The Rizzo Special

On charging bunts, on straddling bases, on living the good life.

We surveyed 100 people, the top 10 answers on the board: What’s Something You Think Of When Reminiscing About Anthony Rizzo?

1. Catching the last out

2. Beating cancer/cancer awareness

3. Hit-by-pitches

4. [ ??? ]

5. The Andrew Cashner prospect-challenge trade

6. Tarp catches

7. Parkland vigil

8. { ??? ]

9. [ ??? ]

10. Healthy male friendship

Day 75 Of The 2025 MLB Season
In 2016, Anthony Rizzo started charging sacrifice bunts like the ball was made of Nerf foam. Most first baseman (including Rizzo, before) stand about 70 or 80 feet from home plate in obvious bunt situations, and then start charging as the pitch comes in. But after 2016 it became normal for Rizzo to set up 60, 50, 45 feet from home, as close as 43 feet before he started charging. Besides getting him to bunts more quickly, this let him cover bunts down both lines, so the third baseman could stay back and take a throw to the base.

There were bunts where Rizzo was on top of the play so fast the runner at second would just hold. There were others where the Cubs would turn 3-5-4 double plays, on perfectly credible bunts down the third base line:

Rizzo made it look comfortable, but the Rizzo Charge is, in fact, super zany, unnatural, and probably really uncomfortable. Look how out of place Rizzo looks down there:

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Michael Busch, who now plays first base for the Cubs, was in a Rizzo situation on Day 75. The Phillies had the winning run on second base with none out in the 11th. The Cubs, needing to sell out to prevent that run, sent Busch crashing in, Rizzo-style, to try to cut off a sacrifice bunt.

Busch, though, isn’t experienced in the Rizzo Crash. In the two years he’s been playing first base for the Cubs, he had only twice charged in a comparable way, both times in extra innings with no room for error. Once the play worked well; once he cut awkwardly into the pitcher,

who then threw wildly to first for an error.

The Game on Day 75 was Busch’s third try, and the result was nothing like Rizzo. Busch glitched:

A lot went wrong here. Despite trying to play it like Rizzo would, Busch started about 10 or 15 feet further back than Rizzo used to, so he was two or three steps later to the ball. By that point, the pitcher would have been better off fielding it, but Busch was Rizzo Crashing, gosh darn it, and so he cut the pitcher off. His momentum was a bit out of control, and when he fielded the ball it took him a couple steps to stop. He was probably too mentally committed to the Hero play, and he looked to get an out at third, which was so unlikely that the third baseman hadn’t even bothered covering the base. And his clock was off; by the time he turned to get the easy out at first, there was no out left.

It was a truism among our Stompers players that ballplayers are inept at anything they haven’t practiced a million times, and asking them to do something new is begging for a blooper. You can’t do something that zany just once or thrice, when things get desperate. Zane has to be honed in the banal everyday.

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With Rizzo now retired, it’s rare for any first baseman to crash so hard. This year, to the best of my data querying, there’ve been only three bunts laid down with the first baseman starting less than 50 feet away from home. Two of those plays starred Matt Olson, at 49 & 48 feet. The third, the real outlier, with a first baseman starting 37 feet back, featured Willson Contreras, an inexperienced first baseman who had been the Cubs’ catcher during the Rizzo years. The pre-bunt stills from this Crash would have made Rizzo proud:

What hppened next—Contreras nearly tumbling into the third baseman on an easy pop-up, well into foul territory—would have made him laugh.

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Day 76 Of The 2025 MLB Season
Everybody survived this play from Day 76, where Elly De La Cruz’s wild throw took the first baseman off his feet and directly into the path of the runner Johnathan Rodríguez:

Ask me about first-base collisions this year and three come to mind:

3. Alan Roden running into Rowdy Tellez, 6-foot-4, 270 pounds, baby bird flying into skyscraper:

Roden wasn’t hurt. Tellez was, perhaps, not aware. “Big human vs. not as big of a human,” he said afterward.

2. Romy González clipping Josh Smith’s foot, both players going down:

González missed a month.

1. Luis Arráez running into Mauricio Dubón, who ran into traffic to get the ball:

Arráez had a concussion and missed about a week.

After that one, Arráez’ manager, Mike Shildt, spoke agreeably about the “safety” bags that college baseball has started using at first base, and that college softball will soon make mandatory across all divisions. Those double bags give runners a clearer lane, so they won’t have to dodge the first baseman’s feet in order to touch the base. I’d be in favor.

But the bigger collision threat probably requires not just a new base but a new rule to go with it, and I think the need for it goes back to Anthony Rizzo. Rizzo always acted like he owned the bag. He routinely fielded throws by casually (and probably unnecessarily!) stepping across the first base line, as, for instance, here:

I can’t say Rizzo invented that technique, but when I first wrote about this in 2016 I didn’t find any of his contemporaries receiving throws that way, while it has since become fairly common. (At that time Rizzo was also the only first baseman who regularly stood on top of the base to receive routine throws, like Josh Smith did in that Romy González crash.)

A relatively simple change to make baseball less treacherous would be prohibiting first baseman (or covering second basemen) from reaching, or moving, across the first base line into foul territory, even when the throw is wild. If it’s wild, yell at the infielder who threw it there. You can’t expect a runner, who is sprinting through the bag without looking at the play, to dodge Tellez-sized obstacles veering into the path at the last second.

So just define anything west of the foul line as the baserunner’s rightful lane, for safety if nothing else. An infielder who moves into that lane has put the runner at risk, and is called for obstruction and general not-cool,-dude recklessness.

You could even call it the Rizzo Rule, in honor of Anthony Rizzo, who… missed two months with a broken arm during his final season, because a fielder ran directly into his lane and caused a collision.¹

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Day 171 Of The 2025 MLB Season
Anthony Rizzo was sitting in the outfield bleachers Saturday. Newly retired Cubs icon, he was the star of the day: He threw out the first pitch, he visited the broadcast booth, players were saluting him from the field and the batter’s box, and for several innings the broadcast constantly cut away to show him chilling out past left field, surrounded by friends and family and others, building a beer-cup snake.

When the Cubs’ Moisés Ballesteros homered to left field, the first thought you had was that the ball might have landed in Rizzo’s section, and what coincidence that would be! Then the wide shot was replaced by the tight one, and the man directly behind Rizzo is holding up the ball, and what an absolutely ridiculous serendipity that is! And then they showed an isolation replay of Rizzo, and in a million years you won’t believe what you’re seeing: The ball comes down on him like a spotlight.

I can tell you that story, and it’s not bad. I can show you the moving pictures, and you can enjoy parts of it:

• The way Rizzo tries to catch it not with two open hands, like we would, but backhanded as if he’s still wearing a glove on his right hand, which makes you wonder whether he was undone by his years of experience catching baseballs just one way.

• The way he lights up before anybody else toes, because in fact the ball is hit directly to him, and a ball hit directly to you only looks quite that way to you;

• The way he puts his hand on his buddy’s shoulder next to him, maybe for balance but maybe to hold his buddy down, so that he and only he will climb up onto the bleachers for extended reach;

• The terror of the woman behind him when she picks the ball up in flight, a reminder that these things that Rizzo put himself in the way of his whole career are actually not Nerf but are really dangerous.

• Specifically, this face:

  

But what made this moment great for me wasn’t any of that stuff, but the shock of seeing it live. No story can ever replicate that shock; as soon as I start telling you a story, your brain is projecting ahead to anticipate the reason I’m telling you, and you know that if there are two characters named Baseball and Anthony Rizzo they must eventually meet. That’s the problem with stories. They’re all too interesting.²

Not like real, unmediated life, which is mostly boring, mountains and mountains of boring, but thus capable of truly shocking us.

I’ve watched a lot of ball. Seeing that home run land on Anthony Rizzo was a top-10 moment, all-time, for me.

Previously: Days 71, 72 & 74 Of The 2025 MLB Season
Next: Day 77 Of The 2025 MLB Season

1. Also Rizzo: The baserunner in this fairly ghastly collision from 2012.

2. There was a late episode of Game of Thrones where two characters who hate each other washed ashore on the same island, and then they fight. Everybody rightly pointed out how contrived it was. The great TV critic Andy Greenwald, though, said something like: “It’s drama. What do you think is going to happen, they’re going to wash up on different islands?”