Impossible Catches and Baseball Immortality
Jo Adell's highlight reel game for the Angels and a weekend ABS Challenge Scorecard.
Happy Monday after Easter, everybody. I hope you found chocolate in your eggs and love in your hearts. I am in the final stretch (fingers crossed!) of finishing my next book, SEASONS, and will be doing some quick hit posts — building around the ABS Challenge Scorecard — until I’m done. I figure that’s better for everybody than just taking the next little while off.
Clubhouse members will be getting one every day. But there will be plenty for everybody.
Of course, if you’d like to become a Clubhouse member, we’d love to have you:
The ABS Challenge Scorecard
Total challenges: 542. Challenges have been successful 299 times (55%).
Batter challenges have been successful 50% of the time.
Fielder challenges (almost always catchers) have been successful 60% of the time.
Here are Sunday’s challenges:
I am keeping a daily chart of challenges, and even though it’s only a three-day blip, I am going to suggest that we might be seeing a trend:
Friday: Batters’ success rate 42%; Catchers 56%.
Saturday: Batters: 48%; Catchers 65%
Sunday: Batters 44%; Catchers 64%*
*I’m saying “catchers” here rather than “fielders” because pitchers have more or less stopped challenging. All in all, there have only been 13 pitcher challenges all year, less than half have been successful, and I’m thinking we’re pretty close to eliminating the pitcher challenge. There were zero pitcher challenges on Sunday.
I don’t know if this means anything at all, but it’s worth watching. If catchers end up being WAY more successful at challenges than batters, well, it seems to follow that the ABS system will help pitchers more than it will help hitters. That doesn’t seem ideal when batting averages are already near all-time lows.
At the same time, though, walks are up. Pitchers generally walk more batters in the early part of the season than during the warmer months, but so far, teams are walking 3.76 times per game, which is the highest rate since the 1940s. Again: None of this matters yet; the season has only just begun. But it’s worth keeping an eye on just how dramatically ABS will change the game. It FEELS dramatic because, for the first time ever, we are seeing walks turned into strikeouts, and vice versa; we’re seeing at-bats extended, and we’re seeing at-bats suddenly ended. That feels like a massive thing. But it’s all still sorting itself out.
If I were doing WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL PART DEUX, I would obviously and of course include Jo Adell’s incredible game on Saturday when he took away three home runs. There’s something so wonderful about a home-run robbing catch — so wonderful that for the Joy of Baseball podcast that Molly Knight and I will be doing*, we chose this beautiful piece of artwork.
*Yes, Molly and I will still be doing the podcast; other projects for both of us have pushed us back a little bit, but we have already recorded the first one, and we are lining up more, and we will definitely be talking joy of baseball with some fabulous people.
The first two home run-saving catches by Adell are wonderful but similar — he went back to the short wall in right field there in Anaheim, leaped with his right shoulder facing that wall, and took the home run away with backhand grabs. Beautiful. Awesome. But, again, similar.
The third one, however, will be played and replayed forever. J.P. Crawford smashed a high fly ball down the right field line. Adell raced over, stretched his arm into the crowd as he jumped, and somehow caught the ball as he tumbled into the stands.
Fan Kayleigh Kraus got the shot for the ages.
Seriously, and I mean no offense to the wonderful Harmon Killebrew, but THAT should be the MLB logo from now on.
Jo Adell was once one of the biggest prospects in baseball; maybe THE biggest. In 2019, as a 20-year-old, he rose from Class A all the way to Class AAA, and he flashed power, speed, defense, the whole thing. You might not know it unless you live in the greater Anaheim area, but Adell crushed 37 home runs in 2025. That’s special. He also posted a .293 on-base percentage, struck out five times more than he walked, and was by more or less every defensive measure well below average in the outfield.
He’s still just 27. Still, it seems unlikely that, all in all, Jo Adell will become the star people hoped he might be.
But the beautiful thing about baseball is that one impossible game can make you immortal.
Jo Adell robbed three home runs in a single game. No baseball fan will ever forget that.
I’m a sucker for stuff like this — back when Twitter was Twitter, I used to do these sorts of exercises all the time. So — deplurize a movie?
My first shot was: “Singin’ in the Drop.”
Which, you know, that’s not bad.
Then I tried “The One Commandment,” which you know, fits our Passover season.
I tried out a few others in my mind:
“One Bride for One Brother.”
“An Angry Man.”
“The Magnificent One.”
“Star War,” (of course).
“Snow White and the Dwarf.”
“Goodfella.”
And then a few others joined in. Matthew offered up “Thelma or Louise,” which is wonderful. Michael gave us “Lion of the Yankees,” which is really good.
I think my favorite, though, comes from Perry: “Indemnity.”
I forgot who, but someone posted "Dial M for Crow" and it was the rare time I did laugh out loud at the internet.
"The Deer Hunter"