SI

Cubs Position Player Drops Majestic Strike Clocking in at Well Below Speed Limit

Reese McGuire brought the non-heat.

Kyle Koster

McGuire featured some nasty offspeed stuff.
McGuire featured some nasty offspeed stuff. / Stan Szeto-Imagn Images
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Trailing the San Francisco Giants by eight runs entering the bottom of the eighth, the Chicago Cubs threw in the towel in the form of letting catcher Reese McGuire stride out to the mound and lob some eephus pitches. Few things are more exciting in sports than watching non-pitchers lob pitches that would work in slow-pitch softball to the best hitters in the world and confound them into looking quite mortal.

McGuire did the job just fine, surrendering just one run in the frame and getting the game over quickly.

The catcher explored all the space above the strike zone before dropping moonshots in, including this 35-MPH job that Rafael Devers could only watch.

Beautiful stuff.

Now, the little ball icon would tell you this was very high. But that thing is calibrated for pitchers who are throwing very fast and not letting gravity do the work. It's entirely possible that this thing came from the sky and did cross part of the plate in the strike zone before finding the catcher's glove. Or the ump understandably just wanted to get things going.

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Kyle Koster
KYLE KOSTER

Kyle Koster is an assistant managing editor at Sports Illustrated covering the intersection of sports and media. He was formerly the editor in chief of The Big Lead, where he worked from 2011 to '24. Koster also did turns at the Chicago Sun-Times, where he created the Sports Pros(e) blog, and at Woven Digital.

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