Five Plays The Highlights Industry Will Just Ignore

The best NSAs of the past month or so

Day 29 Of The 2025 MLB Season
On April 24 Julio Rodríguez lined a ball just inside the third base bag. Alex Bregman went horizontal, gloving it as he crossed over the foul line and to the edge of the infield cutout. His shoulders managed to bear his bodyweight and prevent him from landing with a heavy belly flop. He was thus able to pop up quickly, shuffle his feet into position and hum a throw to first base. Rodríguez, who is inconveniently fast, was called safe.

That play went to replay review, and even frame by frame it was so close that it took several minutes before a “call stands”—I’d say the correct call—could be returned.

The first-base umpire could have made this play timeless by calling Rodríguez out. Oh, ultimately Rodríguez would have to be called safe, but that’s what the guys with the eight TV screens are for. The guys in the booth need to make the right call, but if only the guy on the field could just make the satisfying call. Punch that fist, give the play a punctuation mark. Let it be a highlight! Nobody watching it in the future needs to know Rodríguez was eventually safe. They’d just see the play and, through clever editing, be transported: Alex Bregman, what a ballplayer!

About a month ago I wrote about the Best Plays You Never See Again, incredible athletic achievements that don’t make the montages because they don’t actually lead to any outs. That play by Bregman qualifies, and is the third-best NSA play I’ve seen since the original article. Here are the rest of my top 5, descending:

5. Skenes
You know that trope in movies etc. where somebody stops right in the middle of the street for some reason, maybe to argue with a love interest, unrealistically oblivious to traffic, and you know they’re about to get hit by a truck? That almost happened on this play—which started with a bobble by the third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes—because Paul Skenes is a truck and this little guy on the Nationals was completely oblivious:

You rarely see a pitcher race to cover third on a play like this—even Hayes seemed surprised, and the little guy watching the ball must have thought “how weird that Hayes is throwing a ball to nobody, probably no need to worry.” It’s a head-up play by Skenes, an athletic play, a terrifying play on multiple levels, but ultimately an unsuccessful play. I think Skenes actually could have gotten the out, but to do so he would have had to go full muni bus on the little dude. (He had 10 inches and 95 pounds on the baserunner, whose name is Nasim Nuñez.) Instead, showing mercy, he slowed down a bit, got there a tick too late, and took the tumble himself.

Would this actually be a highlight if he’d gotten the out? Maybe not if the pitcher had been Lance Lynn, but in the year 2025 any novel Paul Skenes content makes it into the highlight rundown. At the least, you clip and save all these plays for the Hall of Fame montage. But no out, no highlight.

4. Hoerner
Nico Hoerner’s through-the-legs throw was too late to get Tyler Wade out on a slow chopper:

If you look at the reverse shot, you can see a Padres coach in the dugout, waiting, watching, withholding judgment—and as soon as Hoerner hikes the ball he throws his arms out “SAFE.”

To me, that coach’s confidence was less “I’ve done the math and concluded that Train A will arrive before Train B,” and more like, “lol they’re doing the through-the-legs play, it’s a wrap.” If you’re a coach and you see the other team going Savannah Banana, you probably get real smug.

But Hoerner’s throw was actually pretty good! I’m not sure it was actually faster than a regular throw would have been. Hoerner ended up needing to plant his left foot to get any leverage for the hike, which caused him to hold onto the ball for an extra tick and slow the play down. But he risked humiliation and he survived, which is what a lot of great highlights are. (I think he could actually have gotten off a behind-the-back pass faster, but that would have been even more likely to end up in the Padres’ dugout.)

I’ll say this, too: Nico Hoerner throwing the ball through his legs? Unusual, but I get it. Tyler Wade’s wild leap after he passes first base? No idea. It’s as though a pit suddenly jumped out in front of him.

2. Tatís
Fernando Tatís’ rump throw:

It’s not just throwing from his back; it’s throwing from his back while he’s still sliding! He gets rid of the ball so fast, and he—well, there’s a phrase you hear a lot when fielders throw from awkward positions: “…and he even got something on it.” That’s rarely interrogated, but let’s do that with this throw: Did Tatís “get something on it?”

When Ben Lindbergh and I were out at Stompers Summer, we had to test our new radar gun. So we went out to the mound and threw some pitches. I was throwing as hard as I could, from a sloped mound; I was touching 65 mph. Or maybe 64, I might have only touched 64. I think Ben was in the same range, but I don’t want to commit libel, so Ben was allegedly in the same range. We were two full-grown adults in the prime of our health, living the dream, throwing baseballs as fast as Toyota Siennas.

Fernando Tatís, while basically sliding down a mine shaft, threw that ball 64.4 mph, according to Statcast. Accurately!

It’s possible the Padres practice this? A few days later, Manny Machado threw one from his back to get a force at second. His is a different kind of back throw—Machado has more time, he seems to get a bit more leverage—but it’s also pristine:

Machado (57 mph, by the way; pft, I could do that) got the out and Tatís didn’t, but Tatís’ throw is more captivating. Incredible outfield throws live forever on the traveling highlight circuit, and I think Tatís’ throw would have been one of the legends if it had resulted in an out. It didn’t, so appreciate being one of the very few people in history who will ever see it.

1. Lawlar
There’s nothing unique about this play; it’s just better than pretty much any play any second baseman will make this year, and Jordan Lawlar deserves to have you see it:

Alas, it was Ryan McMahan (26.7 mph sprint speed) running instead of his teammate Michael Toglia (26.6 mph sprint speed), so no out was possible. I assume somewhere there’s even a defensive metric that will ding Lawlar ever so slightly for not getting the out on this play. Hopefully I’m wrong about that.

Jordan Lawlar deserves to have you see it again, from another angle:

Lawlar deserves to have you watch that GIF once more, but just focusing on his legs this time.

Lawlar’s okay with you moving on now.

(Thanks to reader Liam for flagging the Hoerner play for me. Please continue alerting me to great defensive plays that don’t lead to outs: pebblehunting@gmail.com)

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Day 30 Of The 2025 MLB Season
At the podcast I do, we talked about the Angels’ strange decision to start a getaway game at 6:29 p.m., the very last minute that the collective bargaining agreement allowed them to. It irritated the players, who got stuck with an uncomfortably quick turnaround before their next game, which started… oh, 20 hours after the 6:29 game ended and 2,000 miles away in Minnesota. Organizations sometimes do this sort of scheduling to the opposing team; the Angels did it to themselves. Wild stuff. I don’t have anything else to say about it, except that, on Day 30 of this season, the Angels played the second half of the sequence: The series opener in Minnesota. They lost 11-4.

Then they went on to get swept in Minnesota.

And then, for good measure, they kept losing: After winning the 6:29 game in Anaheim, the Angels had a winless roadtrip and lost seven in a row. They went from 12-12, and 1.5 games out of first, to 12-19, and seven games out of first. Probably not accurate to blame it all on 6:29, and yet fair to.

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Day 31 Of The 2025 MLB Season
A family member sat down to watch two minutes of ball with me and noticed one of this year’s fun uniform trends—not a brand new trend but one that seems to be accelerating, from one or two guys to seven or eight guys:

Family Member: That guy’s wearing shorts! That’s allowed?

Carlos Santana

Me¹: There’s no rule against it, though I suppose there’s enough in the uniform-rules' language that an objection could be enforced if an umpire cared enough. For example “All players on a team shall wear uniforms identical in color, trim and style.” Does that qualify as trim? Conceivable, if you’re the trim police, but most people have other things to worry about. “No player whose uniform does not conform to that of his teammates shall be permitted to participate in a game.” Does that conform? Seems like it basically, but how far could one player’s pants go and still match? Two inches higher, six inches higher, bunching the pants up like a diaper? Eventually the ruling would probably tip. And the rules do require sleeve lengths to be consistent among teammates, so are pant lengths spiritually all that different? Ultimately this probably relates to something I wrote about recently, how in the past decade there seems to be little societal appetite for enforcing rules the way that there used to be, like how the middle school dress code is no longer—

Family member: And he has keys in his pocket!

Previously: Days 28 & 25 Of The 2025 MLB Season
Next: Days 32 & 33 Of The 2025 MLB Season

1. To ruin the fun: I didn’t actually say any of this to her. She did say the other stuff to me.