It is the nature of a really good catch to make you feel like what you've just seen is the coolest thing ever to happen. That is how you know that what you've just seen is really good, and you can tell that you have seen something sufficiently cool if, for a moment, you find yourself reconsidering everything else you've seen. A great play should disorient you; a really great one will feel as if it was dropped on you from a great height.
There is a whole disordered way of being a sports fan that is built around following that natural instinct to reconsider everything all the way out, and into recursive madness; at every game you attend, there will be thousands of other people there whose relationship with sports amounts to constantly rearranging the faces on their own personal Mounts Rushmore and updating and itemizing a detailed personal taxonomy of Signature Moments. As a general rule, I think it is better not to be like that, and to just let the awe overtake you when and where it finds you. Not because it is smarter or more reasonable; no one cares about sports to become smarter or more reasonable. Just because it is more fun.
Anyway, it is with all that in mind that I can say that I think the catch that Athletics outfielder Denzel Clarke made to steal a home run from Angels first baseman Nolan Schanuel on Monday night is the coolest catch of its kind that I've ever seen.
I assure you that I do not make this statement lightly. I have reviewed the tape, watched some other great catches, and considered the context, and the fact that there is basically no context less significant than "early June game between the A's and Angels" notwithstanding, this is the coolest. It is, for instance, cooler than the home run that Clarke stole in his hometown of Toronto at the end of May, and that one was decently cool. It is also significantly cooler than the (also very cool) catch that Clarke made last week, in which he sprinted into and very nearly through the rickety outfield at the A's home field in West Sacramento.
Both are stellar examples of different types of Cool Outfielder Stuff. It may be that you, personally, prefer watching Clarke blast halfway through the wall of his home stadium to preserve a lead against the Orioles, and that is your right. But Monday's catch is most astonishing for how much more mystery there is in it. In watching it over and over again, I have tried to figure out just how Clarke did any of what he does. In the Sacramento catch, the mysterious element is mostly about how someone running into a wall that fast avoided serious injury or death, and honestly I don't have a lot of answers for you on that one, either. In the case of the catch that Clarke made in Anaheim, though, the mystery is "all of it." It is "how is his body where it is" and "how is his body doing that" and "how."
There is a rich heritage of catches like this, and I have looked at some cool ones. I have watched Kenny Lofton walk up a wall to steal a homer and Bo Jackson nonchalantly run off of one, Austin Jackson flip himself bodily over a weird wedge of Fenway Park outfield wall and Jim Edmonds do this Jim Edmonds thing and Dewayne Wise run a quarter mile before leaping above the wall to save Mark Buehrle's perfect game. I think about Endy Chavez's leaping catch to rob Scott Rolen of a homer during the 2006 NLCS basically every 10 days, but I watched the video there, too. For degree of difficulty and style, I think the closest comparison is Gary Matthews Jr. making a blind, back-to-the-batter leap to steal a homer. But also I don't really think there is any comparison. I think Clarke's is the coolest.
It is the coolest, in my opinion, because of how stylishly it incorporates all the things that make cool catches cool. A great many of these catches start with a weird route or half-duffed read, and Clarke's does as well; in the A's call, you can hear play-by-play announcer Jenny Kavnar note that Clarke initially broke towards home plate before hauling ass to deepest, deadest left-center. Another defining aspect of a lot of this sort of catch comes through watching the fielder, who is also almost always tracking an absolutely scalded baseball at peak speed, scope out their environs and consider the situation and proceed make some completely batshit decision based entirely upon janky telemetry and pure brass. To look at Kenny Lofton sizing up that weird, tall outfield wall and calculating the quickest route to the top is to see something that is not quite baseball, but something more delirious and creative. Clarke does this, too, shooting a couple of quick little glances at the wall as he streaks towards it and then scaling it with frankly rude ease. "I just timed it up," Clarke told MLB.com's Martín Gallegos after the game. "Found my distance between the wall and just did what the ball told me to do."
His waist is about even with the top of the wall when he makes the catch. It's the highest I've ever seen an outfielder get on a play like this, just implausible and frankly unreasonable stuff, but also not why I think this particular catch is the coolest. The high-altitude capoeira shit that Clark does from there, which involves him basically surfing the top of the wall in a gymnastic 180-degree dismount, makes for a fittingly absurd ending. I don't know what a baseball player's body is supposed to do in a situation like this—I have never seen a baseball player's body be where Denzel Clarke's was on this play, so how could I? But I can't imagine it's that.
Clarke is 25, and was the Athletics' fourth-round pick in 2021 out of Cal State-Northridge; he was called up at the end of May when the A's, then skulking through a stretch in which they'd lose 19 of 20 games, churned the bottom third of the big league roster in a series of extremely bleak transactions. Clarke, whom the A's plugged in as their centerfielder after sending JJ Bleday to play in a different Triple-A stadium for a while, has been a real prospect, if a somewhat lopsided one. He made an astonishing catch in the Futures Game in 2022 and had the 99th spot on the Baseball Prospectus Top 101 in 2024, but even after some refinements in his offensive approach, Clarke remained more a collection of loud tools than an obvious impact player; when the A's called him up in late May, Clarke's Triple-A on-base percentage (.436) was nearly 20 points higher than his slugging percentage (.419). The gains that Clarke had made in cutting down on strikeouts in the minors have not followed him to the bigs; he struck out 29 times and walked 23 times in 133 minor league plate appearances this year, and has also struck out 29 times, while walking once, in his first 53 trips to the plate in the bigs. His OPS starts with a 5.
I mention all of this because it seems like the responsible thing to do, but also because it does not really matter. The ultra-purgatorial A's don't really matter, and who is playing center field for them doesn't really matter, either. That it may not be Clarke out there for very long surely matters a great deal to Denzel Clarke and his family—Josh and Bo Naylor are his cousins; his mother was an Olympic heptathlete—and presumably also to the people at MLB whose job it is to cut 30-second highlight videos to put 15-second truck ads in front of. But there are only so many ways in which that matters, either. This is what I think is coolest about the catch, beyond every other cool thing about it—that it happened in one of the least consequential contexts imaginable, in a road loss to the Anaheim Angels, in the bleak earlygoing of one of the most instantly and obviously accursed seasons that any team has ever had to endure, and that it was cool enough to matter despite all that. To rescue some significance from all that, to create something memorable in June, in a loss, against the Angels, for a team whose deadbeat owner has blithely consigned his players to couch-surfing in a Triple-A stadium—I don't know how any baseball player could do something more implausible, more impressive, or more defiantly cool than that.
