Gabby Williams is (Almost) Everywhere

The play was close to irrelevant, statistically speaking, like most plays involving the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team are. It added a decimal-sized flake to the accumulation of win-probability snowfall. The Huskies already led fourth-ranked Louisville 13-3 in their mid-February matchup when Crystal Dangerfield’s first-quarter jumper fell off the rim, but senior forward Gabby Williams reacted to the miss with absolute gusto, as if what was hanging in the balance was not UConn’s nearly assured 136th victory in its last 137 games but, well, everything. She crashed in from the right wing, out beyond the three-point line, to the left block. She pulled down the rebound in both hands. She looked over her left shoulder in the direction of the lane, spun on her right foot, and snapped a pass past two defenders’ ears to the microscopically open Napheesa Collier, who laid it in. That was the way the margin grew from 10 to 12; it would soon get to 22.

It was a remarkable sequence soon to be forgotten amid the run to follow, the piling-up of steals and layups and three-pointers. That’s the way with UConn – again undefeated and heavily favored to win a national title in a couple weeks. As with so many iterations of the team in years past, these Huskies dominate seemingly at whim; the college ranks have not yet produced the defense that Dangerfield cannot blur through, that Katie Lou Samuelson cannot shoot over, that Collier cannot pin to her back. But if the range of talent, and the totality of the teamwork it operates within, makes for beautiful and winning basketball, it is also produces an odd feeling of self-summary, of a real-time recap. Particulars are forever being gathered into the larger thesis.

What I’m saying is: It can take a little work, in this context, to consider any one player as an individual contributor, something other than a fleeting embodiment of a general, sleekly proficient Huskie-ness. What I’m also saying is: In the case of Gabby Williams, that work is well worth it.

The basic info on Williams is not all that different from that of her teammates and predecessors. She stands five feet eleven inches tall and rates exceptionally in every athletic category. As a high-schooler in Nevada, she was one of the nation’s top players; she also excelled in track and field and qualified as a high-jump alternate for the 2012 Olympics. She came off the bench her freshman year at UConn (winning the American Athletic Conference’s Sixth Player of the Year award), made a few starts as a sophomore, and as a junior was named a second-team All-American and the national Defensive Player of the Year. This season, she numbers among the fifteen finalists for the Wooden award.

Most anyone who plays enough minutes for Geno Auriemma becomes similarly credentialed; two other Huskies are also Wooden candidates. But where her teammates seem to chart basketball’s possibilities, surveying their options and hitting their jumpers, Williams interrogates it. In the third quarters of 30-point blowouts, she wears an incongruously anxious expression, as if worried even then about opportunities missed, chances blown. As a group, UConn wants to make the right plays. Williams wants to make all of them.

Her stats offer a window into her activity; she leads the Huskies in assists and steals and ranks near the top in rebounds and field-goal percentage. To watch her play for even a quarter, though, is to forget the numbers. Williams sees the court like a satellite and moves like a torpedo. On defense, she monitors three passing lanes at once. On offense, she dispenses the ball from her perch at the free-throw line, forgoing the obvious – that pin-down springing Samuelson – in favor of some one-handed, seam-splitting premonition. And when you see her running in the open court with a thundering, high-kneed gait that it would hurt badly to get in front of, the strategic question of how to limit her turns moot. You just wonder who would be reckless enough to try.

“She plays the way Lawrence Taylor played linebacker,” Auriemma says of his star forward. “Single-handedly, she can ruin a team.” Those are words – “Lawrence Taylor,” sure, but also “single-handedly” and “ruin” – not normally associated with the slickest cooperative in college basketball. But in the case of Williams, they are the only ones that fit. Like Taylor, she seems personally affronted that she can’t be everywhere, doing everything, at every moment. She takes the floor as if to whittle away the impossibility from that objective.

In their NCAA tournament opener Saturday afternoon, UConn did the kind of casual record-obliterating they’re good for once or twice a year, dropping 94 points in the first half against St. Francis en route to an 88-point win. Playing with a sore hip that had kept her out of an AAC tournament game the week prior, Williams was her endline-to-endline self, putting up 16, nine, and six in just 22 minutes. No one moment stood out, the margin too big and the competition too sacrificial. Still, as ever, there was an urgency about her that nobody else matched, visible in the unneeded imagination behind her passes and in the suddenness of her movement. The particulars of opponent and scoreboard didn’t matter. She was playing in a game, so she wanted to take whatever she could.

That and More: On Marcus Smart

Marcus Smart had a fine game all around. During Boston’s 26-point comeback against the Houston Rockets, three days after Christmas, the fourth-year guard contributed in every category, putting up 13 points, six rebounds, five assists, three blocks, and two steals in 34 minutes. He shouldered over screens on one end and into the lane on the other. Late in the first half, he picked James Harden’s dribble clean, took it the other way for a layup, bolted back out to midcourt, and almost intercepted the ensuing inbounds pass.

Still, it was the pair of offensive fouls Smart drew on Harden as the Rockets tried to inbound the ball in the last 10 seconds—the first with the Celtics still down one, the second with them finally protecting a lead, each a flop of the most shameless and effective sort—that afterward siphoned the attention. Al Horford, postgame: “It just shows the value of Marcus Smart to our group.” Harden: “How else am I supposed to get open? Guy has two arms wrapped around my body.” Smart: “Defense wins games, and that was proven tonight.”

Smart is widely understood as a nuisance, a born bother: he hauls his ample frame onto the court and sets about shoving it into people. The classification mostly fits. He has the face for the job (stagily unintimidated, a bouncer’s loose stare), the statistics (36 percent shooting, 30 percent from three), and the repertoire (a muscly abandon that turns to wounded flailing when the opportunity for a whistle presents itself). He earns the requisite quotes; “He’s a guy that figures out ways to win,” says Brad Stevens. But the key to Smart’s importance* to the first-place Celtics is that he isn’t just a grunt. Stapled to all that gruntishness are skills—crude in their particulars, maybe, but rare in their combinations—that add a dimension that’s always a little surprising, considering the source.

*stalled importance, for now, as Smart has gone and injured himself by getting in a fistfight with a piece of hotel artwork

Here’s a moment from a game a couple of weeks later, against the Philadelphia 76ers in London. The Sixers’ T.J. McConnell had grabbed a rebound and turned upcourt when Smart, with a combination of hip check and quadrupedal sprawl, wrestled the ball back from him. A half-second later, he was up off the deck and the ball was out of his hands, sent on a line to Jaylen Brown, who dropped it in at the rim.

The play laid out Smart’s often-overlooked range—he can be an enforcer one second and a clever enough passer the next, a costume change from Ron Artest to, say, George Hill—but also his vital trait: a sustained willingness to make those changes, to jump roles from lineup to lineup, possession to possession, moment to moment. Strong-willed in carrying out his duties, Smart is indifferent to which duties those are. He flattens smaller guards in the post; he walls off middle drives; he runs a clean pick-and-roll and throws a punctual skip pass. As a kind of sacrifice to Boston’s flow, he takes his open jumpers, increasingly embarrassing percentages be damned. At any coordinates of the court and every moment of the game, he’ll find something to do.

This is not to say that he’d be the same player minus his gift for irritation; that grab-bag of B-level NBA talents plays better because of the packaging. When he checks in, Smart’s matchups aren’t thinking about the standard, useful basketball functions he can perform. They’re thinking about the guiltless elbows and the put-on hustle. They see the well-maintained caricature, the thing that summons a “MAHCUS!” from Tommy Heinsohn every time Smart dives for a ball that has already bounced into the second row. And while they’re figuring out how to coexist with him for five minutes without earning a fine or getting their teeth lodged in their soft palate, he’s picking out shooters in semi-transition.

It’s easy to appreciate his usefulness. Smart fills a winning archetype—the blustering, overconfrontational, you love him when he’s your teammate pain in the ass—while minimizing that archetype’s usual drawbacks. He is a clear plus on defense and a subtler plus on offense, and that adds up to a solidly functional seventh man.

But if you care to look for it, you can even spot some actual joy, some relation to beauty, in this player known for scraping the joy and beauty off of everyone else’s game. It’s in the metamorphoses, the moments when he sloughs off the full-body scowl and displays a quick, kind of stunning awareness of the sport’s fluid component. Watching Smart find a backdoor cutter, in stride and on time, is in some small way uncanny, like seeing a stone smooth itself. And then he’s MAHCUS! again, putting his knee into somebody’s quadriceps.

After that game against Philadelphia, which ended up an 11-point win, a sideline reporter asked Smart about his contribution. He hadn’t had a great day numbers-wise, but he’d been relentlessly and sub-statistically involved, tilting the terms of any number of exchanges in the Celtics’ favor. He mopped his face with a towel and said, “Got to be a pest coming off the bench.” Then he walked off, reputation and ruse intact.

Being the Best: On Saquon Barkley and Untouchability

Few athletes live better than the stone-cold, kick-ass, whoop-all-comers college running back. You know the type; you can list the examples. His life, at least the televised part of it, is very nearly perfect. On Saturday mornings, people sit at desks and talk to TV cameras about the remarkable things he’s about to do. In the afternoons, he does them. In the early evenings, he takes off his helmet and says into a microphone that, sure, 300 all-purpose yards are nice, and yes, that third touchdown was fun and all, but he’s just happy he could help his team get the win. It's not just that his talent so thoroughly exceeds that of the people who pretend to be his peers. It's that the structures he operates in—the duties of his position, the game plans of his coaches, the demands of the local and national media and of professional scouts—ask only one thing of him: to lay bare that big, honking, canyon-sized talent gap as often and as convincingly as he can.

And yet: the stone-cold, kick-ass, whoop-all-comers college RB can surely feel the flicker of unreality to the whole thing. The sense of the last second before the morning alarm, stretched from September through New Year’s. His teammates and opponents have bad and good games, they struggle and redeem themselves, and he just rattles off versions of superiority. He singlehandedly buries a rival, or he toasts some midgrade team and sits the final quarter-and-a-half. Whenever he takes the ball he selects from the dozens of good things he can do with it, blasting through linebackers, double-timing out around the edge, moving down the field in a hieroglyphic reel of shimmy and spin move and goal-line trot. The dullest announcing superlative—He makes it look easy!—is, with him, literal, and in response to this a vague uneasiness festers. His carries and games and seasons take on the feeling of extended prologue, and the audience, even as it stands and claps, waits for the conflict. In order to become interesting, he has to become, through injury or scandal or eventual NFL comeuppance, worse.

This player has been named Leonard Fournette, and Reggie Bush, and Ricky Williams, and Bo Jackson, and Earl Campbell. Right now he’s named Saquon Barkley.

Barkley, in his third and certainly final season at Penn State, has reached that excellence-as-stasis stage, less a player than an archetype. He’s not only quick in relation to his power or strong in relation to his speed; he refuses the logic—football's foundational logic—that one talent should come at the expense of any other. His thighs are cannonballs, his toes are trills, his hands are fishing nets and then vises. He is too small to grab and too big to tackle. There is no moment in the sport more promising, more immediately heart-quickening, than when he first touches the ball, taking a handoff or pitch or catching it in the flat, scanning the directions and angles of the defense and scheming against them in the same instant.

Then Barkley moves. In every direction lies an advantage. He chooses the middle, he shoulders through the scrum, he veers to the sideline, he is on open grass and with a tip of his pads is past the safety. He has a straight line to the end zone left, tracked by the big swelling sound. It was remarkable, but now it’s over, and really it was over before it started. The sound gets quieter as he jogs to the sideline, ready to do it again.

Kershaw and Turner, Dodgers

On an overly on-the-nose Fourth of July, between eating hot dogs and heading out for fireworks, I flipped on some baseball: Los Angeles-Arizona, in Dodger Stadium. The sky outside in Minnesota was almost black, but California on TV was sunny. It was the top of the third, Clayton Kershaw was pitching, I was looking for my keys. The inning went how Kershaw innings have gone for a long time—in order, groundout-strikeout-flyout. A couple minutes later, Justin Turner, the friar-looking former afterthought who has become the Dodgers’ most consistent offensive threat, lifted a fastball up over the sky-blue centerfield wall.

I left for the evening without the feeling that I might be missing anything, and, as it turned out, the rest of the game was more of the same. Kershaw took a no-hitter into the seventh, and LA won 4-3. It wasn’t the likeliness of the outcome that had me unconcerned, though; it was that those few minutes had, by themselves, summarized the Dodgers’ sideways charm. They’re a great team, sure—even after a historic late-season swoon, they’ll likely finish with baseball’s best record in a division with three postseason entrants—but they’re not the only one. What sets these Dodgers apart, makes them something other than a company of experts marching to expected outcomes, is that their greatness is made up of near-total opposites. Pick whatever category you like, they stretch it until it snaps. They’re pedigreed and out-of-nowhere. They’re veterans and kids. They’re grim and brilliant and goofy and dumb. They’ve been touched by gods; they’ve dug themselves out of the dirt.

Or: they are Clayton Kershaw and Justin Turner.

***

Everything that has been true about Kershaw still is. He was born in Dallas in March of 1988, stands six feet four inches tall, and is better than anyone alive at throwing baseballs. He carries that designation seriously. Breathing big lungfuls of air, sweat stringing his hair and beard, the working Kershaw seems to have stepped out of an old, bloody painting. He looks like he should be dragging a dead lion behind him. He has that vibe of the gloriously burdened, as if what makes him so good at what he does is his knowledge—deeper than anybody else’s—of how hard it is.

At 29, with more than a half-decade of accumulated brilliance, Kershaw has entered the stage of his career where people scan for faults, out of a desire for novelty as much as anything. He gives up four runs in five innings in April or tweaks his back in July, and candidates are nominated for his perch at the top of the sport. Then he turns a mound into the site of a three-hour war dance, and everyone settles back in for more of the usual.

The temptation, when trying to describe how Kershaw puts together his customary and totally bonkers seasons, is to categorize his offerings. He throws a fastball wrapped in barbed wire and breathes an audible pfft when he lets go of it, so that it seems to come not from a left arm but from a pressurized cannon. His curveball is astrologic. His slider is the only one in the history of the sport that bends and then speeds up.

But really, Kershaw’s particular gifts impress less than his hold on them. It’s not that his pitches almost always do what he wants; it’s how much he hates it when they don’t, even for a moment. In his only compete game this year, on the last day before the All-Star break, Kershaw struck out 13 and allowed only two runs—an excellent afternoon by most standards and a good one by his. At one point, though, he bounced a ball in the dirt, and he curled his lip like someone was twisting screws into his toenails. The Dodgers behind him probably had to bite back smiles. This was the distillation of their ace, his effortful genius writ in body language. Plenty of athletes aim for and even expect perfection, but sometimes Kershaw seems to deserve it.

***

Turner will finish the season among the top five in hitting and on-base percentage across baseball. When postseason announcers pass along this information in the coming weeks, they will do so with some incredulity, for two reasons. First, in the late-20s age range that for most athletes represents the prime of a career, around 2011, Turner was a pretty crummy New York Met, putting up a low average with little pop. He was a part-timer, somebody only diehards could even name. Second, although great ballplayers come in many shapes and styles, Turner doesn’t fit any of them. He has pudgy arms and packed thighs. His hair is red and neck-length—grown, one suspects, in an attempt to cover up a bald spot, but actually only emphasizing it—with a dense beard of matching color. He wears his jersey the way video store employees used to wear their polos.

When Turner came to LA in 2014, he started hitting: enough to find a semi-permanent spot in the lineup, if not quite enough to convince everyone that it wasn’t a fluke. Then, over the next two years, he kept it up. The Dodgers were never built around Turner—they seemed always to be waiting for him to become again who he so obviously was, aesthetically and historically—but they let him hang in the lineup while it lasted. He batted sixth or third, wherever the more important guys weren’t.

Now he’s one of the game’s best hitters. Theories have been offered, of course, centering on a retooled swing and fly-ball approach, but they only give a veneer of sense-making to the basic weirdness of watching Turner scatter doubles. His hands aren’t noticeably quicker; the leg-kick that he installed is, for most players, something to be sanded away. It seems almost as if, instead of catching up to the game, Turner has roped it into his own slack zone. His swing starts as a slouch and ends as a fresh-out-of-bed stretch. His base hits backspin onto open grass, and his homers hit the bleachers as softly as beach balls.

Turner signed a four-year contract extension this past winter, and his productivity will almost certainly drop off by the end of it. He’s found something, but such findings, for 32-year-old hitters, tend not to be permanent. The eventual slide is for future Dodger teams to worry about. This one gets to enjoy what comes first.

***

There is no illusion in sports as persistent as the baseball uniform. When 25 people wear the same one, we start to think of their actions not as distinct—which they largely are—but as joined on some causal line. The logic is circular and leans on types, but it is almost unavoidable. Young Pitcher settles in because Cleanup Hitter gave him a two-run cushion in the first. Fourth Starter tries to match on Thursday what Third Starter did on Wednesday. Shortstop makes a diving stab because Quick Worker keeps the infield on its toes.

The thinking becomes more tempting the harder you have to strain for it. The 2017 Dodgers are a hodgepodge through-and-through: the possibly stoned rookie Cody Bellinger blasting homers, the recovered post-phenom Yasiel Puig playing perfect defense and lurking late in the lineup, the algebra-teacher-looking Rich Hill throwing pure funk. Still, despite the total—almost purposeful-seeming—lack of stylistic and temperamental cohesion, a general Dodger-ness insists upon itself. Something has to tie the three-run shots, the infield hits, the accumulated strikeouts, the various grins and grimaces.

Disparateness itself, then, becomes the theme. Another win comes from all over—Kershaw buzzing through one frame, Turner setting a baseball soaring the next—and you think, Sure. How else could it go?

CC Sabathia Knows Who He Is

CC Sabathia, the New York Yankees’ onetime ace, is not the player he used to be, but he’s often good enough. A characteristic making-it-work moment happened in June, in a home game against the Boston Red Sox. The Yanks led the Sox 5-0 in the fifth inning, but Boston had a runner on third, so the left-hander offered Jackie Bradley, Jr., his best pitches. The first was the slider, a formerly swerving, missile-like thing that has now lost a little speed and gained and little loopiness; Sabathia tucked it into the bottom of the strike zone. The second was a fastball on the outside corner. If Sabathia had used that sequence and hit those spots in 2003, or 2007, or 2009, or 2011, the count would have stood no balls and two strikes. But on this evening in 2017, Bradley managed to hit a chopper up the middle, so Sabathia hopped off the mound, reached up, and snatched the ball with his bare pitching hand. TV viewers could hear the thwack of cowhide meeting palm. He checked on the runner at third, turned, and tossed to first for the out. He did all this with a proud but slightly put-upon bearing, the way some fathers fix faucets. It’s the way he usually looks these days. When trainers ran out to make sure he hadn’t hurt himself, he sent them quickly back to the dugout.

Sabathia is tied for the lead among Yankee pitchers with nine wins, despite missing three weeks with a hamstring strain, and he holds a 3.81 earned run average. These statistics don’t put him anywhere near the top of the league leaderboards whose first- or second-place spots he used to hold as a matter of course, but they nevertheless represent a triumph. From 2012 to 2015, Sabathia’s effectiveness waned every season. His fastball slowed, his breaking pitches lost their shape, and his bulk, once a suggestion of lordly dominance, seemed to have become a burden. The uptick, started last year and continued in this one, signals not a recaptured youth but an acceptance of age. The 37-year-old Sabathia works more carefully than he ever has, prizing aim and subtlety over speed, hunting ground balls instead of strikeouts. He combines a painterly approach—an awareness of what the subtlest movement, an inch’s dip away from the meat of the bat, can accomplish—with a sort of practical resignation: “Tonight wasn’t my best stuff.” Acknowledging that he will never again dominate gives him a chance to compete.

It has been a season of good news in the Bronx, starting with the Redwood-sized rookie outfielder Aaron Judge, who leads the league in home runs and has spurred the Baby Bombers to a relevance in the AL East that most prognosticators thought was a year or two away. Shortstop Didi Gregorius is enjoying the best year of his career, combining a quick bat and nimble glove; catcher Gary Sanchez, last season’s rookie phenom, has shaken off an early-season bicep injury to solidify the lineup. Of all the surprises, though, Sabathia’s turnaround is the pleasantest. He arrived in New York as an import in the winter of 2009, having signed what was then the most expensive pitching contract in history, and steered the Yankees to that year’s championship, so his struggles in recent seasons had been accepted by fans as a deferred cost. His re-emergence as a steady hand has done more than just stabilize an otherwise shaky starting rotation; it has linked what would otherwise be entirely distinct generations. With his old cohorts gone, Sabathia has a suddenly sentimental aura, the result of having slotted in next to Jeter, Mo, and A-Rod on hundreds of lineup cards. He is one of three Yankees on the present roster with a World Series ring won in New York.

In the scheme of his career, it should come as no surprise that Sabathia has found a way to work with new constraints: He has always filled any role thrust upon him entirely. In his mid-20s, with the Cleveland Indians, Sabathia was maybe the most feared pitcher in baseball, with a slider that could scare hitters twice: once when they swung at it and missed, again when it kept breaking and threatened to smash down on their toes. In 2008, the year before he signed with the Yankees, Cleveland traded him at the deadline to the Milwaukee Brewers, who needed help breaking a 25-year playoff drought. Indifferent to the possibility that too large an innings load might hurt his arm and affect his free-agent payday, Sabathia made a habit of throwing complete games on short rest, piling up strikeouts and sweating in sheets. In the last game of the season, he fired 122 pitches over nine innings to beat the Chicago Cubs, and the Brewers clinched their playoff berth. “It was his game. It was his year. It was his two months,” interim manager Dale Sveum said of his temporary ace. “He’s just a special human being.”

The contemporary Sabathia claims not to pine after his old triple-digit fastball or the days when he could carry a team to the postseason almost by himself. “This is a lot of fun, being able to pitch like this, thinking through games, setting guys up and trying to get called strikeouts and stuff,” he told the New York Times in March. “It’s a lot more fun than just going out there and kind of beating them with brute force.” One suspects that he’d still take his former gifts back, were he offered them, but there’s some truth to the sentiment. Sabathia will be a free agent at year’s end, and if he heads elsewhere in 2018, New York fans won’t remember only the savior, the Number One, the World Series hero. They’ll also miss the player who throws slower and works harder, who furrows his big brow, who inspires less awe but more admiration.

Nori, Last

Is anyone born to bat ninth? It’s a spot almost always arrived at incidentally. Prior to 1973’s introduction of the designated hitter in the American League, it was manned by pitchers, who held to the rules of the game by walking from the dugout at the end of every go-round, making a quick out, and walking back. Since then, in the AL, the nine hole has been filled mainly by players who do something else well enough that their hitting does not much matter: brilliant centerfielders and shortstops, ceremonial leader types.

As an offensive presence, and not as a defender who happens to use a bat four or five times an evening, what would the ideal ninth hitter even look like? The phrase—ideal ninth hitter—threatens to dissolve in oxymoron. The easiest answer is that a great ninth hitter would look like a good leadoff hitter, but this avoids the spirit of the question; it is like saying the best way to liven up your commute is to buy a Lamborghini. The curmudgeonly answer is to refuse the premise: “Make the pitcher hit and be done with it.”

The right answer, though, is that the perfect ninth hitter already exists, on the closest thing to a perfect team that the 2017 season has to offer. Nori Aoki plays left and bats last (when he plays at all) for the Houston Astros, that homer-strewing, run-piling club that has already rendered every month until October a formality. Unlike his teammates, Aoki doesn’t hit home runs. He doesn’t hit much in general, really; his .267 batting average and .333 slugging percentage are good for negative wins above replacement. But Aoki’s job, the one that he realizes and embodies as fully as anyone, is not to put up numbers. It is to work the opponent, to frustrate and hang in and prod and pester. A good ninth hitter makes what seems like an easy task, getting the last out in the order, feel a little bit harder than expected. Aoki is the sport’s finest nuisance.

***

At the plate—or, more accurately, over it, his elbows skimming the strike zone—Aoki bends into a batting stance that could only be superstitious, so divorced is it from any principle of balance. He is small to start with, with narrow shoulders and slightly bowed legs, and then he bunches himself further, knees bent, heels lifted, hands offset on the handle as if he’s wringing a washcloth. The barrel of the bat waggles. He looks stuck mid-process, locked uncomfortably in place.

The swing is a relief. When the pitch comes to the plate, Aoki kicks his leg high, drops it back down, and frees his arms. The bat goes quick, in angles. Aoki has tiered intentions. The first is to make the pitcher throw and throw and thrown, five or eight or ten pitches, so he happily nicks a fastball out into the crowd and deadens a slider into the dirt to the side of home plate. The second is to reach base, however he can. Set next to the rest of the blasting-off Astros, Aoki shrinks and magnifies the game. They want to put the baseball 400 feet away, but he just wants to roll it under the second baseman’s glove or lob it over the shortstop’s head. The ball makes a skipping-rock pattern up the middle; it bends a crescent to left. Aoki has his own set of verbs. Where others mash and wallop, he slices, slips, shuttles.

To value Aoki, you have to value variety for its own sake. This has been his worst season, statistically, and it may be his last in a Major League uniform, but he still nudges the game into a mode few modern players can access. He hardly ever strikes out; he tests defenses tuned to line drives with dribblers and squibs. He spins out of the batter’s box and is running as soon as his bat touches the ball. He a puzzle, a pop quiz, those last few seconds on a timer. He is scheduled surprise.

“We expect a good at-bat and we expect a competent defender in the outfield,” Houston manager A.J. Hinch said when his team signed Aoki to a one-year contract in December. This was both rote manager-speak—the sort of reflexive compliment guys in charge dole out to 34-year-olds who can still gain employment as professional athletes—and a wholly inadequate description. For one thing, Aoki’s defense lacks the neatness to be labeled competent; he tracks fly balls in the splayed-arm manner of a kindergartener flying a kite. For another, the pure quality of Aoki’s plate appearances is almost inconsequential. He provides difference, bother. Who can say how exasperation resolves itself? Carlos Correa splits the game open with a home run, but it is Aoki who the pitcher curses under his breath as he leaves the field.