There’s a nagging paradox at the heart of baseball — or any sport, really — and it’s this: The goal of every single player is to play the game perfectly; but if they ever did, there would no longer be any reason for us to watch.
To the fans, perfection is not only boring, it’s useless. It defeats the purpose of caring in the first place. The reason that baseball is interesting at all is because it’s hard, because it can never be played perfectly. The value of sports is not in watching perfection, but in watching players try to achieve perfection while inevitably failing, just like the rest of us do in real life every day.
Ceddanne Rafaela is a freak of a baseball player. He is capable of consistently doing things on a diamond that no one else can do. Things like this:
And this (there’s better footage of this one out there, obviously, but the fan cam adds a level of realism to this play that makes it look even more impressive):
Those are jaw-dropping plays, each of them, and they only begin to scrape the surface of Ceddanne’s defensive brilliance. And that’s why it came as no surprise to absolutely anyone that, last night, ‘Nuff Cedd was honored with his first career Gold Glove Award, along with his teammate Wilyer Abreu, who won his second.
Last night’s award won’t be Ceddanne’s last. Barring something catastrophic, fifteen years from now Ceddanne will have collected so much gold he could be cast as a Bond villain. The Gold Glove winners will be announced, we’ll read his name in the press release, and we’ll shrug our shoulders and say, “yeah, duh, obviously.” Ceddanne winning the Gold Glove will become, dare I say it, boring.
That’s not say that the play on the field itself will — if you can watch those clips above and feel nothing, you’re hopeless as a baseball fan (I’ve already rewatched the second catch six times since I embedded it in this piece). But Ceddane’s arc as a fielder is already complete: he’s the best and he will be for quite some time. There is no grand struggle towards perfection for him out there in centerfield. That’s why I actually prefer watching Ceddanne hit. In fact, he might be my favorite hitter to watch in all of baseball.
Is that a crazy thing to think? Maybe. He is an incredibly flawed hitter. He’s a hitter built of wiry strength and quick wrists and incredible hand-eye coordination — tools that could make him one of the best hitters in the game… if not for one giant, fatal flaw that prevents him from achieving perfection. But it’s that giant flaw — his almost total inability to control the strike zone — that makes me lean closer to the TV every time he steps up to the plate. Can he finally lay off those sliders eight inches off the plate? Can he finally force a pitcher to stay in the zone? When you watch Ceddanne hit, you’re watching someone fighting their demons. What’s more interesting as a fan than that?
If he ever figures it out, Ceddy will become as good as anyone not named Shohei Ohtani. We saw that ourselves this summer. For 48 games between May 25 and July 22 — nearly a third of the season — Ceddanne was the fourth-best player in all of baseball per fWAR, slashing .314/.341/.599 with 12 homers to go with his near-perfect defense. We know exactly what his ceiling is. And we know exactly what demon he has to slay to reach it. Watching that battle play out over the next five years is going to be riveting.
But in the meantime, watch this one again:
An amazing catch that was only amazing because it started out imperfectly. Just the way we like it.
