DAY 9 Of The 2025 MLB Season
On April 4 Rafael Devers chopped a ball to Nolan Arenado’s right. Arenado fielded it on the run and planted to jump and throw, but didn’t get a clean grip on the baseball. As he was lifting off, the ball was pinned to his body:
Clearly, nothing good was likely to come of this throw, and imagine how badly it could go. Jumping in the air without any fingers around the ball—this throw could end up anywhere, from the home plate umpire to the right fielder to the shortstop to literally behind Arenado. His exposure to calamity was outrageous.
And he somehow got off an almost normal throw!
That might not tickle you the way it did me, but that is one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen Nolan Arenado, the greatest defensive third baseman of our lifetime, do. He’s jumping, he’s twisting, he’s falling away, and because he starts with no grip his arm action is trailing behind. He still manages to heave it about as far as the average adult can heave any baseball at all. And it’s right on target. To me, that’s breathtaking.
This is an example of a type of play that I’ve taken to describing, in my notes, as The Best Play You’ll Never See Again, or, for short, Never See Again. An NSA play is one that demonstrates incredible physical ability, that might even make you gasp, but that you’ll never see on a highlight reel because it didn’t lead to an out. His throw was just a doomed (but extraordinary) attempt to correct his own fumble, and thus not a fully articulated great play.
There are a lot of different reasons a play that knocks your smocks off wouldn’t produce an out; or, alternately, why a play that doesn’t produce an out could still shock your crocs off. The most common reason, which actually occurred in this same game, is that a player makes an extraordinary play on one end but his teammate fails him on the other:
You can see it in the shortstop Trevor Story’s reaction at the end of the clip—he knows that his great play was blinked out of highlight existence by the first baseman Triston Casas’ mundane error. Someday, when Story announces his retirement, and the MLB Network runs a montage on his solid-and-occasionally-spectacular career, they won’t include that play. By highlight logic, we just can’t talk about it.
Sometimes the problem is that a great play doesn’t have much practical value. Here, Dylan Moore makes a great diving stop, an incredibly quick recovery to grab the ball, and a ludicrous throw from his back—sincerely, this might be the best almost-play I see all year. But without a realistic shot at getting an out, it’s kind of like being the person who can come closest to doing a between-the-legs dunk on a 30-foot rim: He will not dunk the ball.
His feat has no purpose.
Sometimes a play is difficult and accomplishes something of great value, but without the out it doesn’t have a satisfying highlight arc. I’m not as fond of this Fernando Tatís almost-catch as I am of the Dylan Moore almost-play, but
one could definitely describe it as brilliant, in its own way: The ball was landing just on top of the wall and just as the wall changed heights, so Tatís had to play all the awkward juttings at high speed without smashing his ribs into riblets. And he did it! He successfully saved a home run,
brought the ball back onto the field, and held the runner to a double. This ended up being the key play in a 1-0 Padres victory. You’ll obviously never see it again, because it wasn’t even a catch. You will see tons of sliding/diving/leaping catches that were, arguably, much easier and less consequential than this was.
This play by the Mariners’ Ryan Bliss is less ambiguous than the Tatís play, because there is no element of failure in Bliss’s performance:
He successfully stabbed a sharp line drive that hit off second base, and he kept the go-ahead run from scoring in extra innings. There was no bobble, no drop, no anything—Bliss had one impossible task and he performed it. You’ll just never see it again, because “keeping a ball in the infield” isn’t the satisfying stuff of highlights, even when it looks like this:
You’ll probably start noticing these a bunch now, plays that strike you as harder or more impressive than a typical highlight but that, for whatever reason, don’t lead to an out and thus don’t qualify for “highlight” meta-tags. I’m taking nominations for more of them: When you see one this year, PebbleHunting@Gmail.
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DAY 10 Of The 2025 MLB Season
