Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week, May 12

Welcome to another installment of my weekly look at five things that caught my interest in baseball. As always, I’m indebted to Zach Lowe of ESPN for the idea — his basketball column remains one of my favorite reads in all of sports. That’s all the time we have for an introduction today, though, because there’s a lot to talk about. Let’s get to it.

1. Meaningful Baseball in Baltimore
It’s been a minute. The Orioles started a comprehensive teardown in 2017 and doubled down on it by hiring Mike Elias from the Astros after the 2018 season. They’ve finished fifth, fifth, fifth, fourth, fifth, and fourth in the AL East since then. There was a lot to follow on the prospect front, but the major league team looked bleak; the closest they came to first place in that stretch was 15 games out, and that was in the abbreviated 2020 season. Last year there was a glimmer of hope – the team finished 83-79 and Adley Rutschman, a generational catching prospect, impressed in his debut. But that team didn’t quite feel complete; the front office traded players away at the deadline and kept some of its top prospects in reserve.

This year feels different, with this week’s series against the first-place Rays the highest-stakes baseball in Baltimore in quite some time. The Orioles aren’t just second in their division, they’re second in the entire American League. That series was phenomenal, close throughout and well played across the board. The Orioles took two out of three, with an aggregate 6-6 scoreline, and it felt like two good teams trading blows, not one juggernaut and one pretender facing off.

There’s a limit to how excited baseball players can get about a game in May, but the Orioles were right at that limit. They also showed off why they’re so much fun to watch. Yennier Cano, maybe the best reliever in baseball right now (!!), excelled on the mound:

Jorge Mateo, one of the most delightful defenders in the game, was up to his usual tricks:

Rutschman broke out of an 0-for-19 slump to supply some power (and of course, some hugs):

The Orioles probably aren’t this good. Their record so far outstrips their Pythagorean expectation by three wins and their BaseRuns expectation by four. They’ve been one of the healthiest teams in the majors this year, which takes pressure off of their unproven depth. The rotation might be pitching over its collective head. Gunnar Henderson’s early struggles are undoubtedly concerning.

So what? There are a lot of teams in baseball with question marks right now, and most of them aren’t 24-13. Baltimore is an awesome baseball city. Camden Yards regularly drew 30,000 fans per game the last time the team was competitive. That might be a few years off yet, because the scars of tanking tend to linger, but this is undeniably a team on the upswing. The series against Tampa Bay was just a preview; regardless of what happens the rest of this season, Baltimore is finally hosting games with playoff implications again. I love it.

2. J.D. Davis, Picking Machine
The book on J.D. Davis has always been two lines: can hit, can’t field. That earned him sporadic playing time on the Mets, but when they bulked up their offense before the 2022 season and Davis slumped at the plate, they shipped him to San Francisco in exchange for a platoon-ier positionless right-handed bat, Darin Ruf. That trade has been an absolute disaster for the Mets – in addition to sending away Davis, they tossed in two prospects, and they followed all that up by releasing Ruf earlier this year.

But even if Ruf had been great in New York, the Giants would have won the trade. That’s because Davis has undergone a remarkable transformation: he’s turned into a plus defender while posting a resurgent batting line. Seriously, take a look at the best defenders in baseball this year per Statcast:

That’s stunning. This isn’t a good defender taking a step forward; this is a guy who was one of the worst defensive third basemen in baseball. Only five players had a lower success rate added at third base during Davis’ time on the Mets, and one was Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who is famously not a third baseman. Miguel Sanó graded out better!

What is Davis doing right this year? Quite simply, he’s making the easy plays every time. Statcast divides out plays by the estimated likelihood of making an out. On plays with an estimated success rate below 50%, Davis is exactly average. On plays with an estimated success rate above 50%, he’s been incredible, six outs above average in 62 attempts. That’s a big shift from his time in New York, when he routinely botched easy plays, ending up six outs below average on likely outs.

In other words, he’s getting turned around less often, and making the plays that come right at him. He’s always had a big arm; he’s just doing this more frequently now:

And this:

And this:

Any of those three might have been errors last year. This year, he’s just cleaner, and the stats bear it out.

You don’t have to read too much into this. Davis isn’t suddenly Nolan Arenado or Ke’Bryan Hayes. He’s not making impossible highlight plays, and he’s almost certainly not going to finish the year as one of the best defenders in the game. But infield defense is as much about consistently making easy plays as it is occasionally making spectacular ones, and Davis has that down at the moment. He’s been the second-best player on the Giants this year – and hey, for now, he has more WAR than Aaron Judge and Carlos Correa combined. Not bad for a guy who we all thought was DH-only.

3. Akil Baddoo’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
Akil Baddoo had an afternoon to forget on Monday in Cleveland. No, I’m not talking about his bases-loaded at-bat in the third inning with a chance to break the game open. One out, Tanner Bibee on the ropes, and Baddoo cashed in nothing at all with a pop up to shortstop, on the first pitch no less. A demoralizing strikeout in the fifth also wasn’t great, obviously. Neither was a weak fly out in the seventh. A groundout to Josh Naylor in the ninth capped off a hitless day. But none of those are what made Baddoo’s day so bad. No, that’d be the time he actually got on base.

After a second inning walk, Baddoo tried to create a little offense by stealing second base. On first look, his jump wasn’t good enough to beat a solid throw from Mike Zunino:

A few loops of that GIF, though, and you’ll realize that something seems off. That ball is tailing left to right, far too quickly for Andrés Giménez to pick it so cleanly. In fact, it was tailing so much that it’s hard to imagine how Giménez got a glove on it at all. And why is Baddoo wincing after what was surely a glancing tag?

Unfortunately for Baddoo, he was squarely in the line of fire, and Giménez simply caught the ricochet:

Oof. Talk about adding injury to insult. That’s the worst part of it, or at least one of the worst parts. Baserunners get hit by thrown balls a lot. Here’s Austin Wynns catching one squarely on the helmet on a relay throw gone spectacularly wrong Wednesday afternoon:

That’s the usual outcome of getting hit in any of a variety of painful spots – it almost always ends up with you being safe. It’s hard for the fielder to catch the ball, what with it hitting you instead of their glove and all. But Giménez made a phenomenal split second adjustment, the carom happened just early enough that he had time to make the tag, and Baddoo couldn’t do anything but lie there in pain. Boy, what a bad break:

4. If At First You Don’t Succeed
Brian Anderson made one of the worst baserunning plays I’ve seen this year, enough of a head-scratcher that I featured it in an earlier column. If I were Craig Counsell, I would have torn up that page of the playbook afterwards, and maybe burned it just to be safe. But Anderson wouldn’t be denied; he was up to the same old tricks last Friday in San Francisco. In the top of the first, he drew a two-out walk with a runner on third. I can’t say for certain, but I’d bet that his eyes lit up when Luke Voit quickly fell into an 0-2 hole. Like clockwork, he got picked off of first base:

Terrible baserunning yet again? Nope! This time, he didn’t mess around with trying to entice a throw from the catcher, he just cut out the middle man and goaded Sean Manaea into a throw that led to a run scoring. As Anderson gamely stayed in the rundown, Owen Miller scampered home from third:

Honestly, Miller probably deserves most of the credit on this one. He read LaMonte Wade Jr.’s eyes and broke for home well before Wade released the ball to Brett Wisely. By the time Wisely caught it, Miller was gone; peak Andrelton Simmons couldn’t have received that throw and gotten the ball home in time to make a play.

Or maybe Anderson deserves most of the credit for distracting Wade! Check out this angle:

Anderson is watching Miller the whole time. When Miller breaks for home, Anderson slams on the brakes, as if to say “come and get me.” If he sold out for second base there, he might have made it safely. Wade didn’t have a clean throwing line right away because Wisely was on the wrong side of second base. But that might have reminded Wade to look towards home, and Miller would have been dead to rights if Wade had pivoted immediately. So Anderson did the only thing he could do: stop running and make it obvious that a throw to second would retire him.

You can’t pull this play off too often because good defenses will consistently turn it into an out. If J.D. Davis had crashed harder towards third base (dangit, J.D., I just got done praising you!), Miller wouldn’t have been able to get so far down the line without consequences. If Wade hadn’t double-clutched his throw to second and Wisely had shown greater urgency, maybe Wisely would have had a chance to get Anderson before the run scored (doubtful, but possible).

I don’t think the Brewers will try this again all year — advance scouts have now seen them try it twice. But I hope they do, and that something weird happens. So far this year, Brian Anderson on first base has been a gift that keeps on giving.

5. The Delightful Cubs Broadcast
I’ve been hesitant to write about broadcasts in these articles because it feels navel-gazey. Media writing about media? It’s strange. But broadcast booths are an integral part of my watching experience, and if I’m truly writing about the things I like in baseball, good broadcasting is absolutely one of them. So I’m settling on a compromise: I’ll bring them up rarely, but I’ll try to highlight the occasional broadcast that’s bringing me a lot of joy.

That’s exactly how I’d describe the Cubs broadcast: joyful. Boog Sciambi generally defers to the baseball acumen of Jim Deshaies and Joe Girardi, but he’s not afraid to question them on the finer points of baseball strategy or challenge them on conventional wisdom that misses the mark. Those discussions are one of my favorite parts of the broadcast; everyone involved seems to be interested in learning from each other, which is one of the potential pitfalls in the stereotypical player/stats guy pairing. A discussion of pitch usage might bring all three into the fray over an entire inning while Sciambi interjects play-by-play to keep the discussion from running off the rails.

Deshaies and Girardi bring a wealth of personal experience to the table; Girardi used a recent series against the Cardinals to remember the hardest throwers he caught in his long major league career, interjecting a remember-some-guys exercise (Carlos Zambrano! Kerry Wood!) into an otherwise dry inning. They’ll come back to conversations days later, too: the aforementioned Zambrano/Wood tangent came a day after Girardi first pondered the question, prompted by yet another Cardinal fireballer.

I give Sciambi a lot of the credit here because the booth flows well even with different color analysts. Ryan Dempster handles the role from time to time, and he’s still sometimes shy in the booth, but that just opens the group up for more merriment. “Great questions Demp, way to go,” manager David Ross quipped after Sciambi carried a managerial interview last Friday. But Dempster laughed it off: “I’ve been doing a lot of soul searching, and sometimes it’s just as important to listen as it is to talk.” Then he launched into a discussion of Edward Cabrera’s control issues without missing a beat, all while Sciambi egged him on.

The booth is great, but the ancillary parts of the broadcast might be even better. The camerawork is sharp, the production team finds a good balance of interesting and informative statistics to highlight, and they also avoid the excessive clutter that plagues many broadcasts today. Perhaps because of the network’s affiliation with the team, they frequently feature managerial and front office interviews, and both Ross and Jed Hoyer give more insightful answers than I’m used to receiving from team officials.

Good field-level reporting is an underrated part of good broadcasts, and Taylor McGregor is one of the best in the business. In addition to the injury updates and player quotes the role requires, she banters with the booth and provides a welcome extra perspective on occasion, which prevents the broadcast from veering too old-baseball-y for my tastes.

If it sounds like I’m just throwing praise around everywhere, well, I am. When I’m browsing through the available games, I find myself gravitating towards Cubs games, and certainly towards the Cubs broadcast if I’m going to watch a game involving them. They’re easily in my top tier of broadcasts to watch, which is saying something for a Cardinals fan. If you’re flipping through games looking for a good watch, give them a try.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s batch of five. Until next time, enjoy baseball. Remember, it’s a party out there: