What a great day. Things I Loved, in nine parts:
1. Ronald Acuña stumbling.
Look, if you were Patrick Corbin, you’d be confused, too. You’d look up at the scoreboard and see that Patrick Corbin was the Opening Day starter and you’d assume it must be 2019 or thereabouts. So, after Corbin nearly picked off Ronald Acuña seven pitches into the first game of the day, he did what pitchers in 2019 used to do: He threw over again. One of those non-fancy, non-competitive, we’ve-got-all-the-time-in-the-world-and-nowhere-to-be-but-here pickoff moves that we’ll tell our grandchildren about. Acuña got back standing up, and a little baffled. He held up two fingers to the umpire and/or his first base coach: “two, right?” “two, right.”
Under the new speed-it-up rules, of course, this meant that Corbin basically couldn’t throw over again. So on the next pitch, Acuña took off on Corbin’s first move, and… he tripped.
Fortunately, the batter, Matt Olson fouled the pitch off, so Acuña got another chance and stole the base easily, on the ninth pitch of the 2023 baseball season. Somewhere, Rob Manfred sat in an oversized chair and did the evil fingers.
We’ll all be paying attention to pickoff attempts this year. That’ll be fun. I’ll also be paying attention to how early in the count a runner can get the pitcher to give away his first throw, or even both of his throws, either bluffing steals or just taking enormous leads. And I might start paying attention to the batters who are able to work long at-bats so that the baserunner can press his advantage, when he has one. If Olson had struck out instead of fouling that pitch off, Acuña’s free roll would have been negated.
2. Adley Rutschman tumbling.
Oh, no, I didn’t like this, not one bit. Until it was clear he was completely unhurt, and I could breathe again. And it was then that I remembered that watching baseball means living in a state of constant precariousness, where all the things you love the most keep getting dropped off a ladder in the world’s highest-stakes egg drop. Adley Rutschman, the best young catcher in a generation, began his season with a first-inning home run. And then in at-bat no. 2 he had an inspiring sequence where he followed a juuuuuuuust-foul line drive down the right field line with a juuuuuuuust-fair grounder down the left field line. Trying to stretch that hit into a double, he slid like he did. His shoulder looked like it might well have borne all that force, and for a moment you imagined he would be lost for the year, and then you wonder whether his rehab will have setbacks and whether he might have to play left field when he finally returns in August 2024, but then in fact he just… was fine. Totally unharmed. He didn’t even know you were worried about him, had no idea you’d been sitting up all night on the couch, unable to go to sleep until you heard his car pull into the driveway. Then he had three more hits, a five-hit Opening Day!, but you could barely enjoy them.
3. Brandon Lowe DEFINITELY NOT shifting.
As somebody who thinks that banning the shift is slightly embarrassing for everybody, I’m at least happy to see that this ban is really more of a compromise than anything. No, sure, you can’t shift. You can just play like Brandon Lowe is playing up there, which 32-year-old me would have called “the shift” and 22-year-old me would have thought was some sort of a blooper.
I wonder whether this compromise will ultimately make anybody happy. What I hear most in Normie shift discourse is that people don’t like the shot up the middle being an out. That, more than any other batted ball, is the play that looks like a bad edit: It’s a hit off the bat, then an out in the cutaway. “That was a hit for 100 years,” we scowl. The brain is too used to it being a hit. But Brandon Lowe is still going to get that shot:
So I don’t know.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Pebble Hunting to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.