Note: I’m off next week for some family biz. Please have fun without me.
1.
On Wednesday in Atlanta, a routine fly ball was hit into right-center field. The Braves’ center fielder, Michael Harris II, and right fielder, Ronald Acuña Jr., both drifted toward it. For about 8/10ths of a second it looked like they might collide, but at the last moment Acuña ducked out of the way and Harris made the catch, lemon squeezy. There is nothing strange about this play:
But the Braves’ announcer, Brandon Gaudin, briefly pondered it afterward. “Was that another Acuña joke—or was that real?”
Just think about how much you’d have to know about baseball, specifically our baseball right now—this moment in time—to even recognize the concept of a joke within that play. At a minimum you’d probably have to remember this play, involving Adrián Beltré and Elvis Andrus from a decade ago:
But you’d also have to know a lot specifically about Acuña—that, in addition to being an incredible baseball player who does more to beat the opposition than virtually anybody in the game, he also has a relationship to the crowd/the cameras/his teammates that demonstrates a more layered approach to his three hours on the field. That is to say, he sees the game at this level as not just competition but also performance, and not just performance but also play, and not just play but also the mutual exchange of chumminess. You might remember the time he lay his head upon Ozzie Albies’ chest for a long, tender embrace in the dugout. You might remember his fake sparring with Jean Segura at second base after a double. You might remember when he tried to bat left-handed in a blowout and his manager stepped in to stop him. You might even connect it all to his Snickers commercial, which hinged on his willingness to pretend to be oblivious for a gag. You might have seen him once hit a home run off a third-deck façade and then gather with his teammates in the dugout, pointing at it, like “where did it hit? no way not there! show me again, where did it hit?”—
but doing it for so long and so perfectly framed by the dugout camera that you finally realized he was actually just doing a dramatic performance of awe. You have to be constantly alert to the possibility that Acuña could be doing a bit.
Anyway, they showed the replay and it seemed clear that it was real. Acuña and Harris almost crashed into each other, but they didn’t.
2.
This is the one I’ve really been holding onto all month. Juan Soto was batting, a fast runner was on first base, and the pitcher made a pickoff attempt. This is what it looked like:
You catch that? What Juan Soto did? He faked a bunt.
(You probably believe me, but just in case you think he was doing something else, here’s a side-by-side grab of an actual Juan Soto bunt and that:
Same motion.)
Back in the old days, before March 2023, it was somewhat common for pitchers to throw over to first base in a potential sacrifice bunt situation. The defense was doing a trick with those throw-overs. If the batter saw the pitcher’s first movement and started to square around to bunt, then the defense would know for sure the batter planned on bunting and then they could adjust their plans accordingly. This trick doesn’t happen much anymore, because pickoff throws are precious and sacrifice bunts are so rare. But it wasn’t so long ago that we lived in that sort of world.
And so what Juan Soto is doing here is a joke. He’s pretending that he’s going to sacrifice bunt, as though Juan Soto—perhaps the best hitter in the world—would ever give up an at-bat just to advance a baserunner with a bunt. And, because obviously he’s not actually bunting, he’s further pretending that the defense would believe his ridiculous bluff. He’s pretending the other team was being tricky with that throw over, and he’s pretending to be even trickier, and he’s doing this all in the most subdued way—a little theatrical presentation that nobody else is paying attention to, a joke he’s telling mostly to himself, and a joke that will only confuse most people who notice it at all. It’s pretty funny!
My favorite passage of Bill James’ writing comes from his Historical Baseball Abstract, and I’m going to quote it at length, condensed a little bit, right here:
Pick a player—say, Mickey Rivers. You know so many things about Mickey. You probably remember how fast he was when he came up; that was all you heard about him for the first two years. You know how he walks, with that pained gait suddenly exploding into a blaze of speed when it comes time to run. You know they called him “The Chancellor,” and you probably know why. You know about his throwing arm, and can visualize him picking the ball off the wall in right-center and whirling, flapping like a goose and propelling the ball feebly in the direction of a cutoff man, with the throw most likely coming to earth fifteen feet short of target and a little to one side. You know the way he chops down on the ball; you can probably call up the image of him fouling one off his foot, as he often does. You remember Pete Rose staring down his throat, 25 feet in front of third base in the 1976 World Series. You know about the malapropisms for which he became famous late in his career, and could probably quote three or four of them from memory. You know about his fondness for the horses, and probably remember the stories about his placing bets between innings from the bullpen phone. You could probably call up a hundred things that you have seen him do on the field. One thing I remember is that he used to go back to the dugout a lot and get a rag to wipe his bat with.
To reconstruct that enormous library of information about the players of another era would be all but impossible; to reconstruct just the sense of one man would require that you read a biography of him—as, indeed, you have probably read a biography of Phil Niekro, a few words at a time, a biography splattered across twenty years of interviews and short blurbs in the Sporting News.
We all know a lot about Juan Soto that only we will even know. Even if we put it into words that the future someday reads, most of it won’t convey. To focus on one tiny aspect of his career, the Soto Shuffle—the array of shimmies, stomps, stretches and stares that he uses after taking a tough pitch for a ball—is as familiar to me as the taste of licorice or the sound of a busy signal. I know it in all its variants, and I even have an intuition when one is coming and which variant is likely to show. I know, too, that Soto didn’t do the Soto Shuffle in his first major-league plate appearance; I know that he homered in his second major-league plate appearance; and I know that he did do the Shuffle in his third major-league plate appearance, so for me the Soto Shuffle represents a confidence that we watched him earn. I think I know, too, from articles about him, that when things aren’t going well for Soto he sometimes processes it as loneliness. So for me Juan Soto’s success is an ongoing story about success and confidence and connectedness being intertwined.
The fake-sac-bunt bit doesn’t really work if Michael Massey does it, or if you don’t know any more about Soto than I know about Michael Massey. To get the joke you have to know him well enough to decode the ambiguity. You have to know, basically, that the essence of Juan Soto is confidence manifest as looseness.
3.
Perhaps the dominant form of humor in late-stage internetism is shitposting, which is basically making a dumb tweet but doing it very knowingly, e.g. this classic:
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