Welcome to Week 51 of THIS WEEK IN GIFs, y'all. Two things about this week's lineup: first, it's an all-baseball week, and second, the focus is on baseball personalities being awesome. This is terribly unusual, especially for a crop of baseball GIFs. I just didn't want you to be alarmed.
Voting will remain open until Sunday at 11 p.m. Eastern. Enjoy!
KENSUKE UCHIMURA
(Via @MayorBurnsy/@mattufford)
This might be the first time a batter has ever tried this in a game important enough to be televised. I've seen a player take a wild hack at a pitchout before, but not a bunt.
The best thing about this is that Uchimura's maneuver makes baseball, for a brief moment, look like something completely European and eccentric. Like some British country-club game where there's a guy lunging at a ball with a bat, and a guy a few feet away heaving a log over his head with both hands, and a guy riding around on a horse with a jai alai basket, and another guy diving and cupping his hands to catch absolutely nothing, and a caption that reads:
A GAME OF CUPPY EN-JOYED BY MEN.
This is definitely a wood engraving.
A.J. BURNETT
(Via MLB.com)
This is the second time Mr. Burnett's rosin bag has busted on him, and the odds of that are pretty spectacularly low, because I've never seen that happen to any other pitcher. The closest thing to that I can recall is from a Braves game I saw when I was 11 or 12 years old. A Braves pitcher (might've been John Smoltz, not sure) decided something was wrong with his rosin bag, so he requested a new one, and a batboy brought one out. Then he decided that one wasn't any good either, and they had to go get him another one.
The whole thing took like three minutes. It was the middle of a Georgia summer day so hot that the local government warned kids not to play outside, and I had nothing to do but watch this game, and it was the bored-est I had ever been.
ROBINSON CANO
(Via Marc Normandin)
Whoaaaaaa y'all. This isn't "baseball players clownin' around" mad. Robinson Cano isn't gaming Eduardo Nunez. He's straight-up pissed off. Well you know what, Cano? You know what? You get paid millions of dollars to play a game and therefore are not allowed to feel things. [rides bicycle out of helicopter]
DOWN-BY-11 CUBS FAN
(Via Bill Hanstock)
These fans get it, man. Or at the very least, the personalities I am projecting on them totally get it. It's OK for a team to not win anything, and merely exist forever. It's OK to have a job you love and never get a raise. It's OK to marry someone who will never learn how to whistle. "Winning" is an artificial construct, a cultural artifact. The feeling of happiness is a constant of nature. Stop asking the world how to feel, and start feeling.
PHIILLIES FAN
(Via @CrashburnAlley)
POWWWWWWWW
CARLOS GOMEZ
(Via Marc Normandin)
I don't often include over-the-wall catches in THIS WEEK IN GIFs, because you want to know what? Like 90 percent of them are the same, and look either just like this or so much like it that it doesn't matter. I'm including this one because the scoreboard in the corner neatly provides every single bit of context you really need. This single catch was the sole difference between an immediate win and an immediate loss. For further viewing, please see Joey Votto's despair.
MANNY MACHADO
(Via Dayn Perry at CBS Sports)
Mr. Machado's defensive WAR this season, through 92 games, sits at 2.5. That means his glove alone is worth roughly two and a half wins by itself, a margin that currently separates first place from second in three divisions. Over a 162-game pace, he'd be on pace for a dWAR of 4.4, which would be one of the best totals any player has ever had.
He's also on pace to break the all-time record for doubles in a season. Also, he just turned 21 a few days ago. Kinda feels like the rest of the 2010s in baseball will just be made up of this guy, Yasiel Puig, and Mike Trout wrecking shit.
VOTE!