MLB Photos of the Week: Shohei Ohtani, Fernando Tatis Jr., Juan Soto and more (2024)

We’re just a few days out from the 2021 MLB Draft and the All-Star Game, so there are plenty of good things to read on this website. But perhaps you’d like to take a moment before you do that to luxuriate in some of the notable images that made up this week in baseball. We can help with that. (But we also left some links for recommended reading in here once you’re good to go.)

And with that covered, here’s the MLB Photos of the Week.

Photo of the Week

If you’ve ever taken a photography class, you might remember learning about a compositional guideline called the “rule of thirds.” The general gist is that you can break an image into three parts, both vertically and horizontally, and you want to try to anchor the focal point of your photo just outside the middle of the grid, depending on how you orient your shot. What this means for us here is that in a traditional composition, Cardinals reliever Andrew Miller would not be smack dab in the center of this photo. But rules are made to be broken, and especially so when your subject is as expressive as this.

Miller’s aesthetic was directed by Martin Scorsese in the 1970s, trained in Oakland with Dennis Eckersley, spent some time with Kurt Russell in “Tombstone” and then got left behind by Pedro Pascal on the set of “Narcos.” I hope he keeps this going forever. It is an incredible look.

Best of the Rest

We’re coming up on the Home Run Derby, which can be fun as hell in a standard year but should be sublime in the elevation of Coors Field. The Nationals’ Juan Soto will match up against No. 1 seed Shohei Ohtani in the first round and that promises to be a must-watch. Let’s hope he has a better outing than he did here, flying out against the Dodgers on July 4.

You hear this often, but there really is a natural, balletic sort of beauty in a lot of baseball plays. In real time, the action between the Rockies’ Trevor Story and the Diamondbacks’ Christian Walker was probably a chaotic blur. But here, with the benefit of this moment captured in a single frame, we can see the type of control, the spatial and bodily awareness, the timing and balance that is more commonly found in the world of contemporary or lyrical dance.

This got me thinking about a thought exercise I like to throw at people: Which professional sport do you think you could last longest in without being detected? That is, which sport could you actively play (this is key) for the longest period of time without being outed as an absolute amateur? Most people immediately say soccer or baseball, but I think we all might be thinking a little bit too highly of ourselves on this one. It would have to be something like curling.

Anyway, this leads me to another hypothetical: Which professional baseball player could most easily disguise themselves as a professional dancer? I have a few guesses; maybe you do, too — let me know in the comments. (Mine are mostly middle infielders.)

I asked our Rockies writer Nick Groke if he thought Story here might make the cut. He was somewhat bearish on the prospect: “This is like some Kierkegaardian conundrum. He just now doubled in a run. But I’m gonna guess he can’t dance very well.”

More: How impressive are Vlad Guerrero Jr.’s splits at first base? We asked a former NHL goalie, a ballet dancer and a gymnast by Kaitlyn McGrath

This look on Sergio Romo’s face could author a novel. There are like six different emotions being expressed all at once and each one of them is soul-crushing. His Athletics have had a tough go of it as of late, but according to our Steve Berman, we just might see an upswing on the other side of the All-Star break.

It would not be the MLB Photos of the Week without the Fernando Tatis Jr. Photo of the Week, so here’s one of him enjoying a rain shower in Philadelphia.

More: 2021 MVPs and LVPs, Cy Youngs and Cy Yuks: Jayson Stark’s midseason MLB awards

Tag yourself, I am the man in the red hat seated in the front row, nursing a beer and surveying the scene without a care in the world and absolutely not standing up for that ball. (Look at the hops on Minnesota’s Gilberto Celestino, though! Great form.)

If you do not live on Twitter or in Toronto or Tampa, you might have missed Brett Phillips’ adventures in baseball this week. In a blowout against the Blue Jays on July 2, the Rays sent up the “position player pitching” bat signal and out sprinted Phillips, making his major-league pitching debut. In the duration of one inning, he balked, he threw 94 mph, he threw 47 mph, he exhibited the weirdest warm-up routine in recent memory and he seemed to be having a total blast. That’s sort of Phillips’ whole deal — just like in the photo above, he always seems to be having a good time. (Seriously, look at the face he made after being hit by a pitch last month. He could potentially be the most unbothered person on earth.)

Pitching is way harder than it looks. https://t.co/U4C32EG8ib

— Maverick Phillips (@Brett_Phillips8) July 3, 2021

More: The Tampa Bay Rays’ player-centric, ruthless paradox: ‘You can’t knock it, because they win’ by Andy McCullough

I think a major part of Shohei Ohtani’s appeal is there is an effortlessness to the way he plays — he makes things that are very difficult to do look automatic, the way you or I might look checking our email or punching some buttons on a microwave. It’s clear that nothing he does is easy, but sometimes we need to be reminded of this. That was the case during the ninth inning of the Angels’ game against the Orioles on July 2 as Ohtani attempted to score a walk-off run. He got rocked pretty hard sliding into home as Pedro Severino put up a valiant attempt at defending the plate. You can see that on his face here. It’s wild — he’s human after all.

If you didn’t catch this game, you might be wondering: Did all of that effort and pain and risk pay off in the end for one of the game’s most valuable players?

It absolutely did — just take a look at the photograph at the top of this page for proof.

More: Shohei Ohtani is ‘in his own world’ … which appears to be somewhere beyond baseball’s outer limits by Rustin Dodd
Shohei Ohtani keeps pushing MLB’s boundaries. Whatever his future holds, let’s enjoy his remarkable present by Ken Rosenthal
Shohei Ohtani hit 2 more mammoth blasts. What he did next showed why he’s a superstar by Sam Blum

(Top photo: Ronald Martinez / Getty Images)

Kaci Borowski is a senior editor who joined The Athletic MLB in 2018. She previously worked as a writer, editor and reporter for outlets such as Sports Illustrated, Tennis Magazine, Longreads and Snapchat. Follow Kaci on Twitter @kaciborowski