Diving Plays, Towering Home Runs, Record Breaking Hits, and Other Memorable Moments from the First Half
With the All-Star game in the rear-view mirror, Major League Baseball is now half-way through its 2016 season, and boy has it been a doozy. There has already been a ton of memorable moments, record-breaking hits, no-hitters, diving catches, Major League debuts, and almost anything else you can imagine.
And while it’s true that the youth movement has continued to erupt – sixteen (16!) players under 25 years old have already hit 15 or more home runs (four have hit 20 or more) – the old guys are showing off too. With an MVP performance, a career-first dinger and a few thousand hits, each of David Ortiz, Bartolo Colon and Ichiro Suzuki have brought us back to the previous era of baseball in the best ways imaginable.
So when MLB collected the best offensive, defensive, and pitching highlights from the first half of the season in video form, I thought we could sit back, take a beat (on this damned day without baseball), and relive some of the finest moments of the 2016 season. Enjoy.
First, let’s toe the rubber and look back on some of the best pitching performances in 2016, including Jake Arrieta’s no-hitter, Max Scherzer’s 20 strikeout game, and Clayton Kershaw doing what Clayton Kershaw does (making people look silly):
We all love pitching, yes, but everybody knows offense is the real money maker. So let’s step off the mound and up to the plate, reliving some of the biggest moments at the dish this season, including Trevor Story’s 1st, Bryce Harper’s 100th, and Ichirio’s 4257th:
That said, it is the era of advanced statistics, and no one has benefited more by the movement than the gold glovers. So let’s take off the batting gloves for a moment, and put on our baseball mitts, while we watch Kevin Pillar sacrifice his body, Francisco Lindor play smart (not hard), and the Rangers hit into a whoopsie-doodle triple play.
There are sure to be a lot more memorable moments in the second half of the year, but from where I stand, we’ve already gotten a season’s worth of entertainment. What was your favorite moment?
