“Just a ridiculous game, in general, by me.”

Well, Trea Turner said it, I didn’t.

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The Phillies beat the Dodgers 10-7 on Monday, and Turner had three hits, including two home runs, and five RBIs. He hit, in this particular game, like the offensive superstar they want him to be.

He also missed four (4) ground balls on defense that came at him with varying levels of difficulty. There was one straight-up bonk off his glove on a routine play, one he tried to pick up while sprinting across in front of second base, one that got under his reach and into the outfield, and one that smacked him on the shinbone and skittered away without being touched by human hands. He played defense, in this particular game, like he had walked by a ghostly figure late at night in a graveyard and it had pointed a bony finger at him and whispered, “Claaaaaank.”

Turner’s not a tremendous defensive shortstop; that's never been his big upside. He's a hitter (he won the NL batting title last year), and he runs very fast. Baseball Savant has his sprint speed at 11th in all of baseball. He's also one of the most physically graceful players I’ve ever watched.

This is certainly the most glorious pop-up slide I’ve ever seen, a miracle of body control, balance, friction, and movement through space. (He was playing for the Dodgers at the time. Against the Phillies. It’s fine.)

He’s also got a balletic, balanced swing, which he showed off several times on Monday. Swings have personalities, and it's funny to compare Turner’s swing to one like Justin Crawford’s, which, in both success and futility, always looks a bit like chaos, like he panicked and decided to swing at the very last possible second. I love Crawford; I think he’s going to be a good hitter once he gets past a period of rookie adjustment to major league pitching. But I do always feel like you can hear a little Wilhelm scream right when he swings the bat.

Not Trea Turner. Even when he swings and misses, he looks like he did what he meant to do.

But he is going through something defensively, and I have never been a shortstop myself, but it certainly looks bad on TV. He’s been saying he thinks the issue is with his reads; he doesn’t think he’s correctly picking up what the ball is going to do. And given the ways a hit baseball can travel—with speed and spin, encountering grass, dirt, chalk, bases—that part isn’t as easy as they make it look.

He’s certainly not being casual about it. You can see him trying to watch the ball into his glove, trying to use both hands, trying to secure the ball and thinking please let me just secure the ball, and then sometimes the ball just seems to cackle and jump away from him like a Disney villain with a minor-key theme song. And the next thing you know, he is blowing a big bubble with his gum, perhaps because he knows he’s being booed on television and he doesn’t know what else to do with his face.

(The other very popular move in a situation like this is to look really hard at the card you carry in your hat or your back pocket that tells you your field position for the next batter. Gotta stare at the card! Can't dwell on the thing I just did! I'm very busy with this card!)

It is fair to mention that fans make pretty rudimentary evaluations of plays on the field. They see a guy dive for a ball in the outfield, and they don’t necessarily clock whether a better route to the ball would have made it look easy before they admire the diving catch. Sometimes how close you seem to come to knocking your own teeth down your throat is not, in fact, a reliable indicator of making a “great play.” Of the four balls Turner missed, only one went down as an error, which is a loose measure of whether you’ve falling short of basic expectations.

Of course, fans would prefer that, particularly as a veteran with a large contract, you exceed basic expectations.

What Turner did last night was both very strange and kind of a miniaturized version of what baseball is. If baseball is a massive, elegant schooner, Trea Turner on Monday night was a ship in a bottle that shows the whole thing, just scaled way down.

You’ve got your ups, you’ve got your downs. You’ve got your defensive plays that don’t work, which are hopefully compensated for by your offense. There’s booing, there’s cheering. You’ve got things that suddenly don’t happen the way they normally do, and nobody knows why.

Play does not slide on a simple horizontal line where “sucks” is on the left and “rules” is on the right. No, in fact, sometimes somebody looks terrible in the top of the inning and great in the bottom, or looks great on Thursday and bad on Friday. In contrast to a game like football, where a single contest going wrong can mess up an entire season, baseball demands that you sit and watch your guys, play after play, hoping that over time, there will be a gradual return to some kind of normalcy. Maybe by the end of the game. Maybe by the end of the year. Because if that happens, you’re still okay.

Ultimately, the Phillies won the game. And winning the game is all you have to do. It counts whether you win by one or by ten, and it counts whether you look great doing it or not. It’s all water under the bridge, right? Home runs cover a multitude of sins.

He sort of played a whole season in one night. It’s hard to say he played a good game. Hard to say he played a bad game. He played a ridiculous game. Ridiculous game, in general, by him. He was exactly right.