Guardians first baseman Josh Naylor is one of the last people you’d think would be able to pick up a double on a soft groundball up the middle. But he did it on Thursday against the White Sox.
Naylor is slower than 79% of MLB players, according to Baseball Savant. In 417 career games, he has just 15 stolen bases and one triple. He isn’t usually the type of player who’s going to try his luck and dig for an extra base—except for on a very weird play on Thursday.
In the top of the seventh with a runner on third and one out, Naylor lunged at a breaking ball way off the outside corner and poked it back up the middle. The ball glanced off the hand of pitcher Aaron Bummer, trickled past him and then kicked off the second base bag and into center field. By the time Tim Anderson was able to retrieve it, Naylor had slid into second with a bizarre extra-base hit.
Now how did that get through?!
— Bally Sports Cleveland (@BallySportsCLE) July 28, 2023
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Naylor’s hit left the bat at just 57.5 mph. While it’s not terribly unusual for balls hit that softly to turn into doubles (imagine a flare just over the of the third baseman that rolls into the outfield), it is unusual for it to happen on a grounder. Naylor’s double was just the 14th this season on a grounder hit under 60 mph. What makes his unique is that most of the others on the list were by guys with much better wheels than Naylor, like Travis Jankowski, Kevin Kiermaier and Steven Kwan. But weird things happen on the baseball field sometimes, and credit to Naylor for having the awareness to take advantage.
