It would have been hard for Astudillo to break a sweat, seeing as his slowest tracked pitch was that 46 mph strike and his fastest was a 72.5 mph offering on the outside corner that actually impressed the system enough for it to register as a fastball. His other tracked pitches clocked in at 59.0, 51.4 and 46.3 mph.

Obviously, nothing in sports matters more than Willians Astudillo’s 1-2-3 inning against the Los Angeles Angels.
 
Quick setup: Bottom of the eighth inning, Minnesota trailed 10-3, and even though the Twins have 13 pitchers on their roster (!), they decided it wasn’t really worth it to use any of them in such a lost game. Instead, they went with a 29-year-old backup catcher who in body type bears at least a passing resemblance to the legendary Bartolo Colon. Astudillo is listed at 5-foot-9, 225 pounds, and even before he stepped on the mound, he was already a folk hero. I mean, his nickname is “La Tortuga,” The Turtle, and he has been around baseball for a dozen years after signing with the Phillies as a 17-year-old. He played entirely in the Venezuelan Summer League his first three years, and at age 20 he made it up to Rookie Ball, where he actually stole more bases (2) than hit home runs (0). La Tortuga, indeed.
 
He made it up to Class-A ball at 22 and then got signed by the Atlanta Braves. He made it up to Double A with them before getting let go again, and this time he signed with Arizona. He was given a chance in Triple A with the Diamondbacks and did well — he hit .342 with just five strikeouts in 36 games. One thing about La Tortuga, he does not strike out. In more than 100 big-league games, he has whiffed just 14 times. The guy puts the ball in play.
 
Anyway, the Twins signed him then and in 2018 he was a bit of a phenomenon, getting called up to the big leagues in June (ground-ball single in his first at-bat!) and then again in late August. He was amazing down the stretch, hitting .388 in August and striking out just one time in 70 plate appearances (he only walked two times, Willians Astudillo is not looking for pitcher charity). He provided pretty much every happy memory for the Twins in that lost season.
 
He even pitched an inning that season, giving up five hits, two homers and five runs.
 
He got 200 plate appearances in 2019 and provided some versatility, and he played in eight games last year, but the magic of 2018 was really gone … until now. This has been the year of Willians Astudillo. He’s hitting .304. He’s played four positions. And Friday night he gave the performance of the year on the mound. Let’s do it pitch by pitch.
 
Pitch 1 to Kurt Suzuki: 51 mph “changeup” just outside for a ball.
 
I put “changeup” in quotation marks because that suggests that he was trying to fool the hitter into believing that he was throwing a fastball. But Astudillo clearly wasn’t trying to fool anybody. It was really more like Bugs Bunny’s perplexing slow ball. The look on Suzuki’s face after watching that pitch was something like, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
 
I imagine that major-league hitters probably see facing a guy like Astudillo as a no-win situation. I mean, if they smash the ball, so what? And if they make an out, well, that’s super embarrassing.
 
Pitch 2 to Suzuki: 59 mph “changeup” over the plate; Suzuki hit the ball pretty hard down the line and into Josh Donaldson’s glove for an out.
 
Pitch 3 to Luis Rengifo: A 46 mph “changeup” that went over the plate for a strike.
 
OK, this was the thing of beauty — it’s the first sub-50 mph pitch called for a strike in the American League* since Seattle outfielder Tim Lopes threw an eephus pitch to, you guessed it, Luis Rengifo in August last year. Difference is, Lopes’ pitch was very clearly not a strike while Astudillo’s pitch certainly was. Before that, you have to go back more than five years, to the Angels’ Andrew Heaney getting Billy Butler looking on a 47 mph changeup.
 
*In the National League, then Milwaukee shortstop Orlando Arcia actually had two sub-50 mph pitches called for strikes in September against the Cubs. The first was against Anthony Rizzo, who broke out laughing afterward, and the other was against Victor Caratini.
 
Pitch 4 to Rengifo: A ridiculous eephus pitch that apparently did not even register on the radar gun for a ball.
 
The pitch wasn’t close to a strike — way high and way outside.
 
Pitch 5 to Rengifo: A 73 mph changeup that caught the outside corner for a strike.
 
I’m not putting quotation marks around the word changeup this time because this really was a changeup — in that the hitter undoubtedly did not expect him to throw the ball that hard. Compared to the other pitches, this one looked to the naked eye like it was 95 mph.
 
Pitch 6 to Rengifo: Another ridiculous eephus pitch that did not register on the radar gun, but Rengifo went after it and grounded out to short.
 
It makes me a little bit mad that this one didn’t register on Statcast. Why even have the most sophisticated baseball system ever built if it can’t tell us just how slow that Astudillo eephus pitch went? It couldn’t have been any more than 40 mph.
 
Pitch 7 to David Fletcher: A 46 mph eephus pitch that Fletcher ripped down the line — 94 mph exit velocity — and into Donaldson’s glove for the third out.
 
And with that, the masterpiece was complete. There is no question at all that position players pitching can be a lot of fun. But it makes a whole lot less sense when teams have more pitchers on their 25-man rosters than hitters.
 
You might know that writer Joe Sheehan has, for years, been advocating for capping the number of pitchers who are eligible to pitch in any given game, and I support that idea. I really don’t think it makes the game more enjoyable to have pitchers come in to just throw to two or three or four batters, and I don’t think it is keeping pitchers healthier. Stretch these pitchers out. Give the game more of a flow. And, when the game gets out of hand, sure, give us Willians Astudillo.

Those are some of the words scouts and opposing pitchers used when asked about a Chicago Cubs offense that sits dead last in the majors in many categories, including a .192 team batting average that's among the all-time worst through 15 games.
 
As a team the Cubs have an MLB-worst .230 batting average and are slugging just .414 off fastballs in that time frame. Against fastballs of 95 mph or more, they're hitting a paltry .178 since the start of 2020 and just .105 this season.

Late Wednesday night, after watching another game from the bench, Albert Pujols was summoned into a room with Los Angeles Angels president John Carpino and general manager Perry Minasian and was informed that his near-decade run with the team was coming to an abrupt end. The following morning, the organization announced it had designated Pujols for assignment, a procedural move that will lead to Pujols' release by the end of the week, barely two months into the last season of a 10-year, $240 million contract.