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Come Fan with UsSunday, June 21, 2026

This photo of Adam Jones’ heroic World Baseball Classic catch belongs in a museum

Gregory Bull/AP

Saturday night, the U.S. advanced to the World Baseball Classic semifinals after defeating the Dominican Republic 6-3. Part of that victory goes to Adam Jones, who made a heroic leaping catch against his Orioles teammate Manny Machado. The catch was so good, Machado couldn’t help but show respect to Jones for taking that homer away from him:

What’s even better is out of that catch came a high-quality photo worth putting on a poster. This is what Associated Press photographer Gregory Bull captured that night:

Let’s break down what we’re looking at:

1. Here, we have a cluster of folks putting their hands out in case Jones misses the ball and one of them catches it. On the one hand (no pun intended), I get the impulse to put your hands out to try to catch a baseball. It’s a free baseball flying toward you, and it’s a Manny Machado home run — you wanna catch it, so you can have a story later and prove that you were there when Machado hit a homer. On the other hand, let Jones cook! The dude’s in the middle of a heroic catch that’ll end up on his highlight reel. I’m not sure it’s not wise to be the person who ruins that moment:

2. My dude, I don’t even think you were trying to catch this ball. I think you just wanted to say hi to the camera:

3. These folks are several feet away from Jones’ glove, and I appreciate them just taking in the moment happening in front of their faces:

4. I saw a lot of jokes about this guy looking uninterested in what’s going on here. Looking back at the replay, I saw his arm move into clapping position after Jones caught the ball. In video form, it looks like he loved the catch; in photo form, though, it looks like an album cover for an indie rock band whose songs are about baseball, but also existentialism:

5. Again, video form tells more than what it seems in this photo — this guy right here was basically flinching at the cluster of folks we saw in the first photo. When his eyes opened, he was psyched to see Jones with the ball in his glove. But he will forever be immortalized as “Seemingly Sleeping Man at the World Baseball Classic.”

6. Finally, we have Adam Jones. I don’t have anything funny to say about this, other than the long-haired man on the left has a rad shirt:

This is art:

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