Bryan Woo Tripped

A very quick journey through recent human achievements.

Sep 19, 2025

Day 77 Of The 2025 MLB Season
One of the interests we take in sports is the demonstration of a human body working perfectly. This is true across all age groups, but the specific things we appreciate do change as we enter different life phases. When we are very young and we can’t even use scissors we are impressed by skills, by the simple ability to catch things and manipulate objects and work with others. This is the perfect highlight for a 7-year-old:

When we are in our teens and early 20s, we are ambitious and maximalist, and the perfect highlight is just the hardest throw, the longest homer, the highest leap:

As we move into young adulthood, our identities cohere around aesthetic appreciation; we favor beautiful and efficient expressions of energy, like a runner picking up speed as he turns a corner:

But there comes a point when we never sprint all-out anymore. We don’t try to jump up and touch things just because they’re high up. The body that works perfectly, we come to understand, is the one that can climb into the crawl space beneath a house, that can reach back and grab the bag of snacks in the back seat while still keeping eyes on the road, that can stretch/improvise/adjust/react without straining a neck muscle. The only muscles that mean anything to us are core and glute muscles, and the best highlight is a simple controlled stop:

But eventually the neck is strained anyway, it’s the cost of still living. At that point, you just hope to maintain functionality. You have this recurring nightmare where you’ve knelt down to pick up a penny, but then your legs aren’t strong enough to stand you back up, like something has drained all the juice out of your legs. And after you wake up, for a little while there’s a great relief in standing up and noticing that you can still do it, effortlessly, maybe even with no hands like a boss!

So those are the life phases of highlights:

Ability
Strength
Beauty
Flexibility
Functionality

You go through all those, and then you turn 44.

***

Reader Matthew asked me early this season whether I had any things I would like people to be looking out for, as “batted balls hitting bases” had been during the 2024 season. “At the moment I don't have any great alerts,” I told him. “The closest thing I've got going right now is: Fielders tripping. Not slipping, but the classic trip, where feet get tangled up and the guy trips for no apparent cause.”

How often do you see ballplayers trip for no reason? Well, we’ll get to that.

How often do you trip for no reason? Probably more than you realize. Phase 6 of life: Staying upright.

Earlier this year I developed a very, very mild bit of glute tenderness. I never notice it, unless I’m really stretching into that spot OR I trip/stumble. The sudden need to stabilize activates the glute signal, and I feel this stab deep in the muscle. It’s no big deal, but the result is that every time I trip or stumble even slightly it’s going to get my attention. No trips get past me. And so I can say that I trip or stumble every week or two. It happened yesterday: I was turning 90 degrees from the fridge to the stove and I just… fell over. I wouldn’t have noticed it, but my glute said “you gotta count that!”

I’ve been watching the ballplayers closely, and they never trip. It’s incredible. Up to day 77 of the 2025 MLB season I’d probably watched 300 hours of ball, often multiple players on the screen at the same time, and nobody ever bit it for no reason. Sometimes their feet would get tangled in a bat or an ankle would turn on a base, but those are falls with causes. Sometimes a runner’s spikes would skid out on the dirt, or they’d slip crossing the slick home plate surface, or they’d collide with each other and tumble, but that really goofy trip—the fridge-to-stove type of trip—out in open space, with nothing to blame it on but their own feet? They were flawless on those.

I came to really appreciate how long these guys had kept the tripless streak going. But Bryan Woo finally snapped it: