A lot of cool things happened during the 2022 MLB season. Heck, just having a season at all was pretty cool after the acrimonious lockout gave us reason to doubt that we'd see any games played.
But play they did, and along the way we saw plenty of fun/exciting/joyous happenings, whether they were individual achievements, team-based accomplishments or more collective experiences.
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But some things stood out above the rest. Here are the 22 coolest things that happened during the 2022 MLB season, in random order.
1. Aaron Judge hit 62 homers. No player had hit that many since the steroid era. But this time, there won't be a mental asterisk by Judge's new AL record total. Almost as cool: Judge wasn't just a home run machine. He was as complete a hitter as anyone could want, leading the league not just in homers and RBIs, but also in on-base percentage, runs, slugging percentage, OPS, OPS+ and total bases. He was also the runaway choice for The Sporting News' MLB Player of the Year award. And he's about to make a ton of money in free agency.
2. The rookies were amazing. The talent level among rookies was immense in 2022. Julio Rodriguez mashed dingers for the Mariners. Michael Harris II caught seemingly uncatchable balls for the Braves. Teammate Spencer Strider blew people away with a triple-digit fastball. Steven Kwan just kept getting on base for the Guardians. Adley Rutschman was a revelation behind the dish for the Orioles. Those are just the highlights, and we didn't even mention Jeremy Peña and Brendan Donovan. But speaking of rookies ...
3. More rookies than ever hit a home run for their first big league hit. There were 21 guys who did this in 2022, setting a new MLB record. That smashed the old record of 18. I went into the possible reasons behind the surge here. Still speaking of rookies ...
4. Spencer Strider did something no other pitcher had done. The flame-throwing Braves rookie right-hander struck out 200 batters in a season faster than any pitcher in history. Strider reached 200 punch outs in 130 innings, faster than Randy Johnson, Nolan Ryan, Sandy Koufax or any other Hall of Fame talent you can name. It was even more impressive considering that Strider began the season in the bullpen and didn't make his first start until May 30. Still speaking of rookies and things that hadn't been done ...
5. The Pirates' Oneil Cruz hit a ball 122.4 mph. The ball he smashed against the Braves on Aug. 24 was the hardest-hit ball of the Statcast era. Cruz hit it so hard that it ricocheted off the right-field wall and went right to fielder Ronald Acuña Jr., keeping Cruz at first base with a lousy single. Watch it.
In cool non-rookie news ...
6. Albert Pujols got to 700 homers. Coming into the season, it seemed a long shot that Pujols would actually reach this milestone. But the 42-year-old Pujols somehow found the power stroke from his younger years and just kept hitting dingers for the Cardinals. From Aug. 1 through the end of the season, he had a 1.098 OPS and hit 17 long balls to fly past the 700 milestone. He finally got the big one on Sept. 23 in Los Angeles, with his second homer of the game. He finished the season at 703, shattering all expectations.
7. Miguel Cabrera got his 3,000th hit. Exactly five months before Pujols made history, Cabrera singled to right field against the Rockies on April 23 for career hit No. 3,000. The joy and celebration that followed was chill-inducing. There is no sport that adores its historic achievements more than baseball.
Speaking of historic achievements ...
8. Shohei Ohtani continued to be amazing. It seemed almost impossible that Ohtani could better his incredible and historic 2021 season — a season we at TSN voted the greatest sports season of all time — but he did. After putting up obscene numbers with the bat in 2021 (while still being pretty good on the mound), Ohtani shifted the obscenity to mound in 2022 (while still being pretty good at the plate). Seriously, look at this: 34 homers, 135 OPS+ as a hitter; 15-9 with a 2.33 ERA and 219 strikeouts as a pitcher. Total bWAR: 9.6. What a freak. In other freak-athlete news ...
9. Mike Trout also continued to be amazing. Though we haven't had an injury-free full season of Trout since 2016, he was pretty much back to peak form in 2022, when the future first-ballot Hall of Famer reached the 40-homer mark for the third time, despite playing in just 119 games, and carried a .999 OPS. He's still just 30 years old. Keeping up the freak-athlete theme ...
10. Justin Verlander had one of the best comeback seasons of all time. Think about this: Verlander basically missed two full seasons (one start in 2020 and 2021 combined) and returned in 2022 to put up a Cy Young campaign in his Age 38 season. That's pretty remarkable. His 18 wins led the AL, as did his 1.75 ERA and 0.829 WHIP. Then his Astros won the World Series. That's a pretty good year.
11. The NL East race was awesome. There was no better race in 2022. It had everything: drama, trash talk, even ice cream. You know the story: The Mets once held a 10.5-game lead, but the Braves surged and eventually caught them. Then, it all came down to a three-game series in Atlanta in the first week of October. The Braves swept, earning the tie-breaker, which came in hand a few days later when both teams ended with 101-61 records. The battle for the division title must've taken more out of each team than they realized, because both were bounced in their first round of the playoffs. But it was top-shelf baseball entertainment before that. Staying in the NL East ...
12. The Edwin Diaz trumpets became a thing. Diaz and the Mets found magic when they decided to turn the closer's entrance song — "Narco" by Blasterjaxx and Timmy Trumpet — into a full production. Each Diaz appearance became an interactive enterprise as fans really got into it, sometimes with their own trumpets, real and fake, and created one of the more memorable and distinct closer entrance experiences in recent memory. Timmy Trumpet was even on hand a few times to play the song live. Baseball should be fun, and this was fun.
Speaking of fun ...
13. The Orioles surprised everyone. You could make an argument that what happened in Baltimore was the most surprising baseball story of 2022. Nobody expected a team that had averaged 111 losses over its past three full seasons to finish with a winning record — especially after they were sellers at the trade deadline. But the Orioles kept winning anyway and finished 83-79, the team's first winning season since 2016. It was yet another example of baseball's wonderful unpredictability. Speaking of pleasant surprises ...
14. Wynton Bernard became a major leaguer. You might not immediately recognize his name, but you probably saw the viral video of Bernard calling his mom to let her know he'd finally been called up to the big leagues with the Rockies after 11 years in the minors with five organizations. It was a heart-warming moment. Bernard's debut with Colorado came on Aug. 12, in his Age 31 season. He recorded his first MLB hit the same day and went on to collect 11 more that month. He finished the season hitting .286 in 12 games. It's always satisfying when hard work and patience pay off. Speaking of hard work and patience ...
15. Kyle Wright won 21 games. While pitcher wins are not a great way to evaluate talent, there was something satisfying about the Braves' righty reaching that number. Because a year ago, even after Wright's standout showing in the World Series, nobody would've expected a 20-win season from a pitcher who had spent nearly the entire 2021 season in Triple-A and had been very inconsistent in his big league career up to that point. But seeing Wright go from a Quad-A pitcher to a front-of-the-rotation star for one MLB's best teams was a very pleasant surprise. Speaking of pleasant pitching developments ...
16. Sandy Alcantara kind of brought back the complete game. In an era when five-inning starts are more the rule than the exception, the Marlins' righty fired six complete games in 2022, which was twice as many as anyone else and the most since 2016. Alcantara threw 228.2 innings, easily the most in MLB, earning his second All-Star nod in a dominant season that included a 14-9 record, a 2.28 ERA and a 0.980 WHIP. It was quite the old-school season. Speaking of old-school ...
17. We had two serious Triple Crown chases. A Triple Crown is one of baseball's toughest feats, which is why it's only happened four times since 1950. But in 2022, we had two guys give it a serious run. The Cardinals' Paul Goldschmidt hung in there for a long time in the NL before trailing off down the stretch and finishing well off the pace in average, home runs and RBIs, while Aaron Judge had a shot right up through the final series of the season. The homer and RBI crowns had long been his, but he ultimately finished five points off the batting lead behind the Twins' Luis Arraez (.311 to .316). In both cases, the will they or won't they kept us intrigued. In other will they or won't they news ...
18. The Mariners finally ended their playoff drought. Seattle had missed the postseason for 21 years, the longest drought in North American professional sports. After coming close in 2021, the M's finally broke through this season when Cal Raleigh hit a walk-off homer against the A's on Sept. 30. This young Mariners team brought serious baseball mojo back to the Pacific Northwest. Once in the playoffs, Seattle shocked the Blue Jays in the Wild Card Round and put up a pretty good fight in the ALDS against the Astros — a dramatic Game 1 and an 18-inning Game 3 were thrilling — before eventually getting swept. But don't worry, Seattle. The Mariners will be back much sooner than last time.
Speaking of the postseason ...
19. There was a no-hitter during the World Series. It hadn't happened since Don Larsen's perfect game in the 1956 Fall Classic, but the Astros used four pitchers to hold the Phillies hitless in Game 4, just the second no-hitter in World Series history. The Phillies managed just three base runners — all on walks — as Cristian Javier (who pitched six innings of masterful ball), Bryan Abreu, Rafael Montero and Ryan Pressly kept them out of the hit column. Still speaking of the postseason ...
20. The expanded postseason gave us the drama we wanted. A lot of people still don't like a 14-team playoff field, but the first year under the new postseason format gave us plenty of excitement. The Wild Card Round alone featured big comebacks from the Phillies and Mariners, a series-clinching walk-off homer for the Guardians and the Padres' upset of the 101-win Mets. And two of those series led to the Phillies' upset of the Braves and the Padres' upset of the Dodgers in the NLDS. Who would've predicted that? Not many, and that's the point.
21. Dusty Baker won his first World Series as a manager. It took almost 30 years, but Baker's future Hall of Fame resume is complete. He'd won at every managerial stop since 1993, but a championship long eluded him. He was October's heartbreak kid for a long time, but not anymore. One more thing about that ...
22. Dusty Baker didn't even see the final out of his first World Series title as manager because he had to finish keeping score. After Baker waited nearly three decades to win a title as a manager, you'd think he'd want to take in every second of the clinching moment. But no. Baker is a baseball lifer, so it was business first, as always. He wouldn't even celebrate a decades-long goal until the work was done. As I wrote that night, there was something wholesome and pure about it.
So, there you go — the 22 coolest things about the 2022 MLB season. These and other memories should be enough to tide us through the long winter until spring training returns to warm our hearts.
