The field was soaked. The warning track was muddy. The overcast sky was surely not the greatest target to pick out a ball against. And again, I can’t emphasize enough, this is a ridiculous position in which to make a catch:

I’m sure Dingler’s luck will turn around. But my goodness, don’t hit the ball anywhere near Kyle Isbel. That’s one of the best catches I’ve seen in a while.

5. Hilariously Long Replay Reviews
Like seemingly all sports fans, I dislike the way that replay reviews interrupt the flow of the game. Replay challenges often occur at key points in the game, because otherwise they probably wouldn’t be worth challenging. They’re often tough calls – that’s why they’re going to replay in the first place. Thirty seconds? Fine. A minute? Boy, this better be a really close call. Anything longer than that? Intolerable.

But while a long delay is annoying, a very long delay goes all the way back around to making me laugh. On Monday night, the Rangers were trying to rally from a three-run deficit when Joc Pederson hit a chopper to first base that the Yankees couldn’t field cleanly:

The play at first was incredibly close, Pederson was called safe, and the Yankees challenged right away. The first look wasn’t quite definitive; all it did was make clear that the play was bang-bang:

A minute went by. Two minutes went by. Managers in both dugouts started to chirp. The broadcast ran out of replay angles to show. Before long, they went into Inception mode: a broadcast shot of the stadium replay board showing the New York replay room’s TV setup:

Three minutes elapsed. Meanwhile, Aaron Boone was getting an arm workout:

He was yelling at the umpires there, asking for an explanation. But the umpires didn’t have one, of course. The replay center handles those calls. The on-field crew also has to wait for the decision. Nevertheless, Boone persisted:

The replay wore on. Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Jake Burger, former teammates with the Marlins, milled about and watched the replay themselves:

This wouldn’t be enjoyable if it happened all the time. But you know how jokes often start funny, get less funny with repetition, and then get funnier again when you keep hearing them? That’s what was going on here. Players were laughing. Coaches and others in the dugout – except for Boone – were laughing. The sheer absurdity of how long it was taking put a buzz into the crowd. At the three-and-a-half-minute mark, we finally got an answer. The call on the field was overturned. Pederson was out. The Yankees won the game. And while I still dislike the interruption of flow that most replays create, the utter ridiculousness of this one made me chuckle quite a bit. So yeah, long replays are miserable, but sometimes they have a silver lining.