Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week, May 9

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. For once, I don’t have a fistful of double plays to show you. I don’t even have that many great catches. The baseball I watched this week was disjointed and messy, the regular season at its finest. Making the easy plays tough? We’ve got that. Bringing in your lefty to face their righty slugger? Got that too. Doubles that weren’t? Collisions between out-of-position players? Yes and yes. So thanks Zach Lowe for the wonderful article format, and let’s get started.

1. Tell ‘Em, Wash
I mean, how hard could first base be? Incredibly hard, of course. The Red Sox and Rangers are both on to their respective Plan Bs at first base after Triston Casas ruptured his patellar tendon and Jake Burger got sent down to Triple-A. No big deal defensively, right? Each team plugged in a utility player — Romy Gonzalez for Boston and Josh Smith for Texas — and moved on with life. Look how easy first is:

The good times didn’t last, though. In the third inning, disaster struck:

That play was a whole mess. After Gonzalez dropped the ball, Wyatt Langford scooted around and dodged him, but failed to touch first base. That led the Red Sox to challenge, since it was fairly clear that Gonzalez got back to the bag before Langford did:

But as it turns out, if a runner who is called safe fails to step on a base, the call can only be overturned on an appeal, not a challenge. (This rule seems bad!) So the call on the field stood no matter what replay review showed. However, regardless of the intricacies of umpiring, that’s a play that a skilled first baseman almost always makes. Fielding errant throws is a significant portion of the job. Doing it with a runner bearing down on you is necessary, too, as is finding a way to keep your body out of that runner’s way. It’s incredibly hard!

Right, about finding a way to keep your body out of the way: Smith hasn’t quite figured that part out yet. He kept his foot on the bag while playing this Gonzalez grounder, and chaos ensued:

That play got overturned to an out after review, and fortunately neither player was badly hurt. But look how hard first base is! Both first basemen in this game ended up doubled over with trainers attending to them:

I’ll never doubt Ron Washington again. And with Gonzalez set to miss a few games due to back stiffness after that collision, the Red Sox are heading even further down their first base depth chart… to another utilityman: Abraham Toro. Stay tuned – it could be a fun few days.

2. The Jacob Wilson Experience
The A’s are friskier than expected this year, mixing it up with the top of the AL West in the early going. That’s not exclusively because of Jacob Wilson, though he does lead the team in WAR. But more than that, he leads the team in DAR – Delightful Above Replacement. Watching Wilson play baseball is so dang fun.

There’s the contact hitting, of course. If you like Luis Arraez, you’ll love Wilson, who has a matching first percentile bat speed and 99th percentile squared-up rate, which measures how often batters hit the ball cleanly. They’re the best in the game at avoiding strikeouts, and also among the worst in the game at walking, because that’s how that trade-off works.

Wilson, a righty, peppers the opposite field with line drives. He doesn’t care if he’s pitched inside:

Or pitched away, for that matter:

Those are two random Wilson singles. If you want the full experience, you have to find some high-leverage ones. This one against the Mariners had me out of my seat:

That came after he’d beaten Andrés Muñoz for a game-tying single the inning before. Wilson seems to be always in the middle of things, and he’s definitely always putting the ball in play, so the combination is often delightful. Even his celebrations are fun:

Wilson isn’t the best hitter in baseball. He isn’t the guy I’d most want at the plate in a late-and-close situation. There are holes in his game, no doubt, and his .361 BABIP isn’t going to persist forever. I’ll be surprised if Wilson ends the season even 15% above average offensively; it’s just hard to put up huge numbers the way he approaches hitting. But whatever value he provides in terms of runs, he’s giving at least triple the amount in whimsy, as in “fireballing closer defeated by slap-hitting mosquito” amusement.

Wilson is fun on defense, too. Even though he has a lanky frame and solid arm strength, he favors some downright Jeterian tactics to get the ball to first on time:

Singles hitters are fun to watch – the singles guy is probably more exciting than a dingers-and-walks guy with the same wRC+. Goofy defensive ploys are fun to watch, too. Fun, flowing hair whipping free in celebrations? You guessed it. The A’s are sneaky interesting this year, minor league stadium and all, and Wilson is at the center of their good vibes.

3. PCA vs. JHL
Pete Crow-Armstrong gets my vote for the most exciting defender in baseball. You’ve read the articles, plural. You’ve seen the outrageous reaction time and speed leading to crazy catches. You’ve seen his throwing arm. It’s all amazing – when I look through my notes every week, I consistently have two or three Crow-Armstrong plays that are at least potentially worth covering in this column. But nothing’s quite as funny to me as PCA tormenting his three-letter-acronym counterpart in this week’s Cubs-Giants series.

Jung Hoo Lee is on a tear in 2025. He’s hitting the ball hard, lacing line drives to all fields, and burning on the basepaths. After an early-inning home run, he stroked this clean double – or, well, this ball that would’ve been a clean double against pretty much every other team:

That’s just silly. Statcast had it at a 15% catch probability, but Crow-Armstrong eats up ground like a gazelle after he gets moving. That video isn’t sped up; he just has another gear. Lee was stunned, and pitcher Colin Rea was ecstatic. They were shocked not just because PCA is fast – speed alone isn’t enough there. He had to take a nearly perfect route, too:

Fine, then. Next time Lee was up, he learned his lesson. Instead of lofting a line drive deep into the gap, he laced a low one that not even Crow-Armstrong could get to. Clean double, obviously:

Wait, what? Where did he even come from? How was that a single? Lee has elite speed and gets out of the box fast. That ball was deep into the gap, too. But Crow-Armstrong is even faster, and oh by the way, he has an incredible throwing arm. The camera followed Lee slamming on the brakes, but check out how PCA got the ball in so quickly:

I’d say that’s textbook form, only no one has ever written that particular textbook. There are maybe three players in baseball who can even dream of getting to that one on time and also redirecting it to the infield. And that was better than a redirection; falling away and off the wrong foot, he threw a seed to second base and hit Nico Hoerner in the glove on a single, perfect hop.

Wrigley Field was full of Jung Hoo Lee fans all week. The so-called Grandson of the Wind has a big following in the Windy City. But he probably hopes he’ll never have to go back after the rude treatment he got from his center field counterpart.

4. Reverse Platooning
Hey, managing a baseball team is hard. You can’t treat every game like the playoffs and run out your best relievers in their best matchups every night; everyone would be exhausted in about two weeks, and there are six full months of regular season to contend with. But sometimes the sloppiness goes too far for my liking.

When the Diamondbacks faced the Mets on Monday night, Ryne Nelson lasted only 4 1/3 innings, which meant Torey Lovullo had to cobble together plenty of reliever innings. To make matters worse, they’d played extra innings the day before and the bullpen was gassed. So out of availability as much as desire, he sent out righty Ryan Thompson to face the bottom of the New York order, two righties and a lefty.

That didn’t go so hot. Thompson allowed two of those three to reach, and suddenly he had a problem. The next two Mets batters? Switch-hitter Francisco Lindor and lefty Juan Soto. Lindor is on fire from the left side of the plate this year, with a 139 wRC+ and 11 of his 13 extra-base hits. Soto eats righty fastballs for breakfast. This would be a great time for a lefty – only Lovullo had planned on facing these guys the next inning, and thus Tommy Henry wasn’t loose yet.

Thompson has muted platoon splits for his career, but I’m skeptical. He’s a low-slot sinkerballer who doesn’t throw a changeup; those types of pitchers generally fare poorly against opposite-handed hitters. He barely strikes out any lefties; if you let the Mets’ lefties put the ball in play, you’re probably going to have a bad time. And that’s exactly what happened. Thompson tried to bury a putaway slider but left it over the plate, and Lindor sent it out in a hurry, nearly hitting the pool:

That ball was absolutely clobbered, 107 mph off the bat. That’s what happens when you leave that pitch in the strike zone to a lefty instead of back-footing it.

With the horses gone, Lovullo decided not to close the barn door. He left Thompson in to face Soto with the bases empty, an eminently reasonable decision. Naturally, Thompson struggled to retire Soto, getting to two strikes quickly but then bleeding to a full count as Soto shuffled through a variety of fastballs and sliders off the edge. Then Thompson ventured back into the zone and learned why Soto got the largest contract in history this winter:

That ball was hit even harder than Lindor’s, a homer in more than half of the parks in baseball. If Soto got to face righty sidearmers every game, his numbers would be truly ridiculous instead of just very good. (Yes, in case you haven’t noticed, Soto’s slow start is pretty much over. His wRC+ is up to 143 on the season, and over the Mets’ past four series, he’s slashing .313/.424/.646 with a 194 wRC+.) But, hey, at least Thompson kept him in the park. His reward was in sight: Finally a righty!

Just two problems. First, that righty was Pete Alonso, one of the best hitters in baseball so far this year. Second, Thompson was gassed! He’d thrown 25 pitches in the inning already, and 11 pitches the previous day. Lovullo decided he couldn’t leave Thompson out there, so even though his pitcher finally had the handedness advantage, the manager went to the bullpen.

Naturally, the only reliever warming up in the bullpen was Henry, a lefty. You can’t warm up all your relievers every night; they’d get exhausted. But that meant giving Alonso the platoon advantage by using your lefty, after giving their dangerous lefties the advantage by leaving in a righty. Alonso took the first two pitches he saw, and smoked the third one into left field at 115 mph for a single:

That ball was hit so hard that Soto had to hold up at third. Henry escaped the jam without further damage when the next batter, Starling Marte, also a righty, grounded into an inning-ending double play, but the whole sequence was just very funny to me. All the wrong pitchers in all the wrong spots; no wonder the Mets were hitting the stuffing out of the ball. Postseason baseball is unlike the regular season in many ways, but one of the most impactful is the way matchups work out. In the regular season, it’s about managing workloads, and hitters get plenty of chances to attack suboptimal matchups for the opposing manager because of who’s rested on a given night. In October, it’s about maximizing every possible edge. No wonder it’s hard to hit in the playoffs.

5. Reliever Rollercoasters
I love a good out-of-nowhere reliever. I was fascinated by Nick Anderson and Emmanuel Clase in my first year writing at FanGraphs and never quite kicked the bug. I’m always looking for some guy who throws a weird slider or an unhittable fastball, preferably with no prospect pedigree to their name at all. The stranger the better, in my opinion; funky pitches, strange release points, and the like all add to the thrill of the find.

I like finding these relievers because it’s cool seeing a style that you don’t expect to succeed in the majors work. And yes, these guys are good. The margins are so thin at the highest level that an unexpected pitch or a sudden burst of command can turn non-prospects into bat-missers. What makes it even more interesting is that these relievers rarely last. Like I said, the margins are thin; you can go from missing every bat to not being able to buy an out in a hurry. When you only pitch 50 or so innings a year and also are hitting a level of performance you’ve never previously displayed, regression is almost a given.

Rarely, though, do I think “oh this guy is great” at the same time that I think “oh no, he’s broken.” But Brendon Little is an exception. His sinker and curveball are pretty much unhittable. Like, what are you supposed to do with this?

Or this?

That’s how Little has posted a 24% swinging strike rate, the best in baseball by a mile. Second place is Mason Miller, and he’s at 21.4%. Only five pitchers have eclipsed 20%. You can’t fake those kinds of numbers. Opposing batters simply can’t figure out where the ball is going.

Good news for them, though: Little can’t figure out where the ball is going either. He has the lowest zone rate in baseball, and is walking 13% of opposing batters. He’s up to three wild pitches already, more than halfway to last year’s total in a third of the time. And these aren’t your garden variety wild pitches; they’re extremely wild. This one left the playing field, after Alejandro Kirk was unlucky enough to deflect the rebound off the ground with the top of his shoulder pad:

Little has only hit one guy this year – somehow! – but that HBP had me laughing:

I’m pretty impressed, to be honest. Good luck doing that one on purpose. That pitch was so wild that it wasn’t even a ball in the dirt – it was a ball in the grass before the dirt starts in close to the plate. I love the estimated trajectory dot that pops up at the end of the play, in a place where those dots have no business appearing. That was a 50-Cent-throwing-out-the-first-pitch level miss, and from a major league pitcher no less.

The herky-jerky, high-effort nature of Little’s delivery makes it tough for batters to figure out what’s going on, and it also makes it tough for him to land the ball for strikes. What’s weirdest about all of this, though, is that he had fairly similar stuff last year and posted a poor strikeout rate. He’s throwing his curveball faster this year, but it’s not a completely new pitch or anything. It’s just baffling everyone, teammates and opponents alike. In the above game where he hit Yoán Moncada and bounced one over the netting, he escaped the inning with no damage after striking out Jo Adell on six pitches, with not a single one in the zone. Sounds about right on both sides.

I don’t think that Little is about to burst into the upper echelon of relievers or anything. I’m not even convinced he’ll be on the Toronto roster by September. His wildness is borderline disqualifying. But what could be more reliever-y than to be so wild that you’re hitting guys on the bounce and throwing the ball to the backstop – all while leading the major leagues in whiff rate? That’s as good as it gets in the Relievers You Can’t Believe Are Suddenly Unhittable genre.