San Francisco catcher/first baseman Buster Posey is widely regarded to be one of major-league baseball’s best hitters for reasons that are based in fact. Entering the season, for example, he’d produced among the 10-best league- and park-adjusted batting lines since 2010. This season he’s continued that trend, recording not only the 14th-best batting line among qualified players, but also, since the All Star break, producing the absolute best such mark among qualifiers. In the ways a batter can be good, Posey has been.

Who else is good is Clayton Kershaw. Indeed, for as talented as Buster Posey is at hitting, Kershaw is probably better than that at pitching. You and I, we could spend all day talking about Kershaw’s abilities. We won’t do that, probably — because we’ll never meet, for one reason, and also because, even if we did meet, one of us would probably have important plans that day — but we could, is the point.

In any case, the best pitcher and nearly the best hitter met yesterday afternoon in San Francisco. Among the various results was the one depicted above in GIF form, a swinging third strike on a Kershaw slider in the eighth inning. A reasonable person might reasonably have assumed that it was the worst swing Posey had produced this season. According to data at Baseball Savant, it’s only the 13th worst — where worst, in this case, is defined as “the pitch furthest from the center of the strike zone at which the batter has also swung.”

So, a reasonable person would have been wrong, is one point of this post. Although, not very wrong, is another.

In conclusion, here are all the swings and misses Posey has recorded out of the zone this season, his swing and miss against Kershaw circled in red: