Every time Alec Bohm sprints into foul territory, my heart jumps into my throat. We learned earlier this season that his friends on the Philadelphia Phillies call him Raffy, because he is very tall and gangly like a giraffe. You can always see why they chose this nickname when he's running after a foul ball: his body moving faster than his mind, the ball plummeting toward the earth, his limbs on the precipice of doing something either very beautiful or very dangerous. This scares me because I love to get outs, but I do not want him to get hurt, and it always seems possible that he will.
In Sunday's game against the Washington Nationals, Bohm was playing first base. This is not where he belongs. He is a third baseman who only plays first when Bryce Harper has the day off, as he did yesterday. And the first baseman mitts are different. They are big. They have more padding. He's not used to it, so when he went barreling toward the stands in the ninth inning, the glove rebelled.
The ball, which he had run so far to grab, landed right where it should in his glove, and then before he could snap it closed, popped right back out. Bohm—with all his momentum hurdling him forward—watched the ball, and reached his long, long arm back away from his body to snap it out of the air. His hair flows against him, waving in the wind of his changed direction. But he could not stop. He tumbled into the foul ball net, glove raised above his head, the ball snow-coned in the top of the glove.
He caught it.
Come for the juggling catch. Stay for Alec Bohm's flow. pic.twitter.com/NdOPBxWWwr
— MLB (@MLB) August 18, 2024
This almost brought a tear to my eye. My boy!
Racing for a fly ball in foul territory, having it hit his glove and pop back out, is the kind of behavior that made me love Bohm as a player when he came up to the majors. Except back then, he would have dropped it for sure. There would have been no recovery. He was younger then.
Almost two years ago now, I wrote about how the best way to watch baseball is to adopt a player as your terrible little son who you love so much, and encourage him to be better. I wrote:
The key is to finding a Terrible Little Son is to look for a player who seems like he could be very good in the future, but who is fucking around so consistently and annoyingly that you feel like you need to pull him aside and ask him to take deep breaths, make him promise that he's going to do his best, tell him you love him and send him back onto the field to hit .240.
And I had adopted Alec Bohm. But here we are, two seasons later, and he is good now. The future has arrived. Alec Bohm started in this year's All-Star Game at third base. He is hitting .296 with 13 home runs and 85 RBIs. He has reached base in 35 straight games. He consistently hits cleanup behind Bryce Harper.
It is a beautiful pain to see your baseball children grow up. Everyone loves him now, not just me, and he deserves that. He's good, after all. I am so proud of him.
Very early in the season, I made a stupid bet. Despite attending 15 games last season, I never saw Alec Bohm hit a home run. He only hit them when I wasn't there. So I promised him (he does not know this; he certainly does not care) that if he hit a home run while I was in attendance this year, I would buy his ugliest jersey: the blue City Connect jerseys that they only wear on Fridays at home.
On Thursday, he did it. a three-run beauty of a homer that cruised into left field slow enough for all my friends to be pointing at me by the time it landed. I bought his jersey on the way out of the stadium for a ludicrous $200. He deserved it. He's all grown up.
