What makes a baseball player exciting?

In some ways, this is an unanswerable question, an aesthetic judgment that defies quantification. What makes a player exciting? Who can say? You know it when you see it.

The beauty is that there is no right answer, as ESPN’s most exciting MLB player brackets — last year’s debut and the 2025 version released Tuesday — help illustrate. Excitement in baseball comes in many different forms, and different fans will be drawn to different traits.

“I just like seeing guys who can do a lot of different things on the field,” said James Wood, the Washington Nationals’ representative in the bracket, who embodies several common qualities among our 32 entrants:

• With a 2025 baseball age of 22, he’s young. The bracket overall skews young, with the average age (26.4) more than two years younger than the MLB average (28.6).

• We’re still getting to know Wood, who debuted just last season. The median debut season of our 32 entrants is 2022. Three players — Nick Kurtz, Roman Anthony and Colson Montgomery — have debuted since this year’s Opening Day.

• At 6-foot-7, Wood is tall for a hitter. That’s the same height as Aaron Judge and just 2 inches taller than Elly De La Cruz and Kurtz. The average height in MLB is 6-1½.

• Wood has a quick bat that generates hard contact. His swing speed (76.1) ranks in the 95th percentile and his average exit velocity (94 mph) is in the 98th percentile, according to Statcast. Collectively, the hitters in the group own an average swing speed (74.9) far above the MLB average (71.6) and generate much higher exit velocities (92.2 mph versus the average of 89.2).

But in the end, it’s not any one of these things that mark a player as exciting. It’s a combination of skills — and it looks a little different for each of them. For Wood, it’s a rare mashup of that height, the grace of movement, the almost laconic body language that suddenly explodes when bat meets ball or when he is chasing down a fly ball in center field.

“Just being able to hit for power and run the bases, play defense, just affect the game in a lot of different ways,” Wood said. “I think that’s the way to bring excitement.”

For his part, Wood grew up admiring left-handed hitters such as Curtis Granderson and Robinson Cano, and originally tried to model his game after Barry Bonds. Wood might also remind you of a lefty-hitting Dave Winfield because of his build and the way his long limbs kind of unfold as he moves.

“I haven’t really watched a whole lot of video on [Winfield],” said Wood, smiling because it’s not the first time he has heard the comparison to the Hall of Famer. “I’ve gotten that one a few times, especially when I was in San Diego. I probably need to do a little more homework.”

Nearly all of the 28 hitters in the bracket are superior athletes and run well, helping them fill the columns of the stat sheet. But you can also get there by being a pure masher — Kyle Schwarber can’t run and hardly plays the field anymore, but with baseball’s second-highest hard-hit rate (behind the rookie Anthony), he hits the ball so hard so often that you can’t take your eyes off him. Even when he’s striking out.

“The loudest roars I hear during the game are either home runs or a big strikeout,” Wood said. “Or when someone hits one down the line and everyone’s just running all over the bases.”

Given the variety of ways in which a position player can manifest exciting qualities, it’s fairly difficult for a pitcher to get into the bracket. We’ve got five of them, or, well, 4½.

The half-pitcher is Shohei Ohtani who, on the pitching side, demonstrates the two things that register as most exciting, at least in our nomination process: He’s a starter, and he’s dominant.

According to strikeout-minus-walks percentage, a solid proxy for dominance, our four qualifying pitchers — Tarik Skubal, Garrett Crochet, Paul Skenes and Jacob deGrom — rank first, third, fourth and sixth, respectively, in K-BB% across MLB. If Ohtani qualified, he’d edge Crochet for third.

Ohtani also registers as more than a little exciting at the plate, rating in the 99th percentile in exit velocity, the 94th in swing speed and well above average in sprint speed. The full swath of skills is unmatched in the grand pool of players in MLB history, so that’s tough to beat.

You already knew all about Ohtani, of course. One of the fun things about the bracket is that because every team gets at least one nominee, it’s a chance for more casual fans to realize that dynamic performers are found across the majors even if they haven’t yet achieved the fame of national superstars such as Ohtani, Judge and Juan Soto.

The players know who these stars are, though. When asked to name some of his favorite players to watch, Wood cited familiar names including Judge, Corbin Carroll and Fernando Tatis Jr., whom he saw as a onetime Padres prospect, and Soto, for whom he was once traded.

Then, unprompted, Wood said:

“I like teams like Milwaukee. They don’t have a lineup full of sluggers, but they’re the best team in baseball right now because they defend and they run the bases better than anybody. It’s a headache playing against them. You got guys flying all over the place. So yeah, they’re fun to watch.”

This points to another way to get into the bracket: stand out on MLB’s best and most exciting team. Which brings us to Milwaukee Brewers nominee Brice Turang, who seemed slightly taken aback when told he had been selected. You can understand the reaction because Turang has plenty of competition in the excitement category in his own clubhouse.

“We just got guys who are gamers,” Turang said. “I’m not saying other teams don’t, but the guys in here have competitive at-bats, steal bases, drop bunts, play great defense. We are just playing every aspect of the game.”

The Brewers are all over the team leaderboards in categories including fielding run value (third), sprint speed (second), stolen bases (second) and Fangraphs’ baserunning value metric (first). This is how a team that ranks 19th in home runs can be second in runs scored, even in 2025 baseball.

Turang embodies all of that and even has added some power to his arsenal, which has helped him stand out that much more. As a Gold Glove second baseman, he’s one of nine middle infielders in the bracket. Add in four center fielders and one catcher (Cal Raleigh), and 14 of the entrants play up the middle on defense, where athleticism like Turang’s can really shine.

Not surprisingly, Turang’s favorite player to watch early in life was Ken Griffey Jr., who was a teammate of Turang’s father, Brian, for two seasons with the Seattle Mariners. Later, Turang’s interests tilted toward Ichiro Suzuki, Vladimir Guerrero Sr. and Andrelton Simmons.

Among contemporaries, Turang echoes Wood in that he simply marvels at how many different ways players in today’s game can exhilarate.

“They’re all a little bit different,” Turang said. “You have guys like Bobby Witt, who rips the cover off the ball, plays good defense, can run, can do kind of everything. And then you got guys like Judge who are big, strong dudes hitting massive homers.”

There is truly no one thing that marks a player as exciting, and perhaps the real proof is provided by the fans in the ballpark who react to the amazing things they see unfold on the green expanse before them. There is much to see.

“I feel like the game is faster than it’s ever been, so athletic,” Wood said. “The power and speed combo, there’s a lot of guys who did it, but I feel like now there are more than ever. There’s a ton of guys who can hit 30 and steal 30.”

Pep Guardiola sought a challenge at every stop of his managerial career. Whether it was swapping Barcelona B for Barcelona after just one season, moving to Bayern Munich or taking on the Premier League with Manchester City, he has usually come out on top.

On his first day at the Etihad Stadium in 2016, he admitted that, despite trophies in Spain and Germany, the question on everyone’s lips ahead of his arrival in England was: “How good is Pep?” He has already answered it once with 18 trophies in nine years in Manchester.

But amid a swirl of change at City and at the center of English soccer, he’s facing the prospect of having to answer it all over again. In a career full of challenges, this is perhaps one of the biggest yet.

Had things played out differently, Guardiola might already be enjoying his retirement on a beach in the Maldives or a golf course in Portugal. He chose to stay at City, in part, because the beginning of this past season — only the second to end without a trophy during his spell at the Etihad — was so difficult and he didn’t want to leave the club in a mess. It appears he also realized the club would find it far easier to hand over to a new manager in a summer that didn’t include the added complication of a Club World Cup.

Having decided to stay and sign a contract extension until 2027, he has taken on the task of trying to build another title-winning team. It’s just that the landscape now is very different.

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Of the squad he picked for the Champions League final against Inter Milan in Istanbul just two years ago, 15 players — including Kevin De Bruyne, Ederson, Kyle Walker and Ilkay Gündogan — have either left or been moved out to the fringes.

It’s not just the personnel who have changed. At the same time as dealing with huge squad turnover, Guardiola is also trying to adapt to what he views as a shift in the balance of the Premier League.

At one point this past season when discussing the success of teams like Newcastle, Bournemouth and Brighton, he said that “modern football is not positional, you have to ride the rhythm.” It was quite the admission from a coach who has built an empire on a strict framework of positions and movements.

After City’s Champions League defeat to Real Madrid in February, he said his “tactics don’t work like they used to.” Earlier this season he insisted he would “never ever change his beliefs” and still likes his team to make “a thousand, million passes.”

It seems, though, he has reached an acceptance that he has to change with the times.

This season, he’s trying to marry his own desire for control with more high pressing and quicker, more direct attacks to mirror what’s happening elsewhere in the league. It’s one of the reasons he picked Pep Lijnders as his assistant after the Dutchman played such a key role in developing Jürgen Klopp’s “heavy metal” style at Liverpool.

It’s a nice idea, trying to merge elements of two of the most successful teams in the modern Premier League era, but it has come with some teething problems.

After starting with an eye-catching 4-0 win at Wolves to open the 2025-26 season, City lost their next two games. In defeats to Tottenham and Brighton, they conceded almost identical goals when fast breaks exploited gaping holes at the back — gaps made more pronounced by the high defensive line favored by Lijnders.

It’s something Manchester United manager Ruben Amorim will have no doubt noticed ahead of the Manchester derby at the Etihad on Sunday. City will kick off against United one point and four places below their neighbors in the table. They’re already six points behind champions Liverpool, who can now call on new £125 million striker Alexander Isak after the international break.

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No team since Manchester United in 1992-93 has lost two of their first three games and still gone on to win the league. Even at this early stage, there’s a lot of ground to make up if Guardiola wants to regain the trophy he lifted six times in seven years between 2017 and 2024.

But if it’s not going to be this season for City and Guardiola, then when? Guardiola has a contract for the next two years, but staff have given up trying to predict when he might call it quits.

There’s a feeling in some corners of the City Football Academy that this could yet be his last season. There are others who feel that, even though he has admitted he’s approaching the end, the 54-year-old could still be convinced to sign another new contract. That would depend very much on his own energy levels and whether the working relationship with director of football Hugo Viana — who has taken over from Guardiola’s great friend Txiki Begiristain — is running smoothly.

Either way, City bosses decided a long time ago that Guardiola has earned the right to decide how and when he goes. He has accepted that this past season was so bad in terms of City’s specific goals that he might have been axed by any other top club.

At the end of his 26 years at United, Sir Alex Ferguson bowed out as a champion after winning the title in 2013. Guardiola’s achievements deserve the same finale.

To give himself the perfect send-off he’ll need to piece together another great team capable of thriving in a different age of the Premier League. It’s another big challenge to tick off the list.

Christian Pulisic has downplayed the controversy between himself and Mauricio Pochettino, saying his relationship with the United States coach is good.

A star USMNT player, Pulisic decided to skip the Concacaf Gold Cup to rest after two long seasons with AC Milan. He offered to play in a pair of friendlies ahead of the tournament, which Pochettino rejected because he wanted to keep one group together. Pulisic was then criticized by some former American players.

Pulisic returned to the national team this month and started in a pair of friendlies, assisting in the second goal in Tuesday night’s 2-0 win over Japan.

“We have good conversations,” Pulisic told reporters of his relationship with Pochettino. “Honestly. Probably what you guys experience and what the media sees is a bit not exactly what we experience. Things are good. We spoke. We had a normal camp and everything is good between us, good between the team.

“There’s probably not as much drama as you guys think there is.”

The winger, who turns 27 on Sept. 18, made his national team debut in 2016 and has 32 goals in 80 international appearances. He scored the lone U.S. goal at Trinidad on the night the Americans failed to qualify for the 2018 tournament and scored in the 1-0 win over Iran at the 2022 World Cup.

“I love this team. It’s everything to me,” he said. “I’ve been here for quite a long time. I’m getting to see some new guys, getting to bond with some old players. Even seeing [Cristian] Roldan again, it’s so cool for me.

“For me personally, I don’t feel like a step was lost.”

Pulisic had not spoken with reporters since last spring.

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In explaining in June why he wouldn’t accept Pulisic for the friendlies against Turkey and Switzerland, Pochettino said: “I am the head coach. I am not a mannequin.”

“I think it’s behind us, all that happened in summer, and I think now we need to look forward,” Pochettino said last month after announcing his September roster.

“We all made a mistake in some time, because we read the situation in a different way,” Pochettino added last Friday. “The most important is that when you are intelligent people, if we want to move on and do the right things — I want to be intelligent.”

Pochettino had said ahead of camp that he did not speak with Pulisic over the summer.

“Obviously, national team can be tough because you don’t spend day-to-day together,” Pulisic said. “So I think in the camps we’ve come in, got to know each other and starting to just, yeah, learn each other, learn the team, and, yeah, how we can both help each other as best we can to go forward and try to win. So, I’d say it’s good.”