These 11 hitters were grateful for this year's luckiest hits

It's Thanksgiving, so let's take a look at some baseball players who had something extra to be thankful for this year.

Here are 11 hitters who can be thankful for some of the luckiest hits of the 2023 season.

1) Luis Guillorme and Tomás Nido, Mets

Guillorme and Nido defied the odds by hitting not one, but two line-hugging infield singles in the same inning on April 10 against the Padres. Guillorme's bunt down the third-base line appeared to be going foul after catching the edge of the infield grass … only to somehow spin back along the foul line and stay fair. Two batters later, Nido followed with a swinging bunt that incredibly followed the exact same path -- it, too, took a turn toward foul territory after rolling along the edge of the grass, only to settle perfectly on the third-base line for a base hit.

2) Jeremy Peña, Astros

Speaking of line-hugging infield singles: Here's another one, from June 5, which also included a humorous homage to one of baseball's iconic bloopers. Alek Manoah was the culprit, as he tried to blow Peña's bunt roller foul as it trickled down the third-base line. Manoah failed, and Peña ended up with a hit.

It was a throwback to when Lenny Randle famously blew Amos Otis' ball foul in 1981 (Otis was awarded first base).

3) Xander Bogaerts, Padres

Bogaerts ended up with the goofiest triple of the year in a game against the Rockies on Sept. 18. It started with an "excuse me" half-swing on a Nick Mears slider that fooled Bogaerts, but he just barely got his bat on the ball and chopped a weak grounder toward third base. Perfectly toward third base, it turned out. The ball bounced off the bag, over third baseman Ryan McMahon's head and down the left-field line … where it rolled along the wall and got past left fielder Nolan Jones, letting Bogaerts get all the way to third. Bogaerts doesn't hit a lot of triples, either -- he has only three in the last five seasons, including this one.

4) Forrest Wall, Braves

Bogaerts isn't the only guy to hit a ball off a base this season. Wall did it, too -- and for his first Major League hit. The Braves rookie knocked a ball off the first-base bag and over a leaping Pete Alonso's glove in Atlanta's 21-3 blowout of the Mets on Aug. 12. And there was one more fun twist: Wall's knock came against a 64 mph lob thrown by position player Danny Mendick, who was pitching mop-up duty for New York. Nothing like your first hit!

5) Willi Castro, Twins

An infield popup should never be a hit. And yet, there was this play. On May 29 against the Astros, Castro blooped a ball basically straight up -- only 53.9 mph off the bat, at an 81-degree launch angle. The expected batting average on such a batted ball is .001 -- essentially, it's a hit 0% of the time. Except this time it was a hit. Astros pitcher Hector Neris deked third baseman Alex Bregman into thinking he was going to catch the ball -- only to scurry out of the way at the last second. Bregman, who had pulled up, simply watched the ball plop to the infield turf. The hit traveled a grand total of 30 feet.

6) Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Blue Jays

It's pretty uncommon for a Major League outfielder to lose track of a fly ball. But two on the same play? It happened to the Braves on May 12, when center fielder Michael Harris II and right fielder Ronald Acuña Jr. both lost Guerrero's sky-high fly ball into the Rogers Centre rafters. Both outfielders threw up their arms in the same "Where is it?" gesture, as the ball fell behind them for a double. Harris and Acuña both had a 99% catch probability on the play, per Statcast.

7) Hunter Goodman, Rockies

Not to pick on Acuña too much, but the National League MVP did have some adventures in the outfield in 2023. On Aug. 28, he got such a late read on Goodman's fly ball to right field that he let a ball with 6.7 seconds of hang time drop to the turf. Acuña froze on contact, then drifted in, then finally started sprinting as he realized how far he was from the ball's landing spot. He couldn't get there and Goodman got an extra-base hit out of a ball in which the outfielder had a 99% catch probability.

8) Brandon Nimmo, Mets

You might never see an outfielder take a route like this again. Nimmo hit a routine fly ball to left field, and Sam Haggerty jogged into position to make the catch. But that's when he realized the spot he ran to on the field wasn't the spot where the ball was going. In fact, Haggerty was nowhere near the ball. He tried to recover and sprint over to make the catch, but didn't get there in time.

That's how Nimmo ended up with an unusual double on the old "L"-shaped outfield route.

9) CJ Abrams, Nationals

Sometimes, you just lose a ball in the sun. It happens to even the best fielders, and it happened to Rangers star second baseman Marcus Semien on July 9. Abrams' infield popup plopped perfectly between Semien and shortstop Corey Seager, who were standing only feet from each other by second base. Like Castro on his lucky hit above, Abrams had an expected batting average of .001 on this batted ball, making it as unlikely a hit as it gets.

10) Rafael Devers, Red Sox

Let's get a home run in here. Devers' on June 13 was the shortest over-the-fence home run of the 2023 season, and it really had no business being a homer. It wasn't hit hard, with an exit velocity of 92.9 mph (a hard-hit ball is 95-plus). It was hit very high, with a 39-degree launch angle and 5.5 seconds of hang time, normally plenty of time for an outfielder to make the catch. But Devers' fly ball at Fenway Park was hit to the perfect spot and had just had enough distance -- 311 feet -- to reach Pesky's Pole in the right-field corner.

Fenway Park is the only MLB stadium where it would've been a home run, and balls hit with that exit velocity and launch angle are outs over 95% of the time.

11) Brandon Belt, Blue Jays

How about one more home run to finish things off? Here's the softest home run of the year. Belt's homer on Aug. 20 at the super-hitter-friendly Great American Ball Park was hit just 87.6 mph -- over 10 mph slower than the pitch he hit it off, a 99.4 mph fastball from the Reds' Hunter Greene.

To give some context for how lucky it is for such a softly hit ball to be a home run: There were only five homers all year hit under 90 mph, out of 5,978 total in the big leagues, and Belt's homer is the second-softest to clear a fence in the last four seasons, out of the 19,786 homers hit since 2020. (Only Harold Ramírez's 85.4 mph home run on June 21, 2022 was softer.)