Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week, May 23

Hello, and welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. I’ll keep the introduction short today, because I’m getting ready to travel to St. Louis for a game with my dad and uncle. There’s a Masyn Winn bobblehead ticketed for my memorabilia shelf – and a pile of enjoyable plays to recap before I can go get it. So, of course, thank you to Zach Lowe of The Ringer, whose NBA columns of likes and dislikes inspired this one, and let’s get started.

1. The Weekend of Wilmer
I have a soft spot for Wilmer Flores through a sheer fluke of geography. I lived in New York during his Mets tenure, and I moved to San Francisco around the same time he did. His walk-up music has been the same for the last decade: the Friends theme song. It’s a fan favorite and even comes with a good story. He’s the quintessential role player, a guy that most teams would love to have but no team needs to have. He’s been pitching in across the diamond, albeit in decreasingly difficult defensive roles, that whole time. With the exception of a down 2024, he’s been consistently valuable, but he’s never been a star – the closest thing I know to a Wilmer Flores highlight is his charming sadness when he thought he was getting traded.

For just one weekend, though, that all changed. Flores has been improbably dueling with Aaron Judge for the major league RBI lead throughout the first eight weeks of the season. RBI might not be a great predictive stat, and it might not be a great stat overall, but it definitely matters to players. Fancier versions of measuring contextual offense – WPA, RE24, and so on – all think that Flores has been a top 10 run producer this year, too. He’d fallen behind Judge by just a hair in those races – and probably has no chance at keeping up all season. I mean, have you seen Aaron Judge? But none of that mattered when the Giants played the A’s last weekend.

In the first game of the set, Flores worked an epic 10-pitch at-bat, then broke a tie with a grand slam:

Before that blast, Flores had fallen off the RBI pace and was also mired in a bit of a slump. Sure, he had the gaudy counting numbers, but he was running only a 102 wRC+ and an ice-cold 83 wRC+ over the past month. The slam got him within four RBI of Judge, and then he went yard again…

And again…

… to rack up eight ribbies and create a tie atop the major league leaderboard – a tie between literally Aaron Judge and little old Wilmer Flores.

The weekend wasn’t done, though. Judge had a rare two-game stretch without driving in a run, which meant Flores could take the lead with just a single solitary RBI. Through nine innings, that looked quite unlikely. The game headed to extras in a 0-0 tie, and the A’s wanted no part of Flores, walking him twice and generally staying away from him all game. In the bottom of the 10th, though, manager Mark Kotsay wanted to play platoons. With two on and two out against flame-throwing closer Mason Miller, Kotsay decided to intentionally walk Mike Yastrzemski to pitch to Flores with the bases juiced. I hate – hate, hate, hate! – this decision. Miller is wild! The biggest weakness in his game is that he might walk someone, not that someone might put the ball in play. And just as you’d expect:

What a way to take the major league lead in a time-honored statistical category. The celebration was raucous – at least after everyone got done being shocked by the optics of that intentional walk. And for just a few days, Flores got his long-awaited place in the spotlight.

Just one potential snag: I can’t be sure the game wasn’t a simulation. Here’s where Flores’s grand slam landed:

Here’s where his three-run shot ended up:

Really? The same group of guys, in the exact same spot, twice in a row? And one of them had enough presence of mind to troll the other for dropping the first home run ball? If we’re really living in a simulation, I’d hope they could fix the randomness a little bit. How believable is it that Wilmer Flores hit three homers, with the first two of them going to the exact same spot (the third was pretty close too)? I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

2. Texas-Sized Duels
Last Thursday night, the Astros and Rangers faced off to kick off Rivalry Weekend (more on that later). Houston sent perhaps the best pitcher in baseball this year to the mound: Hunter Brown, whose name is strewn across every pitching leaderboard you can imagine. The Rangers countered with arguably the most dominant pitcher of the last decade: Jacob deGrom. He might not be at his world-devouring peak anymore, but he’s still outrageously good even throwing 97 mph instead of 100.

Brown and deGrom both came out firing. Through five innings, they combined for 10 strikeouts and no runs allowed, with only two hitters so much as reaching second base. Those numbers might undersell it, too. The picture is better told by how the batters looked after coming up empty:

A sixth-inning home run by Five Things favorite Jake Burger opened the scoring, but neither team could do much to follow through on the offensive momentum. Brown answered Burger’s blast by striking out three of the next five Rangers he faced. With a ballooning pitch count, deGrom started attacking the zone, and he backed Burger’s homer by retiring six of the next seven batters, with only two even reaching a two-ball count.

If you’re doing the math at home, that’s a lot of outs recorded after a sixth-inning homer. Neither deGrom nor Brown wanted to exit the game, and they both went eight innings, with deGrom finally giving way to reliever Shawn Armstrong to pitch the ninth. The aggregate pitching performance was staggering: 16 strikeouts, one walk, one run. Neither starter even eclipsed 100 pitches; each was efficient in addition to being overwhelming.

I’m not always a fan of pitchers duels, but I am when they look like this. The two of them combined for 26 swings and misses, and I think that undersells the dominance. Both pitchers spent most of the game in cruise control. On the rare occasion that a runner reached scoring position, the whiffs came fast and furious. Whether it was a deGrom slider or a Brown four-seamer, batters found themselves staring down the business end of one of the best pitches in baseball and came up short.

In the end, Burger’s solo shot held up. The Astros simply couldn’t break through against deGrom, and while they managed to put a runner on base against Armstrong, they otherwise went down quietly.

This was already the fifth game in 2025 where Brown went six or more innings while allowing no more than a run. It was his fifth straight nine-strikeout game, and only the second homer he’d surrendered all year. He got shelled in his only start since then, to be fair, but otherwise, he’s on another level right now, racking up results like peak deGrom. For his part, deGrom is still rounding into form; this was only his third start of six or more innings all year, but he’s gaining momentum every week. In his five starts leading up to this gem, he’d compiled a 1.53 ERA (2.13 FIP) and 33 strikeouts to four walks. His next start? Seven innings of two-run ball at Yankee Stadium. (More on that later, too.) The AL West is going to be fun this year, and a Texas stand-off between two aces was a great way to start the season series between two divisional and intrastate rivals.

3. Rivalry Weekend
I don’t always love MLB’s contrived events. Players Weekend was fun but unevenly executed. City Connect jerseys have been mixed at best. I never even know why players are wearing camouflage hats these days; it happens so frequently that I can’t keep up with which holidays they’re purportedly tracking. Special jerseys, patches, games in strange cities – the league’s promotional staffers are high-volume shooters, throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.

Rivalry Weekend was a good example of the highs and lows of that approach. The Rangers-Astros series crackled. Yankees-Mets was awesome – it would have been great anyway, but the drama of Juan Soto’s return to Yankee Stadium put the fans into overdrive, giving a three-game interleague set in May playoff energy. The upstart Nationals trounced the stumbling Orioles, showing off their own young core to woo DC Metro Area sports fans who were falling back into old baseball rooting habits with the Nats rebuilding. The Angels swept the Dodgers in an improbable turn of events. The battle of Ohio was a tense, hard-fought blast. I even enjoyed White Sox-Cubs; it wasn’t always competitive, but there’s something about an intra-city game that gives stadiums energy.

Throwing a ton of natural rivalries together all in one weekend is a fun idea. Throwing all 30 teams into “rivalries” feels meaningfully less organic and delightful. I’m here for geographically convenient matchups like Rays-Marlins and Tigers-Blue Jays, even if there’s no great animus between the fanbases; the same goes for Pirates-Phillies and Cardinals-Royals. But we’re already on the fringes of rivalrydom there, and to fit all 30 teams into the promotion, compromises had to be made.

The Mariners and Padres have been cast as rivals for more than a decade now, and it doesn’t make much more sense today than it did the first time the league came up with that particular pairing. I get it; the West Coast is big and the cities are scattered. But Braves-Red Sox? You’re telling me that two of the most storied franchises in baseball, with their own rich histories of hated opposition, are honorary rivals for three days? Sure, the Braves once called Boston home, but they left Beantown for Milwaukee more than seven decades ago. Speaking of Milwaukee, I have a lot of Brewers fans in my extended family, and not a single one of them considers the Twins a rival.

Why not promote a suite of rivalry weekends, with roughly half of each weekend’s series the “Rivalry Games,” instead of a single one in mid-May? That way, the Red Sox could play the Yankees instead of an NL team they’ve never even faced in the playoffs. The Padres and Dodgers are a real, honest-to-God rivalry, whether it’s a sanctioned weekend or not. Expand the event a little bit to include one of their matchups instead of pairing San Diego with another club that also happened to draw the short straw when it came to nearby partners. Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned Braves-Mets, Cards-Cubs, Giants-Dodgers, Phillies vs. any other NL East team.

So here’s my proposal: Rivalry Month, four straight weekends where at least seven series feature historical or geographical rivals. Every team will get at least one Rivalry Series, but many will have multiple. That way, we won’t have to call an event Rivalry Weekend while leaving out Yankees-Red Sox. I love splashes of high-stakes baseball in the regular season. I love them so much that I’m proposing more pomp and circumstance around it, even in a league obsessed with pomp and circumstance. Last weekend just felt like going halfway and calling it done.

4. Tommy Kahnle, Closer
Everybody has their guys, the players they irrationally love despite no obvious connection. I wrote about this exact sentiment yesterday in my latest love letter about Isaac Paredes. Obviously, the lift-and-pull king is my favorite player, but Tommy Kahnle has to be near the top of the list. I vividly remember reading this Jeff Sullivan article about Kahnle while I daydreamed about one day becoming a baseball writer myself. I kept thinking, “This guy came out of nowhere! And he’s really good! It’s so cool to find those.”

In the years since, there have been a lot more of those guys, but Kahnle stands out to me for his sheer weirdness. He keeps throwing his changeup more, so much so that I keep writing about it. He hardly throws anything else at this point. He’s up to 83% changeups this year, the highest mark of his (or anyone else’s) career. He doesn’t overpower batters; he befuddles them.

For much of the past half decade, Kahnle has been stuck in injury limbo; he’s pitched only 116 innings since the start of the 2020 season. But he’s hardly fading away – he has a 2.24 ERA over that time period, with a 28% strikeout rate and excellent peripherals. Hitters know what’s coming – that playoff stretch was a great example – they just can’t do anything about it.

Now, for the first time in his career, Kahnle is getting regular save opportunities. He’s up to six saves on the year, nearly matching his career total, and he’s doing it for the team with the best record in baseball. He isn’t Detroit’s everyday closer – that’d be Will Vest – but the Tigers have installed him as their top setup man, and Kahnle gets the opportunity if the ninth inning features a ton of lefties. After all, he might be right-handed, but the only pitch he throws (more or less) is at its best against opposite-handed hitters.

Watching him work is tremendously fun for me. Whatever the opposite of fire-breathing is, that’s how you could describe Kahnle’s approach. Here, he bullies Victor Scott II with mid-80s velocity in the strike zone:

Next, he slows Lars Nootbaar down, then speeds him up with the first fastball of the night to draw a fly out:

One run game, hot-hitting righty at the plate? Kahnle has just the thing – a changeup right down the pipe:

It works! I don’t know how, but it works. Our pitching models scoff – Stuff+ gives him an 83 Pitching+, where 100 is average, and his PitchingBot ERA estimate is 5.29. It’s safe to say that the models can’t figure him out. Hitters can’t seem to either, so far, anyway. And “so far” stretches back to 2019, the first season in which he threw at least 50% changeups. Every time I watch a Tigers game, I’m rooting for Kahnle to come in and face the other team’s best hitters in a big spot. He’s almost always been good enough to slot into that role, even if in an unconventional way. Now, he’s finally getting some chances to do it. I couldn’t be any more pleased.

5. A Double Burger
I promise this column won’t always be about Jake Burger, but he’s been getting involved in just my type of oddity so much this season that he’s become something like a column mascot, a guy who keeps showing up in weird plays and situations and trying to figure out what the heck is going on. I don’t usually think of home runs as highlights, either, but they’re what Burger is best at, and given that I’ve been featuring him for all kinds of plays that no one is good at – busted rundowns and impossible relays and the like – it’s only fair to feature him going deep, too.

After a tough start to the year – .190/.231/.330 and only three homers in 108 plate appearances – the Rangers sent him down to the minor leagues for a reset. They were clear that they wanted this to be a brief trip rather than an indefinite demotion; Burger is a key part of their plans, to the point that during the offseason they traded away a solid veteran first baseman to free up playing time for him. He looked like a solid big leaguer facing minor league competition in that 10-day span, slashing .391/.462/.696. Then he returned to the major leagues, plugged right back into the lineup like nothing happened, and started mashing.

In his nine games since coming back up, Burger has a 202 wRC+. He’s cut his strikeout rate more or less in half, doubled his walk rate, and matched those three homers in a third of the time. The first blast came in the aforementioned pitchers duel against Hunter Brown. The next two came at Yankee Stadium on Wednesday night to put the Rangers in front and support another excellent Jacob deGrom outing, though the Bronx Bombers rallied to walk it off in the bottom of the ninth.

That recent pair of homers demonstrates the reason to put Burger in the lineup. Soft-tossing lefty on the mound? Burger will make it rain:

Leave in your LOOGY after he got a lefty in the previous inning? Again, Burger can take the ball the other way, particularly at Yankee Stadium:

The Rangers wanted righty power at first base. They’ve got it, after a brief delay. And it doesn’t hurt that Burger is a great interview, either. “I kind of thought: New Pope, new me,” Burger told the Dallas Morning News. “He’s a Midwestern guy like me. I was proud.” He’s doing Pope-themed celebrations after hits – a Papal wave for a double, the sign of the cross after a homer, and so on. The bummer start to the season is in the past. The vibes are immaculate. Do yourself a favor and turn on the Rangers next time deGrom starts – you’ll get to see one of the best pitchers ever to do it and also one of the most enjoyable hitters to watch.