Retirement, Verlander style

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Genevieve Verlander, Justin Verlander

Daughter escorts father from the mound without a dry eye in the Comerica Park house Saturday.

The games meant nothing and everything at once. Nothing in the big picture of the Tigers’s season or the postseason they’re going to miss, but everything to their retiring Hall of Famer in waiting and his family. Especially his seven-year-old daughter.

Genevieve Verlander—that’s Vivi to her family and friends, as seen on the Tigers jacket she wears—highlighted the Tigers’s commemoration of Justin Verlander Friday night with a ceremonial first pitch curve not necessarily unlike the ones her father threw in his heyday.

Daddy himself squatted down to take the pitch. The split second it hit his glove, Verlander thrust his arms skyward and galloped out to sweep her up as she leaped into the arms she’s going to feel far more now than in her first years.

“It’s been awesome,” Verlander told MLB.com’s Jason Beck about their preparations. “We’ve been practicing. She’s all pumped up about it. We actually came out here to the field and practiced off the mound one day. I asked her, ‘Where do you want to go? You want to go to the mound?’ And she’s like, ‘The mound.’ I’m like, ‘That’s my girl’.”

The lack of dry eyes in the Comerica Park house could be equaled by one thing only, and it happened on the following afternoon. At the end of a season Verlander lost to injury in April, willing his way back to make a final stand before beginning the retirement he announced in July.

That’s when Verlander took the mound for the final time in his major league life, against the Pirates. When he pitched almost like a reasonable facsimile of his classic self, surrendering a measly two runs, both on solo home runs, then got the first out of the sixth and a surprise unlike any his career had brought him before.

This time, Vivi had more help. From mother Kate Upton and Tigers manager A.J. Hinch, who’d once also managed her father in Houston. They’d plotted this very moment. Verlander had no clue what would happen after he lured Brandon Lowe into a pop out to catcher Dillon Dingler.

Hinch walked out to plate umpire Laz Diaz to inform him of the pitching change. Then he motioned to the first base side. Vivi ran out toward the mound wearing an even bigger grin than the one behind which she threw the Friday night curve. Father and daughter hugged even harder this time around.

And Verlander—one of the most composed pitchers who ever stood on the mound before tying lineups into knots; a competitor who married power to smarts and feel to analytics; a lion so intense that it took marriage and fatherhood to let him look more human than he looked in his bristling younger seasons; a lancer who’d spent his final innings on the mound ironed up for work as always—lost it.

He wept. Unashamedly, unapologetically. Even Hinch looked as though he might shed a few tears as he joined father and daughter for a quick mini-group hug. “It hit me like a ton of bricks,” Verlander admitted after the game. He also admitted he hoped Vivi would understand he wept for joy, not sorrow.

This beat any father-daughter dance on record so far.

“He’s a really hard guy to surprise,” acknowledged Finch, who attests to numerous conversations with Verlander about fatherhood and family life. “He’s as planned out and mapped out as any human I’ve ever been around. And so I contacted Kate a little while ago and just tried to think about ways that we could create a special moment for him.”

It must have hit the Tigers like a ton of bricks that Verlander walked off the mound with Vivi in his arm and into the arms of her mother and her younger brother, Bellamy, with the Tigers in a 2-0 hole. (Lucky Pirate boys Lowe and Jacob Gonzalez. They get to brag that they took a Hall of Famer yard on his final day in the bigs.)

Lucky for them they could wrestle back to where a 3-1 deficit in the bottom of the ninth was, for once, just a simple hurdle.

First, Kevin McGonigle pushed Max Clark (one-out single) across the plate and Hao-Yu Lee (double) to third. Then Eduardo Valencia won it with a clean blast into the left field seats. Verlander wouldn’t get credit for a pitching win, but nobody questioned he and his family had won the day. And the weekend.

Detroit probably won’t remember Saturday’s final score as heavily as they’ll remember Vivi racing out to make sure her father wouldn’t step off the mound alone. In baseball terms, they’ll have far older memories to hold, as The Athletic‘s Cody Stavenhagen noted:

Electric strikeouts in the playoffs. Thrilling feats of dominance on so many summer days. He is best known throughout the sport for his longevity and his durability, a near-unbreakable force who lived to see an era where starters are coddled rather than pushed, where battles are won through algorithms and optimization just as much as they are heart and grit. The way he embraced it all, the old and the new, is part of what helped him outlast so many of his peers.

The family embraced again in front of the dugout and in front of Verlander’s teammates, with whom he’d share some final handshakes. Comerica Park rocked in tribute to the big righthander. He’d pitched for his heart and soul Saturday, and they knew it.

“It felt very storybook,” Upton said after the game. “And it was so Justin. That’s the most Justin Verlander thing I’ve ever seen.” She could have been referencing his pitching and his paternal vulnerability at once.

Then, the family disappeared through the dugout to the clubhouse and toward the rest of their lives.  Suddenly, you forgot the grizzled veteran resembling a prospector in the mountains too long, saying goodbye to the game he enhanced, stepping full time into the family life that didn’t unmake the three-time Cy Young Award-winning, 3,560-strikeout pitcher, but remade the man.

“I never wanted to retire because of a milestone, a number or a date on the calendar. I wanted the game to tell me it was time,” wrote the 42-year-old in a social media post.

Baseball has given me more than I could have imagined. It taught me discipline, resilience and the value of continuing to adapt and evolve. I’ve been fortunate to play with and against incredible players, for outstanding organizations and compete in front of fans who deeply appreciate the game.

Don’t waste your time pondering that Saturday’s quality start might portend Verlander rethinking retirement. He knows his body would laugh and bark, “That’s what you think.”

One day, perhaps Vivi Verlander will come to understand that she did a lot more than just charm the living daylights out of Detroit and baseball nation with her Friday night pitch and Saturday afternoon escort. God and her parents willing, she’ll see she helped her father do what too many of the greats fail to do. Hell, she helped him do what too much of this regular season failed to do.

She helped him leave baseball fans wanting more. But the only thing more her father can give fans from here is a speech on the Cooperstown stage in five years.

Turning to the Final Stretch

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Mike Yastrzemski

Mike Yastrzemski took a page out of Grandpa’s book Sunday to help the Braves clinch the NL East title.

As mid-to-late September weekends go, this one just finished had a few highs and a few lows. It also had at least one unexpected jolt of an injury to a batter who wasn’t even at the plate at the time.

In His Face Dept.—Alex Bregman did nothing but stand in front of the on deck circle with Michael Busch at the plate for the Cubs against the Reds in the fourth inning Sunday. Then Busch hit a check-swing foul off Reds righthander Luis Mey. Bing! The ball shot back, then into and off Bregman’s face, the veteran third baseman covering the stricken side as he made for the clubhouse.

“He got hit in the left cheekbone essentially, under the eye,” said Cubs manager Craig Counsell after the Cubs finished their 9-1 win. “I don’t know anything more than that right now. He was bleeding from his nose a little. There’s some swelling. It’s a terrible, terrible accident. We hope he’s OK.”

Bregman managed an Instagram post indicating he thinks he’s going to be more OK than his manager might: “Thanks for all the messages yall. I’ll be back.”

The better news for the Cubs: Most Valuable Player Award candidate Pete Crow-Armstrong smashed his 45th home run of the season, a two-run shot in the fifth inning. Last week, PCA became the Cubs’s all-time single-season home run hitter from the left side, passing Hall of Famer Billy Williams.

On the Threshold Dept.—Bregman’s injury may have sobered the Cubs postgame, but the win cut their magic number for a postseason berth to one. They might have clinched if the Diamondbacks lost to the Yankees Sunday, but the Snakes upended the Aaron Judge-less-again Yankees, 8-4.

The big blow: Nolan Arenado’s fifth-inning grand slam, his third salami slice of the season, off Yankees reliever Brent Headrick.

The good news for the Diamondbacks: The game was their 47th come-from-behind win this season, the best in Show. The bad news: They trail the Phillies for the final National League wild card slot by four games and have six left to play.

The Yankees have a wild card berth clinched. But to win the American League East, they’d have to win the rest of the way to season’s end and get a little help from their friends. They’ll have a grand chance to win half the battle: they start a four-game set against the division-leading Rays in Yankee Stadium Tuesday.

Whether You’re a Brother or Whether You’re a Mother Dept.—Going 52-25 since they looked dead and buried in late June has the Red Sox with a clinched American League wild card slot . . . but they needed some help from the Braves, who spent the weekend sweeping the Astros and thus enabled the Olde Towne Team—who lost to the Rays 5-1 Sunday—to clinch.

They’ve been rolling to the Bee Gees’s classic “Stayin’ Alive” during their long self-resurrection. “I think that pretty much says it all,” said left fielder Roman Anthony after they secured their slot. “We pretty much stayed alive when nobody else thought we could. Now here we are.”

It made the Red Sox only the fourth team to reach a postseason since 1903 after being fourteen games under .500 or more. Encouraging further note: two of the three previous reached the World Series, with one (the 1914 Boston Braves) winning it.

Let us remember: In this century, the Red Sox have made it to four World Series . . . and won all four of them. That’s a very far cry from their 20th century legend of extraterrestrial, star-crossed loss.

Land of the Braves Dept.—The Braves didn’t just nudge the Red Sox into the postseason with their weekend sweep. After clinching a postseason berth at all Friday, they finished their weekend clinching their seventh National League East title in nine seasons with a 4-2 win over the Astros.

“This is what it’s all about,” said outfielder Mike Yastrzemski while the Braves popped and sprayed the champagne after Sunday’s game. “It’s so hard to win baseball games in general in the big leagues because everybody is so good. It’s obviously not the end goal, but these are the times that you need to celebrate because it’s hard to get here.”

The grandson of Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski helped make things easier on Sunday, when he took a page from Grandpa’s book and hit one into the right center field seats with two aboard during a four-run sixth. The Astros’s Jose Altuve and Yainer Díaz homered solo and it wasn’t enough.

Walt Weiss, former major league infielder who’s in his first season at the Braves’s helm, agreed with Yastrzemski: “I told these guys winning the division is really tough. I know it’s the first step, but it takes six months to do it. It takes everybody, and we used everybody. Virtually everyone that got an opportunity stepped up and helped us win games this year. Special group in that way. Very close group.”

Weiss summed the Braves up well. They entered the season boasting of their depth, and the long grind they needed to prove its worth paid off.

One Lat, One Ranger Dept.—The AL West-leading Rangers took a blow this weekend: righthander Cal Quantrill hit the fifteen-day injured list with a tight right lat, incurred Saturday after twelve pitches to four Blue Jays.

Sunday wasn’t much better for the Rangers, their record back at .500 even with a loss to the Jays in which starter Jacob deGrom pitched despite some “mild” groin tightness and came out in the fifth with the bases loaded and the Jays up 3-2.

With the 7-2 final win, the Jays join the Astros in the hunt for the third AL wild card, and both finished Sunday two and a half behind the White Sox for the berth. The White Sox helped their own cause by spanking the Tigers Sunday, 8-1.

Chicago Unbound Dept.—Come to think of it, the White Sox finished Sunday remaining a single game back of the AL Central-leading Guardians. Their rough September nudged them out of the division lead, but they could still take the division with a stronger finish than the Cleveland company.

And to think that, just two years ago, suggesting a future higher than the basement for the White Sox was something out of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale.

Immaculate intro

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Payton Tolle

You’d grin, too, if you were just one pitch away from a game-opening immaculate inning and feeling you were going to nail it right before throwing pitch nine.

Payton Tolle can do an awful lot more than hug opposing hitters up the baselines or send other reminders of legendary fun-haver Mark (The Bird) Fidrych. He can even pitch. Sometimes, he can even do things for his team that only a Hall of Famer could and did 24 years earlier.

Things such as the most immaculate intro since B.B. King’s crying guitar ushered “The Thrill is Gone” in.

The big, bearish lefthander chose Sunday afternoon in Fenway Park to stand and deliver. Against the top of the Royals’ order. Nine pitches. Three strikeouts. Two swinging strikes followed by a called strike on Nick Loftin. Three swinging strikes by Bobby Witt, Jr. One foul followed by two swinging strikes from Jac Caglianone.

Tolle didn’t get to hug Loftin, Witt, or Caglianone. He simply grinned after pitch number eight, then pumped his glove and his fist and went, “Whooaaaa!” after strike nine. Nobody complained. Especially not the Red Sox, since Tolle went from there to pitch five shutout innings scattering four hits. To the Red Sox, those are hugs that help mean successful pennant races.

But they don’t exactly mind their gregarious southpaw’s act, either. Neither do the opponents. So far.

The only previous immaculate inning to open a Red Sox start was Hall of Famer Pedro Martinez, who did it to fellow Hall of Famer Ichiro Suzuki (swinging strikeout) plus Mark McLemore (called strikeout) and Rubén Sierra (swinging strikeout) on 18 May 2002. The most recent immaculate Red Sox frame in any inning was Chris Sale to the Twins in the top of the third on 26 August 2021. The victims: Nick Gordon, Andrelton Simmons, and Rob Refsnyder, performing their own version of “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Swing.”

The Red Sox won both those games, Martinez’s 4-1 and Sale’s 12-2. Tolle went from those first five to a slightly troublesome sixth: leadoff single (Witt), hit batsman (Caglianone), first and second and nobody out. Then: fly out to right (Salvador Perez) and back-to-back swinging strikeouts (Michael Massey and Matthew Lugo).

Didn’t seem to faze him. I can do this kinda stuff to ’em all through the picture, he seemed to say as he hopped off the mound. The Royals could have stepped into the batter’s box with bazookas, not bats, and Tolle would have indulged the hearty laugh. Then, he’d stuff a few fastballs down the tubes. With a cutter and a sinker now and then to break up the monotony.

All that with only one run to work with from his mates. More specifically, from Caleb Durbin,  who hit the first pitch he saw from Royals starter Nick Cameron over the Green Monster’s left center field side. You’d think a team averaging 4.4 runs a game playing an American League Central basement resident with a tragic number of four entering play Sunday could hand their most colourful pitcher a little bit more room to maneuver.

Oops. With Tolle finished after six shutout innings, the Royals now had a shot at the Red Sox bullpen. They opened against Erik Miller in the seventh with back-to-back inning-opening walks, a fielder’s choice making for an out at third the Royals challenged to no avail, and then Carter Jensen pinch hitting for Lofton and singling the run home against Garrett Whitlock.

Whitlock kept the damage to a single run when he got pinch-hitting Vinnie Pasquantino to fly out to deep enough center field for the side. Then the Red Sox got a crack at Craig Kimbrel, the veteran reliever. He once toiled for the Red Sox. His career then and since has been too much akin to the arsonist putting his own fires out. That’s a too sad decline for a guy who was one of the best relievers in the business, once.

Kimbrel spent the earlier part of the year with the Mets, before they released him to be picked up by the Rays—who released him, in turn, to be picked up by the Royals. His Royals stint thus far has actually been the best of the season and respectable in the bargain: a 3.27 ERA and a 3.01 fielding-independent pitching rate. The bad news: He’s given up ten hits in eleven innings’ work as a Royal, his walks/hits per inning pitched (WHIP) rate is a skating-near-thin-ice 1.27, and he sports a 3.3 walks-per-nine rate.

Entering a tie game to start the seventh, Kimbrel induced a leadoff fly out (Trevor Story) but walked Durbin and Nick Sogard back-to-back. Royals manager Matt Quartraro took no further chances. He pulled Kimbrel post haste and went to Connor Thomas. Double oops.

Thomas got rid of Andruw Monasterio with a punchout but Roman Anthony cashed Kimbrel’s errant chip, singling Durbin home to break the one-all tie. Thomas slid out of further trouble with another called punchout. But in the bottom of the eighth, Story slashed a two-run single. The score held for a 4-1 Red Sox win.

Shame, though, that Aroldis Chapman had to work the top of the ninth as if he was a late-career Kimbrel disciple. Putting out a small fire he set himself: back-to-back walks to open, then striking out the side. If we can’t discard the save rule just yet, perhaps we can call “no save” when you’re starting the ninth cold but setting your own fire from which to save your team?

None of which was enough to erase the joy of Tolle’s game-opening feat. Just the latest ode to joy from a pitcher whose mother’s guidance and memory inspired him to inscribe her favourite phrase for him (You’re so pretty) on one finger of his glove. If this keeps up, the Red Sox theme might become the wearing of the grin.

This time, it’s for real

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Arte Moreno

Arte Moreno leaves a serious mess for new owner Stan Kroenke to clean up.

A headline in The Athletic called the depths to which the Angels have sunk in the past decade plus the result of their soon-to-be-former owner’s meddling, myopia, and penny-pinching. That’s almost like saying the depths to which the nation has been plunged are the result of its president’s egoism, narcissism, and avarice. Thank you, Captains Obvious.

Angel Stadium is a hope, skip, and catcher’s throw to second base from what’s been called (mostly by its founder and the company he bequeathed) the happiest place on earth. The ballpark itself, and the fan base that fills it almost in spite of itself, hadn’t been the happiest place on earth in a very long time, until this week past.

Arte Moreno first entertained selling the Angels in August 2022 . . . until he didn’t. It wasn’t nice to tease Angel fans suffocating over a team’s ineptitude built (or should we say unbuilt) by the very owner teasing the sale. Then came Wednesday of this week, when the news broke like New Year’s Eve fireworks that Moreno agreed to sell at last, to Stan Kroenke and his Kroenke Sports and Entertainment group.

Christmas in September! Our long national nightmare is on the threshold of over! Goodbye, Arte, goodbye Arte, goodbye Arte, we don’t hate to see you go! There may have been no way season-long “Sell the Team!”-chanting Angel fans could have out-celebrated that news. Not yet, anyway.

The early reviews and previews have had it that Kroenke likes to win, owns a few other sports franchise who like to win just as much, and isn’t what Moreno proved to be. Kroenke isn’t known to be fearful of reasonable investment in his teams and their facilities. The Angel news was barely a day old when speculation arose that he’s willing to build the Angels a brand-new ballpark. With his own money, even.

Moreno was major league baseball’s first Latino owner, and one with pockets almost as deep as the Damn Dodgers or the Empire Emeritus. But this big-market owner with big-market resources preferred to spend like a flea market owner in a one-horse town—where the horse was a hobby horse. Unless he could find what once animated a certain longtime Yankee owner: “name guys who put fannies in the seats.”

Whether they cohered into a solid baseball team was the question Moreno could always ask later.

Since the Angel sale was first announced, observers have tripped over themselves and each other trying to decide Moreno’s top five foul-ups, bleeps, and blunders. Only five? Here we go again:

* He ordered then-GM Tony Reagins to deal for Vernon Wells after he couldn’t convince future Hall of Famer Adrián Beltré to sign as a free agent. Ignorance wasn’t bliss: the Blue Jays probably popped champagne corks over the declining Wells becoming someone else’s headache.

* Seeking scapegoats instead of solutions, he purged international scouting director Clay Daniels and overall scouting chief Eddie Bane over bonus skimming by some Daniels subordinates and never really seemed to address the Angels’s scouting problems at their depth.

* He addressed the Angels’s chronic pitching issues with bargain reclamation projects instead of sound development and free agency pickings—then, he (and Angel fans) watched enough of those projects deflate in Anaheim but a) find revival elsewhere; or, b) leave the game as what-ifs.

* He refused to deal Shohei Ohtani approaching two trade deadlines for much-needed infusions of youth and minor-league replenisments, then watched him walk into free agency and the Dodgers’s arms and back-to-back World Series championships.

* He handled injury-addled Josh Hamilton’s drinking relapse more clumsily than Donald Trump handles international relations: Hamilton obeyed the protocols and told on himself at once, but his Angels boss of bosses ran him out of town on a rail into the arms of the Rangers who wouldn’t have to pay a thing to take him back.

* He refused steadily to entertain dealing Mike Trout for needed youth and farm infusions and wasted the prime of the single greatest position player the Angels have ever known, now in an injury-depleted decline phase in which he has occasional flashes of his former self.

* Instead of entertaining an Ohtani deal, he went all-in on a 2023 trade deadline acquisition haul, but then put five players including their two key deadline acquisition on the waiver wire when that illusory 11-3 July finish turned into an 8-19 August.

* He barely registered the Tyler Skaggs tragedy, the popular pitcher dying of a fetanyl overdose, an Angels employee providing the stuff to Skaggs (he may have become addicted after surgery before he became an Angel), and the team finally settling with the his widow and family.

* He scapegoated several managers after Mike Scioscia’s retirement, especially Joe Maddon, Scioscia’s longtime bench coach turned Cubs curse-busting World Series-winning manager, whose even hands couldn’t lift an Angels team riddled with pitching issues and injuries, none of which were Maddon’s fault.

There’s a reason I haven’t mentioned Hall of Famer-in-waiting Albert Pujols plus C.J. Wilson, Zack Cozart, and Anthony Rendon. Injuries aren’t Moreno’s doing. He didn’t ask for Pujols to incur numerous lower body issues before releasing him to finish his career a Dodger and then a prodigal Cardinal.

He didn’t ask for Wilson’s body to prompt his retirement after two Angel seasons, for Cozart’s labrum, shoulder, and neck to put paid to his career after he was dealt away, and for Rendon to have nothing but injuries to show for his big deal after a serviceable (abbreviated) 2020. For those, Moreno’s off the hook.

For everything else, Kroenke’s going to have his work cut out for him. He’s going to have to remake/remodel a team whose now-former owner’s biggest legacy is wasting the primes of Trout and Ohtani. No matter how much money he has, no matter how much winning his other sports franchises have delivered, when it comes to the Angels there’ve been oil spills that were easier to clean up.

A Giant disaster, and other dog days afternoons

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Oracle Park

Oracle Park’s Opening Night pagenatry turned to a 1-0 loss and a season-opening three-game losing streak . . . a giant harbinger of disaster to come for the Giants this season . . .

As the dog days of August go, this year’s dogs took their time to run, even if they weren’t always as brutal on the heat side. (At least, not in my neighbourhood.) On the other hand, when I sat down to write seven American League teams with losing records remained in the wild card picture and nobody in the AL West had a winning record. (The Astros opened Sunday at .500.)

Thus do we approach September’s advent. With the National League slightly more respectable than the AL, with a mere four teams holding losing records and lingering wild card hunt positions. But Sunday also began with the Giants one game away from joining the Rockies at being eliminated from the postseason mathematically.

The Giants didn’t even have to lift a finger for that elimination. They had the scheduling quirk of a Sunday off-day, resuming play against the Diamondbacks to end the month. All they needed was the Dodgers to beat the Tigers, and they could relax. Well. The Dodgers won, 6-1, taking two out of three from the Tigers beginning with former Tiger Tarik Skubal’s ten punchout masterwork to open the set.

How on earth did these Giants sink to Rockies-level calamity? You don’t even have to bring up the ups, downs, quirks, and jerks of Rafael Devers and company, though you might want to consider Matt Chapman and Willy Admaes on big deals but approaching the downturn if they haven’t hit it already.

Start with the starting rotation. Behind Logan Webb (who opened with a whisper before rounding back up) it has no pitcher with a strikeout-to-walk ratio over 2.5 except Webb, and only one pitcher not named Webb (Landon Roupp) has a fielding-independent pitching rate under 4.00

They’re hardly the least run-preventive pitching staff in the Show (the team FIP is a league-average 4.16) but between those non-Webb starters and a bullpen losing enough leads after six innings to be tried by jury for treason, the Giants aren’t exactly the group the other guys’ batters fear.

Not to mention that PBO Buster Posey—Hall of Famer in waiting as a retired catcher, too many growing pains running the organisational show—spent much of the year with a shallow farm and a lack of bench depth when the injury bug proved a bit of a swarm. His trade deadline activity brought back some value but that won’t be manifest for another year or so.

Not to mention further that, well, you could dress these Giants up but you couldn’t take them anywhere. Entering Sunday they were .338 on the road (23-45) compared to .478 (33-36) at home. Their traveling secretary must have had a few too many days prepared to beg, “Do I really have to?”

Now, their long National League nightmare of 2026 is all over but for the September string. They sat at 9-19 for August following Sunday’s day-off mercy killing, the worst month of a season in which they never got closer in any full month than a game below .500 (in July).

Meanwhile, around the bases, down the lines, and up from the dugouts . . .

MVPete Dept.—That three-homer Friday Pete Crow-Armstrong treated himself against the fading Reds catapulted him a little more ahead of the NL’s Most Valuable Player Award  pack. Entering Sunday’s play, moreover, PCA led the entire Show with 8.3 WAR on the season (almost two full ahead of Shohei Ohtani) and 296 total bases. He also entered the day leading the NL in slugging, OPS, and OPS+.

He’s no slouch in center field, being seven runs above the league average for total zone runs and fourteen above the league average for defensive runs saved. Did we mention that he also leads the NL in win probability added? With Ohtani a mere sixth and Sal Stewart, the league’s runs batted in leader entering Sunday’s play, nowhere to be found in the top ten.

You Know Us, Sal Dept.—Stewart’s league leadership in the team-dependent RBI department ([RBI’s] depend on managerial control, a hitter’s position in the batting order, park dimensions, and the success of his teammates in getting on base ahead of him.—Branch Rickey) has the old/mold school salivating on his MVP behalf.

WPA isn’t the only truly critical category where Stewart sits outside the league’s top ten. He’s also outside the top ten in WAR overall, offensive WAR, defensive WAR, OBP, slugging, OPS, OPS+, hits, extra base hits, and walks. He’s a good player who promises greatness. But he doesn’t belong in the MVP conversation yet.

Knee Trembling Dept.—The Yankees’s promising rookie shortstop, George Lombard, Jr., suffered a brief spell of defensive hiccups after an eye-opening beginning, and now he’s dodged a serious knee issue. He “tweaked” his knee swinging during a Saturday game against the Red Sox. It turned out to have no structural damage but inflammation that might yet land him on the injured list at this writing.

Wild Teoscar Dept.—Back to that 6-1 Dodger win Sunday. It might have been a mere 3-1 but for Teoscar Hernández on the loose after he was hit by a pitch with Mookie Betts on second, Freddie Freeman on first, and one out in the top of the eighth. Tigers reliever Tanner Rainey promptly wild pitched the Mookie Monster home. Max Muncy almost promptly singled Freeman home from there. Then Hernández scored on another Rainey wild pitch.

All that after Hernández busted a one-all tie against Tigers starter Framber Valdez in the top of the sixth, smashing a hanging changeup into the center field seats with Freeman aboard.

Framber Valdez, Teoscar Hernández

Hernández about to send that hanger out . . . (SNLA capture.)

Mercy, Mercy Mess Dept.—Dropping two of three to the Astros this weekend won’t slaughter the Mets’s otherwise fine August. (They were 14-12 after Sunday’s 6-3 loss.) But they were 11-6 as of 19 August. Then, they went 3-6 including Sunday. Still, watching their youth brigade continue to play without surrender has been fun, and they will finish August with their second winning month of the season.

But only their second, alas.