That Denzel Clarke Catch Was A Long Time Coming

Two and a half weeks!

Jun 10, 2025

I’m only supposed to be on Day 42 here, but I’m going to time travel into the future/the slightly more recent past to take advantage of your attention already being on the A’s center fielder Denzel Clarke.

Day 59 Of The 2025 MLB Season
You probably saw Clarke’s catch last night. It’s the early leader for catch of the year and, as David Roth put it, one of the best ever in the genre:

Clarke has been in the majors for two and a half weeks, but, if you can believe it, that catch is the payoff to a several-stage storyline I’d been following.

In the catch last night, Clarke got a clean foot into the wall and hoisted himself up onto his right elbow. He got to his spot in plenty of time, and you almost had the sense he was floating until the ball told him where to make his final thrust. When the ball arrived, and he had to improvise a little bit with that torso twist into a fully extended backhand, he was rock ready:

That catch didn’t come out of nowhere. Clarke had already made one Spiderman catch in his brief major league career, on May 30:

That’s already enough catch to define a player’s career. It wasn’t quite as extraordinary as last night’s, in part because Clarke didn’t have quite as much spring or quite as much upper body engagement. (The wall being almost three feet higher in Toronto hurts, because he couldn’t get his right arm—the one clutching the wall—fully under his shoulder, as he could in Anaheim.)

Great catch! In my notes for that day I wrote “Clarke got better at climbing the wall!” I wrote that because three days earlier he had gone up to try to Spiderman a homer in Houston, and it went poorly:

It’s all awful: He short-arms the wall with his right hand, his step-to-plant gets no purchase, his feet spin right off the panel and he faceplants into the 399.

You almost see him sneak a glance back toward the infield to see if maybe nobody saw him do that.

But the desire — oh, the desire is there. We know for sure that the desire is there because, four more days earlier, on Day 58 of the season, in Clarke’s major league debut—the first inning of his major league debut—the first batter of the first inning of his major league debut!—he had first attempted a Spiderman catch:

The form was clean, but there was also no real pressure on him: Clarke wasn’t anywhere close to the ball. It had carried well over the wall and, because of Clarke’s awkward route, a few feet behind him to boot. With no real chance at robbing it, he was like a kid pretending in his backyard.

Still, it was a pretty leap, and Clarke had clearly shown that he had the will. As my pal R.J. once told me: If you can find the why, you’ve already found the how.

And, sure enough, Clarke has the how. In the first two-and-a-half weeks of his major league career, Denzel Clarke:

Practiced the game’s coolest play, on basically an imaginary ball
Failed the game’s coolest play, on a real ball
Succeeded at the game’s coolest play
Perfected, even elevated, the game’s coolest play

But Sam, you say. I also was thinking of a catch.

[After an interval of silence.]

That’s interesting, but I only do this for one catch at a time.

You persist: Well, Sam, I really was thinking of a catch.

Fine. I acknowledge it: You might have a different favorite Denzel Clarke catch, the one from last week when he caught a ball on a full sprint and crashed into the center field wall at like 80 mph. It was arguably a better catch than even his fully self-actualized Spidermans:

I do think that’s the wilder, crazier, more impressive catch. And, unlike the Spiderman catch, there’s no practice, no preparation, no way that Denzel Clarke could have been workshopping that o—

Oh, wait, he was. Seven days earlier:

These things take practice.

Mistakes are how we know we’re learning.

Nothing Denzel Clarke does comes out of nowhere. His whole life has been leading to these catches, or at least his whole two-and-a-half-week career has been. And if you want to know what he can possibly do to top these, just look at the catches he’s not making. Those are the ones he’ll make next.

Previously: Days 53, 54, 55, 56, 57 & 58 Of The 2025 MLB Season
Next: Days 60, 61 & 62 Of The 2025 MLB Season