Welcome to another edition of Five Things
My weekly column that highlights strange and often delightful happenings from the last week of baseball.
My own baseball watching was a bit stilted this week, for the best possible reason. I went to three Giants games, an exciting event made possible by cheap ticket deals, a friend’s birthday, and some last minute cancellations of non-baseball weekend plans. Two of those games were pretty awful; Blake Snell got shelled Friday night, and then Blake Snell’s replacements got shelled Wednesday afternoon. The good news is, there’s still *so much* good baseball going on all the time that I had plenty in the tank to write about. You don’t have to look too far to find things to like about baseball these days.
We’ve got new holidays, old AL Central rivals, stadium gimmicks, and pure unadulterated velocity. As always, this column is inspired by Zach Lowe’s basketball column, Ten Things (Zach inspired Will Leitch to start his own Five Things column over at MLB.com, in fact).
Jared Jones Day
There’s a new holiday making the rounds. It happens every five days or so. Maybe you haven’t heard of it, in which case I’m very pleased to introduce it to you. It’s called Jared Jones Day, and I hope you’ll start celebrating with me.
The customs of Jared Jones Day are quite simple. When Pirates rookie Jared Jones pitches, we turn on the opposing team’s broadcast. Then we watch the admiration, disbelief, and general chaos that ensues as he makes lineups full of professional athletes look like uncoordinated rubes.
This holiday began in earnest for me when the Pirates visited the Mets last week. I turned on the Mets broadcast because it’s one of my favorites, and all three broadcasters were gobsmacked by Jones’s arsenal and approach. Keith Hernandez was reduced to giggling at one particularly nasty slider. Jones went five one-hit innings, striking out seven, and left destruction in his wake. The Mets looked every bit as impressed as the broadcasters sounded.
It’s so fun to watch Jones that I can’t blame these guys. His fastball defies gravity. He challenges hitters rather than wasting pitches or giving up on at-bats. When he walks someone, it’s despite his best efforts, and it means the hitter got to swing at a center-cut fastball somewhere in the equation. His slider, on the other hand, is a surgical tool, slicing off the corners of the strike zone at 90 miles an hour.
This week’s observation of JJDay came on Monday against the Brewers. Milwaukee’s announcers aren’t as quick to compliment opponents as the Mets crew, but even still, they couldn’t keep the admiration out of their voice as he blew William Contreras away with a 99-mph fastball located perfectly on the upper edge of the zone. And of course, there was the piece de resistance, this pitch that Brice Turang will never ever live down:
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Power on Power
Monday afternoon in the Bronx, the A’s clung to a tight 2-0 lead. They’d taken that lead only moments before, in the top of the ninth inning, on a Zack Gelof home run. But the Yankees lineup was ideally positioned to mount a comeback: Anthony Volpe, Juan Soto, and Aaron Judge were due up. That’s not the toughest lineup you could face in this position – the Dodgers would like a word – but it has to be close. Luckily for Oakland, their best player happens to be their closer. Mason Miller is ridiculous. I’m not sure I’m selling it enough by saying that, even. He throws 103 with movement, goes max effort on every pitch, and looks like a football player who took up baseball as a hobby. You’ve never seen a man so hulking throw so hard.
Miller quickly dispensed with Volpe, tossing a few sliders that Volpe fouled off before blowing the doors off with 103 up and away:
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City By The Bai-Ley
The Giants haven’t had the best farm system in baseball in recent years. Recent graduates like Luis Matos, Casey Schmitt, Joey Bart, and David Villar have been somewhere in between role players and journeymen. But it hasn’t been all bad. Patrick Bailey, the team’s first draft pick in 2020, looks like the next great homegrown Giant.
Last Saturday, I happened to be at the park for a nice afternoon of baseball. The Giants celebrated Bailey with a bobblehead, and he had himself a day worthy of the festivities. Bailey’s better known for his defense than his offense, but Saturday was an exception. In the first, he dumped a soft liner to center against Zac Gallen. In the third, he extended the lead with a bloop double. That’s the kind of hitter he was in 2023; good bat control but below average power meant he was hitting his fair share of line drives, but not cashing many of them…
