Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week, September 25

Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images Welcome to the last 2026 edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. The regular season is headed to a conclusion, with two division titles and four playoff spots still up for grabs. For me, late September is a great time to catch my breath and watch a little meaningless baseball as a palette cleanser before flipping the switch to the maximum-intensity world of October. So while there are some consequential games this week, this column isn’t about those. It’s about some goofy things I saw in low-stakes matchups, a player I enjoyed watching all season, and some voices that have enriched my baseball-viewing experience over the years. With my customary acknowledgment of Zach Lowe of The Ringer, who popularized the format this column shamelessly copies, let’s get started. 1. Professional Courtesy Baseball players on opposite teams are competitors, but they’re also workers in the same field. Yes, you’d like to beat the other team, but your counterpart on their squad is one of the people who can most relate to your daily struggles. You might compete against them 10 times a year; the other 355 days, your lives are far more alike than different. Catchers have a particular bond; let people throw projectiles right at you all day, and you’ll naturally gain a lot of respect for other people willing to do the same thing. When the Brewers and Phillies squared off this week, the stakes were moderate. The Brewers hadn’t clinched the top overall seed yet, though they were headed there. (They did last night, when the Dodgers lost to the Padres.) The Phillies haven’t yet clinched a playoff spot, though again, the writing is on the wall. For the most part, it was a playoff tuneup for both sides. In the top of the ninth on Tuesday, with the Phillies up three and cruising home, William Contreras decided that he might as well burn a challenge: Obviously, he wasn’t going to win that one. But Jhoan Duran had been moving the ball all around the zone, including hitting the outside edge for a borderline strike call earlier in the at-bat, and you don’t get to take the challenges home. The only downside was that Contreras had to stand out there for a few seconds looking foolish, then have his error displayed on the Jumbotron for the whole crowd to laugh at. But fellow tools-of-ignorance wearer J.T. Realmuto didn’t make Contreras wait for the review: The field microphone didn’t pick that up, but it didn’t have to. “Hey, that was a strike, man.” “Oh, for sure? OK. Thanks.” If it wasn’t those exact words, it was certainly something in that neighborhood. That’s just polite, right there. Catching is hard work! No one wants to stand out there looking like a rube a second longer than they have to when the outcome is already determined, and Realmuto wasn’t going to let Contreras experience that just because he plays for another team.You Aren't a FanGraphs MemberIt looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed. We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member. 1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other. 2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off. 3. Dark mode and Classic mode! 4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them. 5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects. 6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.) 7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only. 8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO. 9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members. 10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features! We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it. In case you didn't read all that, here's the short version. Membership includes:✓Ad-free browsing✓Unlimited FanGraphs & RotoGraphs articles✓Historical & platoon projections✓Leaderboard & player-page stat heatmaps✓One-click data exports✓Customizable player-page dashboards✓Dark & Classic site modes✓Weekly Members-only mailbag✓FanGraphs Walk-Off, your year in review✓Optional homepage photo removal✓Gift articles to non-members That led to an amusing challenge resolution. Contreras was completely off the field before the call got confirmed: The outcome of the game wasn’t remotely affected. This play didn’t matter even a little bit for either club in the long run. If these teams meet in the playoffs, there’ll be no love lost; Contreras isn’t going to call easier pitches for Realmuto to hit when the Phillies’ backstop is in the box because of his kind gesture. But that’s what was so great about it. With nothing to gain other than helping a fellow ballplayer out, Realmuto was happy to oblige. 2. Yordan The Unsolvable The most interesting awards race in baseball this year? It’s NL Rookie of the Year, as I wrote about yesterday. But the most delightful award-worthy performance of the year? For me, it’s Yordan Alvarez’s flat-out dominance. It’s not the best hitting season we’ve seen in recent memory, nor is it better than Aaron Judge’s MVP-winning performance from last year. But man, is it fun to watch Alvarez hit. Big hulking sluggers are supposed to have one clear weakness: whiffs. You’ve watched Judge, Shohei Ohtani, Kyle Schwarber, and their ilk swing the bat. They’re up there looking to launch, and they take huge rips in pursuit of that goal. You can’t make an omelette without cracking a few eggs, and so on. But despite looking the part at 6-foot-3 and 237 pounds, Alvarez doesn’t work like that. Alvarez boasts one of the fastest bats in the majors. But he gets to that bat speed without swinging wildly. His hands are simply so quick and powerful that he can take some of the most powerful swings in baseball while retaining excellent bat control. His 7.4% swinging strike rate is one of the lowest in the majors. To find someone who comes up empty less frequently, you’ll have to go way down the home run leaderboard, from Alvarez at 41 to Alex Bregman, whose 26 homers place him 31st in the majors. Alvarez is second in baseball in isolated power; Mookie Betts, who’s down in 42nd, is the first hitter on that leaderboard with a lower swinging strike rate. That kind of power/contact hybrid isn’t completely unprecedented – Juan Soto, who missed too much time to qualify for the leaderboards this year, similarly blends power and precision. But Soto and Alvarez aren’t quite doing the same thing out there. Soto looks like he’s waiting for a pitch he can deposit in the seats. Alvarez looks like he’s about to pounce – he swings more, takes fewer called strikes, and generally behaves like you’re going to have to try pretty hard to walk him. He’s not reckless by any means – he chases less than league average – but it’s a completely different feel. How are you supposed to get Alvarez out? You can’t just cheese him with a lefty specialist; he has neutral platoon splits across his lengthy career, with a 160 wRC+ against lefties and 169 against righties. For comparison, Soto’s marks are 131 and 169, respectively. You also can’t use high-velocity fastballs to beat him; he’s one of the best in the majors against them. Wanna spam him with breaking balls? He was one of the best hitters in baseball against sliders and curveballs this year, and he’s an aggregate 70 runs above average against them in his career. Changeups and splitters? He tattoos both of them, too; since his debut, he’s the second-best lefty hitter in the majors against changeups (behind Brendan Donovan) and the best against splitters. That’s all the pitch types. There’s no real way to pitch to Alvarez, and so teams are increasingly choosing not to. He’s been intentionally walked 33 times this year, more than double Shohei Ohtani’s 16 in second place. The longer Alvarez keeps hitting like this, the more teams choose discretion over bravery; his rate of intentional walks has nearly doubled since the All-Star break. Those walks, as well as the general punchlessness of the Houston offense, have held him back from even more outrageous counting stats; even as a top-of-the-lineup hitter on a possible playoff team, he’s 115th in runners aboard per plate appearance this year. His 102 RBI are silly given that backdrop; he’s 10 RBI behind the major league leader, despite having 25% fewer runners to drive home. From a WAR perspective, this will be one of the weakest MVP seasons in recent memory. But I don’t really care about that. WAR isn’t great at accounting for the value of elite hitters with no defensive position. Alvarez’s batting line, as well as the behavior of opposing managers, makes it clear that he’s the best hitter in the game this year. It’s been a treat watching opposing clubs do the strategy equivalent of a shrug emoji all season long. 3. Bruiseless HBPs Taking one for the team by standing in there and letting yourself get hit by a pitch is a venerated skill in baseball. After any given hit-by-pitch, most of the dugout will be on the top rail yelling encouragement to the guy who got drilled. It’s part of the job, and players appreciate their teammates doing the dirty work that’s necessary to win. Drew Gilbert is the exact kind of player who revels in this kind of work: scrappy, undersized, maximum effort at all times. But he didn’t need maximum effort or grittiness to accept this particular gift: Seth Halvorsen was out there on mopup duty, a low-leverage spot in a low-leverage game. He’s been a reliever of last resort since the Dodgers acquired him in July, and he’s almost certainly not going to be on the postseason roster; in fact, he’s been optioned to Triple-A since this game, and the Triple-A season is over. In other words, his main job was to not get hurt. And when he felt his cleat stick mid-delivery, he shut down his delivery rather than risk anything untoward happening. He flipped the ball towards home plate almost as an afterthought: “See? I’m pitching!” You’re supposed to make a genuine effort to get out of the way of a pitch – umpires are allowed to wave off the HBP if you don’t. Gilbert didn’t move a muscle as the pitch bounced in: From this perspective, it’s not entirely clear whether he knew what was happening. His head turn to the umpire looks almost quizzical, as if he’s asking what the rule is. But a side angle is more revealing. This little hip lean doesn’t happen on accident: You know someone threw a strange pitch when both sets of announcers compare it to a shot put. Joe Davis let out a shocked, involuntary “Oh!” when he saw it. “Take that, Gilbert,” Mike Krukow deadpanned. “They will not have to ice that one.” And as you’d expect, the Giants dugout didn’t go nuts celebrating Gilbert’s hustle. They barely reacted – a six-run game and a ridiculous HBP will do that. The play didn’t end up mattering at all, naturally. Halvorsen struck out the next two batters to end the game. But it’s going to stick with me for a while, because it’s the silliest HBP I’ve seen in a long time. I can’t get enough of the strike zone dot that popped up halfway through the pitch in the first GIF, or this still image that looks like three people playing baseball and a pitcher so annoyed with them that he can’t even look them in the eye: 4. Moral Victories The Mets dugout exploded at the end of the sixth inning on Tuesday night: That celebration feels too big for a 5-3 scoreline for a team 14 games under .500 and that has long been eliminated from the playoff race. But the team wasn’t celebrating its own success – it was celebrating Sean Manaea’s win over his own personal bogeyman, the sixth inning. Manaea has had a forgettable year: 18 starts, 14 relief appearances, 1.0 WAR on the back of a 4.67 ERA and peripherals to match. But his middling season hides a ridiculously misshapen ride. In the first five innings of his starts this year, he was quite good. His ERA by inning: 4.00, 3.50, 2.00, 5.29, 2.70. That works out to a 3.49 ERA over 87 2/3 innings of work. But the sixth was an absolute disaster. Manaea pitched into the sixth 15 times this year. He allowed 17 earned runs, and since he failed to make it out of several of those sixths, that works out to a 13.11 ERA. And that’s including the scoreless sixth he notched on Tuesday. While pitchers do get worse the more times they go through the lineup and the more fatigued they get, Manaea’s good-to-terrible transition in the sixth can’t possibly be a reflection of true talent. He’s just been absolutely snakebitten in the inning this year. I’m absolutely willing to believe that it got in his head, too, because it all unraveled so quickly. It must have seemed like a bad dream. He got creamed for three in the sixth on August 15, then four in the sixth on August 21. After a rough start (six earned) where he only allowed a single sixth-inning run before departing, it was more of the same: three runs in the sixth on September 1, and then four on September 8. In his next start, on September 15 against the Orioles, he began the sixth with an out, finally ready to exorcise his demons – but Pete Alonso was due up next, and manager Andy Green went to a righty for the platoon matchup. That’s how you end up doing the whole-dugout-high-five routine on a sparsely attended Tuesday night road game. The Mets didn’t care about the result of this game at all. The Rangers needed it badly. But Manaea wanted a clean sixth inning more than anyone else on either team wanted anything at all, and it showed. I love the silly things that keep players going as they grind through a long, and often unrewarding, regular season. Manaea’s pure joy at getting a monkey off his back is a wonderful example. 5. Last Call for Legends At the end of this year, several venerable and beloved announcers are stepping down from their roles. Howie Rose of the Mets, Rick Rizzs of the Mariners, and Tommy Hutton of the Marlins are each ending long and decorated careers. I know that all three will be missed by the fans who heard their voices day in and day out over the years. But as a San Francisco resident, I don’t feel I can end the season without celebrating Mike Krukow’s tremendous announcing career. Krukow and Duane Kuiper have spent the last 36 years as the primary broadcast pairing for the Giants, who maintain a complicated rotation of radio and TV that also includes Dave Flemming, Jon Miller, Hunter Pence, and Javier López. I’m not a Giants fan, and when I moved to the city in 2019, I had no particular affinity for Kruk and Kuip. But in the seven years I’ve lived here, Krukow’s voice has become part of the heartbeat of the city to me. I hear it blaring out of bars as I walk by in the evening, or in the background of my own apartment when I’m cooking. I hear it on the TV at my grocery store, sneaking out the window of the house where our dog boarder lives. The Giants are an institution here, particularly in the gap between the Warriors finishing their season and the 49ers starting theirs, and Kruk and Kuip are the foremost proponents and advocates for that institution. Sometimes, it can feel like you’re listening to a new language. “Grab some pine, meat” barely registered as English the first time I heard it. Now I know that it’s a strikeout celebration, a light-hearted mockery of the opposing hitter that’s used to celebrate the Giants pitcher who just notched a strikeout. The list of Kruk-and-Kuip-isms is so long that The Athletic compiled 83 of them back in 2023, and I can think of plenty more that didn’t make the list. That’s part of the charm of the broadcast. It’s two old friends talking baseball, with all the inside jokes and winking references that entails. Listen to it long enough, and you start to internalize that as your own language. I know that I’ve submitted more than one turn of phrase that my editors sent back to me confusedly, only for me to realize that it’s not so much a baseball phrase as something I heard Krukow say on TV once. I don’t have the same connection to Krukow that longtime Giants fans do. I didn’t live through the Even Year Magic years here, or hear him explain Barry Bonds’ greatness to fans. But even in a fraction of the time, he left a mark on me as a baseball viewer. I associate Krukow with measured announcing, goofy turns of phrase, and a willingness to be tough on the home team when it deserves it. I listen to a ton of baseball on TV, and I think that Krukow is one of the best around – that Kruk and Kuip as a pairing is one of the best around, really. I’m going to miss hearing him next year.