Five Things I Liked This All-Star Week

Welcome to an All-Star week edition of Five Things, my weekly column that looks at whatever caught my eye in the last week. As always, thanks to Zach Lowe of ESPN for the column idea. One piece of feedback I frequently get on this series is that I’m not paying enough attention to the big stars. It’s true; we’re not exactly short on Shohei Ohtani coverage here at FanGraphs, and I’m one of those hipster-y baseball watchers who loves a fourth outfielder more than your average fan. This week, though, I thought I’d do something a little different. In celebration of the All Star game, which is perennially one of my favorite events despite the low stakes, here are five things I like about huge stars.

1. All Your Base Are Belong To Elly
I”m not the first person to write about this, and I obviously won’t be the last, but JEEZ. Elly De La Cruz is fun because he’s a complete unicorn, a switch-hitter with 80 power and 80 speed. He’s fun because he’s 6-foot-5 and looks like a middle infielder got stretched beyond all recognition. He’s fun because he has fun on the field. He’s also fun because he can steal third and home on the same pitch:

This is my favorite play of the year so far. It’s almost certainly going to stand up as my favorite play of the year. What could top it? The steal of third, eh, whatever. That’s child’s play with the new rules and top-shelf footspeed. I just can’t get over the awareness on display after that swipe. He realized that Brian Anderson wasn’t playing close to the bag at all, and even as he dusted himself off and adjusted his helmet, he was already gathering more information:

I don’t want to let pitcher Elvis Peguero off the hook, but really, this was De La Cruz beating the whole Brewers team on his own. Anderson didn’t immediately close down to third after the steal because, well, why would he? The base was already stolen. What purpose would be served by walking over and lackadaisically sticking his glove towards the mound? He was just going to turn around and walk back to his off-the-line fielding position anyway.

Peguero wasn’t faultless, as I mentioned. This is way too long to turn your back on a guy with game-breaking speed:

Meanwhile, William Contreras should have been yelling at the top of his lungs the whole time. The most dangerous baserunner in the game is nearby. What in the name of Bernie Brewer was everyone thinking? Keep eyes on him at all times!

What they were thinking is that this isn’t how baseball works. No one steals third and then home. No one steals home, even. No one steals without a pitch being thrown. This felt like a Little League game where one kid is just a lot more mature than the rest, only De La Cruz is younger than everyone on the field. That’s life in Elly’s world right now. I can’t believe he wasn’t an All-Star, but it doesn’t matter, because he’s the most exciting player on the field every time he plays these days:

2. Shohei’s Speed
On August 21, the sentence immediately preceding this one will stop being true. Why? Because the Reds are visiting Anaheim for a series starting on that day, and Shohei Ohtani is rapidly ascending the ranks of the best players of all time. He mashes home runs. He hits for average and takes his walks. He pops 100 mph on the radar gun regularly and learns new pitches on the fly. I’m not the first to note that the Babe Ruth comparisons are getting tiring, but Ohtani makes all the mythmaking around Ruth feel quaint. He’s the best hitter in baseball this year, and he’s also striking out a third of the batters he faces. It’s Shohei’s world; we’re just living in it.

All of those things are great. I wouldn’t have space to cover all the things Ohtani does that bring me joy in this column, even if every item were about him. Let’s just focus on one aspect today: his speed. Naturally, Ohtani leads the Angels in steals, because he leads the Angels in everything. He also leads the majors in triples (he leads the league in homers, too, but that’s not a speed thing). He gets some of those triples because he tattoos the ball, but he also gets some because he can flat out fly. Check out this unlikely triple from July 8:

I know what you’re thinking. “Ben, you clipped a double on accident.” That looks like a garden variety double off the bat, a blistered line drive that split the outfielders and got to the wall. Mookie Betts is playing it like a double. But wait! Smash cut to the basepaths:

You can’t let your guard down for even a minute with Ohtani, because he’ll take advantage of it. He wasn’t even going full speed as he rounded first base; like everyone else, he was clearly thinking double when he hit it. But when the ball kicked off of the wall strangely, catching the padding and dying on the track instead of rebounding to the grass, he hit the afterburners:

Most of his triples are more textbook than that one. Here’s the next-most-recent, from late in June. It should come with a banana peel sound on Ohtani’s off-balance swing, and then Yakety Sax for Gavin Sheets‘ defense:

Not every triple is earned. But that one against the Dodgers was, and it’s just another tool in Ohtani’s unending bag. He homered later on in the game, by the way. The Angels lost, 10–5. Some things never change.

3. Austin Riley’s Defense
Austin Riley is rightly regarded as a bat-first player. He’s coming off of back-to-back seasons where he was roughly 40% better than the average hitter, and he signed the largest deal in club history on the back of those years. He was also 10 outs below average at third base according to Statcast, though DRS instead thought he was a plus defender out there, so the true answer likely lies somewhere in between.

This year, Riley’s bat has been hot and cold. He slumped badly in May and again in June, but he’s had his fair share of hot streaks as well. The result is a batting line that isn’t far from league average, though his raw power numbers suggest that better days will be here soon. But there’s one clear piece of good news to counteract that: he looks better and better defensively to me every day.

The first example that comes to mind? What about the All-Star Game itself, where Riley channeled Nolan Arenado to rob a sure base hit from Josh Jung:

That’s just clean living right there. Jung hit the ball so softly that it was a do-or-die play. Riley correctly went in barehanded, used his momentum to glide into a throwing position, and delivered an accurate throw on one hop. Plain and simple, that’s great defense. That ball is a hit most of the time, particularly against a hitter with Jung’s power, because third basemen have to play back.

That was the best play he made all game, but I liked this one, too:

That was a nice play, even if it didn’t have the wow factor of that off-balance charge. He displayed great hands, calm reactions, and the presence of mind to fire the ball across the diamond immediately rather than first getting to his feet. You have to go for it there, because a normal throw won’t work, and the risk of misfiring is just not as big as the reward of turning a double play.

Those quick-reaction throws weren’t always Riley’s forte. In fact, he looked stiff and mechanical to me in the early stages of his career, trying to throw from the same platform every time rather than adapting to his situation. Now, though, he looks smooth and natural out there. His offense will turn around, and when he does, he’ll be a true double threat rather than a slugger with a third baseman’s mitt.

4. Logan Webb, Digging Deep
Complete games are a thing of the past. There have only been 20 so far this year, and we’re more than halfway through the season. As recently as 2015, there were triple-digit complete games, and there were 50 as recently as 2021. Baseball just doesn’t work that way anymore; relievers are too good these days, and teams understand the realities of both pitcher wear and batter familiarity more than they used to.

Logan Webb is the kind of pitcher who would have racked up complete games in a previous era. He has a low-stress delivery and excellent command. He picks up a ton of double plays thanks to his superlative sinker. He’s relatively immune to platoon disadvantages thanks to his best pitch, a jaw-dropping changeup. But in his first 95 starts, his career high was eight innings pitched. He’s the most durable pitcher in baseball — he leads the league in innings pitched, and more than half his starts have gone seven innings or more — but last Sunday, the 96th start of his career, was the first time he went the distance.

The Giants needed every bit of his brilliance in a 1–0 win over the Rockies. They slumped into the All-Star break, 3–7 in their last ten games before Sunday’s series finale. Their playoff position is tenuous; they came into that day a half game out of the final wild card spot. You’re supposed to beat the Rockies, and yet the offense could only muster a single run against Kyle Freeland and Justin Lawrence.

Webb made that run stand up with his greatest single-game performance. He posted double-digit strikeouts for the seventh time in his career and didn’t walk a single batter. He got grounders like he always does. He pitched big in the biggest moments. He did everything an ace is supposed to do, which makes sense: he’s their ace.

Webb’s normal strikeout pitch is his changeup, and this game was no exception. He garnered ten swinging strikes with it, and six of his ten strikeouts. His slider, which is perfectly passable against righties, got three swinging strikeouts of its own. That’s par for the course; Webb throws secondary pitches more than 70% of the time with two strikes, one of the highest rates in the game.

Sure, that’s what he usually does, but I like baseball for the oddities. The highest-leverage moment in the game, both in my mind and according to leverage index, came in the top of the eighth inning. Harold Castro lined a one-out double to left, which brought Brenton Doyle to the plate. Winning run in scoring position, only one out in the inning: if Doyle reached base safely, Webb was likely getting pulled. Four straight changeups showed you what Webb wanted to do, but Doyle finally got a bat on the fourth one:

That brings me to my favorite pitch of the entire game. Doyle had changeup on his mind. Webb had changeup on his mind. Catcher Patrick Bailey surely had changeup on his mind. But the way forward was right down main street:

He’ll never record an easier strikeout unless the pitch clock is involved. Doyle got two changeups and a slider in the fifth. He got four straight changeups in the eighth. He got lulled to sleep and paid the price. That was a great piece of pitching by a great pitcher, and Webb sailed to the victory by coaxing a weak grounder to end the eighth and striking out the side in the ninth. One game is just one game, but going into the All-Star break with your ace carrying you feels pretty dang good.

5. The Incomparable Luis Arraez
I get it, Luis Arraez is more fun than valuable. I think wRC+ does a good job of describing offensive contributions for the most part, and it thinks he’s doing really well — the seventh-best qualified hitter in all of baseball. But I also think that the rest of our WAR framework does a good job of describing value, and his baserunning and defense are doing him no favors. Being the 25th-most valuable hitter in baseball is a lot less exciting than batting .383, and sadly, I think that Pandora’s box has long since been opened when it comes to treating baseball players like piles of statistics instead of fun dudes to watch.

Here’s the thing, though: Arraez is a remarkably fun dude to watch! A walk, a homer, and a strikeout have a higher combined linear runs value than three singles, but I’d rather see the three singles in person. This one absolutely isn’t something that happened this week, but it stuck with me, and what better occasion to bring it up than after Arraez slapped two All-Star singles this week?

My favorite Arraez skill is his uncanny ability to get hits with two strikes. Here’s an example: after working the count against José Berríos in the bottom of the first, he took a well-located sinker and Arraez’ed it right up:

That wasn’t even a bad pitch. It was 95 and heavy, perfectly dotting the bottom of the zone. I don’t think Berríos could have located it better if he tried. No matter: soft line drive, nine-degree launch angle, completely undefendable.

The next time up, Berríos got ahead 0–2, but Arraez is hard to put away. He fouled off a curve, then took two wide ones to get to 2–2. His next pitch wasn’t quite perfect, and you have to be perfect to throw something Arraez can’t get his bat on. Advantage, Arraez:

Bad location for a changeup? No doubt. What are you supposed to do, though, when he’s either fouling your curve off or taking it for a ball? Berríos had to try something new, and his plan didn’t exactly pan out.

Ah, but don’t worry, Berríos got another bite at the apple. In the bottom of the fourth, Arraez had a chance to break the game open: three-run lead, two men on, and no one out. Again, the two dueled to a 2–2 count. Berríos tried yet another option this time, a four-seamer up. You can probably see where this is going:

That’s three different pitches to three different locations in two-strike counts, and there were some curves that Arraez fouled off in the bargain too. You just can’t get anything past him. After a clean single in the sixth on a 1–0 count — de rigeur at this point — the Blue Jays had one last shot to salvage something. Oh, not the game; the game was well out of hand. But what about putting Arraez away after getting ahead of him for once?

This time, Mitch White got a shot. He quickly got ahead 1–2 and decided to take no chances. He didn’t emulate Berríos and try to dot the corners; he just reared back and threw one way above the zone. Arraez didn’t even blink:

If there were an easier way to put emojis into these articles, I think this paragraph would just be a string of ‘crying laughing.’ What are you supposed to do about that? When Arraez is feeling it, he looks absolutely unstoppable. He batted five times in this game and hit five line-drive singles. None were smashed. None had to be. He’s on an absolute tear right now. Arraez gets to two strikes less than almost anyone in baseball, because he swings early and often. He’s still second in baseball in hits with two strikes. He leads baseball in two-strike hit rate, and the distance between his 15.3% rate and Cody Bellinger’s 11.5% second-place mark is the same as the distance between second and 98th place. Whatever you think about batting average, whether you’re telling kids to get off your lawn or not — who cares? Just marvel at this diminutive hitting genius and leave your WAR at home for a day.