Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week: All-Star Edition

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. As MLB pauses for the All-Star break, I thought I’d pause for one of my own. Just like the league, I’d like to recognize the stars of my own personal baseball bubble. There’s a lot of overlap between the guys who populate Five Things most frequently and the best players in the game, but it’s not a complete overlap. You generally know what you’re getting with this column: some fun, fluky plays and players. Today, you’re just getting an aggregated version of that: the most fun I had in the first half of the year. And no, if you’re wondering, there are no Didn’t Likes this week, c’mon. As always, thanks to Zach Lowe for the idea for this format, which is just as exciting (to me) in baseball as it is in basketball.

1. Elly is Speed
Man, do I love Elly De La Cruz. He was the most exciting player in the majors the second he made his debut last year. In 2024, he’s been a lot more than that. Per our calculation of WAR, he’s the sixth-best player in baseball this season, though I’d dock him slightly for his defense given the discrepancy between OAA (which feeds into our WAR) and DRS. However you slice it, he’s putting the tools he flashed last year together consistently, and the sky remains the limit even as he’s ascending quickly.

De La Cruz’s speed has to be seen to be believed. He might casually steal second on a delay. He might take two bases on a bad pickoff throw. He’s first in the majors in steals – and the gap between him and second-place Bryson Stott is the same as the gap between Stott and 33rd-place Jose Altuve.

The good things that De La Cruz does are pretty much all highlight worthy. He has a cannon arm, blinding speed, 80-grade power from both sides; you name it, he can do it. My favorite expression of that? His triples:

It’s just so fun to see the defense in scramble mode realizing that De La Cruz isn’t settling for two. His strides will fool you, but they won’t fool major leaguers; they’ve all seen him do it. He just makes the distance vaporize. It feels like an optical illusion. The closest comparison I can come up with is Usain Bolt rounding the turn in the 200-meter dash. This is mesmerizing:

It turns out that Elly is great. Even if he weren’t, though, he’d make this team, because he’s phenomenally fun. Every day is a new chance to see something unprecedented with him. What a time to be alive.

2. Matt Chapman, Defensive Stalwart
You might think that this one is a homer pick, what with me living in San Francisco and all. You’d be partially right! I do watch a lot of Giants games; they’re consistently on at dinnertime, and the broadcast is a real treat. That’s not the real reason why Matt Chapman is here, though. He’s here because he’s a walking defensive highlight. Hit the ball on the ground to third base against the Giants, and there’s a good chance you’ll end up on the business end of a web gem.

He might turn a double play all on his own, or appear out of nowhere for an impossible tag. His baseball instincts might retire a runner who had no clue they were even in play. My favorite infield play in baseball is a barehanded, single-motion throw by a third baseman, and Chapman is the foremost current practitioner.

All that said, I opted for a different highlight in this spot. Last week, the Giants were in quite the pickle. They had a narrow 3-2 lead against the Braves when Austin Riley smashed a double down the left field line. Matt Olson started the play on first and got a tremendous jump. He was trying to score all the way; Michael Conforto has a strong arm, but he had to cover a lot of distance to get to the ball and time wasn’t on the Giants’ side. But having Chapman in the middle of a relay changes the calculus:

Relays aren’t exciting baseball plays. You can tell because the camera cut from Conforto to Olson without stopping on Chapman. No one starts a conversation about their favorite player by saying “watch how he cuts the ball from the outfield.” Maybe they should get more love, though. This is beautiful:

Every level of this play was great. Conforto made a strong throw to Chapman. Patrick Bailey made a perfect swipe tag that blocked Olson’s attempt at a tricky slide. But Chapman’s relay was the straw that stirred the drink, a bolt of lightning perfectly weighted to give Bailey an easy tag:

Chapman’s throw was clocked at 94 mph, his hardest of the year, and he didn’t spend 15 seconds getting signs and going into a windup before releasing it. He just turned, planted, and threw a perfect strike – and nearly decapitated Brett Wisely in the bargain:

3. Pirates!
The Pirates have been simultaneously bad and boring for the better part of the past decade. In the aftermath of the Big Data Baseball Sinker era, they hadn’t found a consistent new identity. Starling Marte, Gregory Polanco, and ringleader Andrew McCutchen left town, and Pittsburgh didn’t bring in any obvious replacements. In the years since, the Pirates made a few questionable trades and missed on a few draft picks. Suddenly, it was pretty grim.

Things are turning around this year, though. Last year, the Pirates picked Paul Skenes first overall. It was a controversial pick – his LSU teammate Dylan Crews was first on a lot of boards, with Max Clark and Wyatt Langford in the mix as well. But Skenes has cranked it up a notch from his already impressive form. He added a new upper 90s splitter/sinker hybrid, refined his fastball command even further, and hit the big leagues running after utterly embarrassing his Triple-A competition (27.1 IP, 0.99 ERA, 45 strikeouts, goodness).

He’s been absolutely electric in the majors. He’s in the top 10 for every major statistical category, and he’s not doing it with smoke and mirrors. Well, he is doing it with smoke, I guess:

That would be exciting enough, but the Pirates hit on another top young pitcher. Jared Jones doesn’t have the same pedigree as Skenes, but he looks like he might be an ace before long too. He made his big league debut this year and immediately started blowing hitters away:

His fastball might be the best in baseball. The shape is outrageous, a mind-bending frozen rope that seems to appear out of nowhere thanks to his long-striding, low-release delivery. He throws it the fourth hardest of all starters to rack up 50 innings this year – Skenes is first, naturally – and has been locating it well to boot. It turns out that having a laser beam for your primary pitch goes a long way toward dominance. His wipeout slider completes the picture – it’s a Spencer Strider starter kit, more or less.

Jones is still a work in progress. He had scattershot command before this year, to put it kindly, though he seems to have improved to at least average on that front. There are also workload questions here. Jones has hovered around 125 innings pitched in his last two seasons, and he’s already approaching 100 this year. His velocity has consistently dipped late in starts, and it’s also dipped as the season has gone on. He’s currently on the IL, and assuming it’s not a serious injury, that might be for the best. The Pirates have been giving him extra rest between starts this year; they seem to understand the importance of building Jones up rather than throwing him into the deep end.

I don’t think that the future is here yet in Pittsburgh, but it’s getting closer quickly. The team’s two aces are leading the charge, and they just happen to be two of the most exciting pitchers in the game to watch. You love to see it.

4. Expressive Stars
Shohei Ohtani flinching:

Juan Soto shuffling:

The entire Mets team dancing together while one of them performs a hit single:

Heck, Lance Lynn getting fired up:

Baseball is supposed to be fun. That’s why we watch it. For me – and it doesn’t have to be the same way for you, obviously – Ohtani and Soto have been the greatest exemplars of that this year. Watching an Ohtani at-bat is delightful. Inside pitches make him flinch expressively. Swinging and missing transforms him into a pinwheel:

That’s how I imagine I’d look if someone made me swing at a major league fastball. But Ohtani is nothing like me, of course. He spends a good chunk of his at-bats looking discombobulated. Often, he turns on the next pitch and hits it 400 feet.

Soto doesn’t wear his failures quite as vividly as Ohtani, but that doesn’t make his at-bats any less entertaining. He gives the pitcher an appreciative nod after he gets fooled. He pounds his hip theatrically to keep his mechanics right. His face will tell you exactly what he thought of the last pitch. It’s not quite an inner monologue, but it’s the closest you can get in a visual medium.

It’s not that I don’t like watching other baseball players too. One of the reasons I like baseball on TV so much is that you can see the little idiosyncrasies that make these world class athletes seem just like us. Or maybe not just like us – none of my coworkers have hit number one on a Billboard chart – but at least enough like us to bring me joy.

5. Basepath Hijinks
The rest of the Five Things All-Stars are players, but there’s no rule in our rulebook that says you can’t nominate plays. There’s also no rulebook, for the record. So here are a few plays on the bases that delighted me this week.

There’s Daniel Schneemann and Brayan Rocchio combining on a perfect double play:

Look at that magnificent throw and tag:

There’s Jacob Young scoring a completely pointless run in a novel way. After a walk, he took second on defensive indifference. Then he saw a wild pitch and decided what the heck, let’s score:

I thought that was a wildly bad play – what if he made the last out of the game? – until I watched it again. He didn’t even need to hit full speed on this one:

Hey, that run is going to be on his baseball card forever. Why not take it?

And why not, let’s close it out with a classic: the delayed first-and-third double steal. Even the woeful White Sox get frisky on the basepaths sometimes:

Now, was that a wildly poor decision by catcher Ryan Jeffers? Most definitely. He went for the chest-high throw to second, an option recently explored by Sam Miller in his ongoing exploration of first-and-third steals. The idea here is to give the receiving defender the option to either go for a tag or make a strong throw back home. The thing is, that throw only works if there’s someone there to catch it. While Jeffers was rising and firing, the rest of the infield was conceding the base:

Honestly, what a play by Willi Castro. He got to that ball in the outfield grass to keep the runner on third from scoring automatically, and then managed to get off the ground and at least aim a throw home. Unfortunately for him, that throw kicked off the mound:

The second Jeffers unleashed that throw, Eloy Jiménez was likely to score from third. Castro did his best to stop that from happening, but his last-ditch effort wasn’t enough. Scoring note: Castro was charged with two errors on that play. He got a fielding error (huh?) and a throwing error (eh…) for trying to go above and beyond. Hey, at least the real life All-Star team gave him a spot. I’m sure that matters more to him than what the official scorer thought on this play.

All those plays happened earlier this week. There are impressive athletic feats tucked into every game. All you have to do is watch. So sit back and take a breather. Like Eloy, you’ve earned it: