David Hess wasn’t faking his surprise that Orioles manager Brandon Hyde (in jacket) came out with a hook when he was eight outs from finishing a potential no-hitter.

Something strange happened to the Orioles. They won three out of four including two against the Yankees to open the season. But something more curious happened to them on the way to the third win.

First-year manager Brandon Hyde hooked his Monday night starter, David Hess, who took a no-hit bid to one out in the seventh before a hard line drive out ended his evening. The Oriole bullpen almost torched away a game they’d led 4-0 before Hess even had to take the mound.

And none of the above were April Fool’s jokes.

Hess threw 82 pitches when Hyde went to the mound to lift him. The righthander put a little extra fuel into his fastball and let it set up his fine secondary pitches including an effective changeup he threw more often than he seems to have done in any of his 2018 games. Throwing twelve out of twenty first pitch strikes didn’t hurt, either.

Hyde’s expressed concern was Hess having also thrown 42 pitches in two innings worth of scoreless Opening Day relief against the Yankees three days earlier. Hess looked as though he’d seen two ghosts and the Loch Ness Monster when Hyde arrived at the mound.

Even the Rogers Centre audience booed when Hyde lifted Hess.

“Hyde likely didn’t want to force his young pitcher to have to throw 150 pitches in the span of four days,” writes NBC Sports’s Bill Baer. Deadspin writer Tom Ley isn’t that sanguine:

[L]et’s not forget that Hess’s pitch count being such a cause for concern was entirely the result of the O’s steadfast refusal to field a real, major-league quality baseball team. This is a team in desperate need of pitching reinforcements, but instead of spending money on a player like Dallas Keuchel, they decided to start the season with just four starters, leaving Hyde a jumble of pitchers with nebulous roles with which to patch together outings. This is how you end up with a guy like Hess—not a reliever but not really a starter, either—losing a shot at a no-hitter because he had to pitch two innings in relief three days earlier.

Some think the Orioles’ front office, as happens with a number of other front offices these days, put Hyde on a strict pitch count for Monday considering that he did work heavily in relief on Opening Day. Others think Hyde was being a little too over-protective. My guess is the truth might be somewhere in the middle.

Hess proved stand-up enough after the game—acknowledging both his personal disappointment but appreciation that his manager was looking out for his health—which was pretty impressive considering what almost happened after he departed. After his eight strikeout/one walk/no-hit performance, the Orioles ended up being lucky they banked a 6-5 win with the potential tying run stranded on third.

Pedro Araujo relieved Hess and walked Justin Smoak promptly enough. Then Araujo lost the no-hit bid entirely when Randal Grichuk, once a touted young Cardinal bedeviled by injuries and traded to the Blue Jays in January, sent a 2-1 pitch over the left field fence.

Araujo escaped after a followup single and an inning-ending double play. His relief, Mike Wright, got two swift enough outs before Freddy Galvis hit one down the line and over the right field fence before Billy McKinney flied out to end the eighth.

But with one out in the ninth Wright turned it over to Richard Bleier. And Bleier almost turned the whole game over thanks to a sacrifice fly (pinch hitter Kevin Pillar) and an RBI triple (Teoscar Hernandez) before he struck out Lourdes Gurriel to let the Orioles escape with their lives.

All other things considered it wasn’t tough to believe they might have lucked out taking two of three from the Empire Emeritus despite being out-scored by a run during the set before arriving in Toronto.

So how realistic was the concern for Hess’s pitch count and workload?

You can look at his first near-full major league season last year and say he wasn’t exactly overworked—but he started the season at Norfolk (AAA) and pitched 45.2 innings in nine starts before coming up to Baltimore to pitch 103.1 innings. Total it as 148 innings.

As an Oriole in 2018, Hess had a 4.88 ERA and a 5.80 fielding-independent pitching rate; he’s not exactly a strikeout artist and he’s neither a hard fly ball nor hard ground ball pitcher. And he worked with an average 2.9 runs worth of support while he was in his games. There’s a certain degree of hard luck in there, but only a certain.

Except for the 154.1 innings he pitched at Bowie (AA) in 2017, Hess’s total 2018 workload was the heaviest of a career that began in 2014 as a fifth-round draft pick and saw him promoted from A to AA during his second season, when he was 21. Now he’s 25. Except for Monday night, he hasn’t exactly looked like the second coming of past great Orioles pitchers.

But he hasn’t been the most overworked pitcher in the business, either. Unless something looms for him that would be completely unexpected, Hess isn’t likely to suffer the fate of four-fifths of the once-vaunted “Baby Birds” Oriole rotation of 1959-61 (Milt Pappas, Jerry Walker, Jack Fisher, Chuck Estrada, Steve Barber) who looked like comers but ended up with broken or dead arms and short enough careers.

The Baby Birds were bedeviled by a man, Paul Richards, with an overblown reputation for handling pitching. He could handle it as a catcher, which is how he got his rep in the first place, but he mismanaged his Baby Birds horrifically. A longtime Orioles scout, Jim Russo, in his memoir Super Scout: Thirty-Five Years of Major League Scouting, dropped the dime on Richards:

With Paul, we led the major leagues in, of all things, tonsillectomies. Paul was from the old school that said, “There’s got to be poison in your system if you’ve got an injury.” When our young pitchers would come up with shoulder problems, Paul would tell our team doctor, “Doc, these kids are having shoulder and arm problems. Better check those tonsils out real close.” We had more kids having their tonsils removed than any other club, and it was all silly and unnecessary. The only thing wrong with those kids was they were throwing too much.

Paul’s teaching ability was genius. But he had another side that was just plain dumb . . . [O]ne of those kids would pitch in an exhibition game and, instead of running and a shower, it was to the bullpen to work on either an extra pitch or the slip pitch. And nobody’s keeping track of how many pitches they’re throwing. We’re not talking about veterans here. We’re talking about nineteen- and twenty-year-old arms. Everybody calls Paul a genius, and he was a real smart man. But how can you lose track of that?

What a surprise, then, that Jerry Walker, Chuck Estrada, and Steve Barber ended up with elbow- or shoulder-compromised careers. What a surprise, then, that Jack Fisher was plain overworked by the time he became a Met in 1964 and turned into a plain workhorse who was far less than half of how he looked in 1959-60 with the Orioles.

They used to say of Milt Pappas that he was “babied” because, somehow, his workload wasn’t quite as heavy as the others. Maybe what they ought to say is, what a real surprise that Pappas was probably lucky to enjoy as long, as healthy, and as fine a career as he ended up enjoying. Among the Baby Birds he was the exception, not the rule.*

Nor does Hess seem likely to go the way of Generation K, the Mets’ prospective mid-1990s front-line threesome of Jason Isringhausen, Bill Pulsipher, and Paul Wilson. Overworked insanely in the minors before they were each 22. One and all ended up with elbow or shoulder trouble, sometimes both. Careers destroyed, if you didn’t count Isringhausen’s somewhat unlikely resurrection as a quality relief pitcher for over a decade.

Generation K’s problem was the Mets’ minor league brain trust and the parent club’s manager at the time. A former pitcher of modest endowment himself, Dallas Green was never programmed to believe that a very young pitcher’s arm and shoulder weren’t born major league ready and could be ruined with overwork before proper development and strengthening.

Neither Green nor the Mets’ farm administration had a clue, and maybe they couldn’t have cared less, that Isringhausen, Pulsipher, and Wilson came up to the Mets half cooked already. Until, one after the other, all three went down injured fast enough and, as Rob Neyer once observed, “it opened a lot of eyes, even among grizzled old baseball men who would much rather have remained blind.”

The thing that bothered me the most about my short career is the fact that I was just learning how to pitch when my arm blew out. I used to challenge everybody.—Chuck Estrada.

I’ve told many people this before: I’ve done two things that never will happen again. Throw 200 innings in a minor league season and throw 131 pitches in my first major league start. Those two things will never happen again.—Bill Pulsipher.

David Hess doesn’t look bound for a Hall of Fame pitching career, and perhaps that’s a big reason why there was such a moan of disappointment that he was pulled with a no-hitter in the making Monday night. You know: a guy who’s liable to be a major league footnote in the long run has a shot at immortality for one night.

Even an organisation that’s the clown show Deadspin describes gets things right once in awhile. Sure it would have been fun to see if Hess could have finished what he started, and fun isn’t likely to be synonymous with Orioles baseball very often this year, barring unforeseen surprises.

But Hess was beginning to droop a bit before he was hooked. The final two outs he got on the night were hard line drives. Like a lot of pitchers, Hess isn’t as effective the third time around the order. And if it’s going to be another long sad season for the Orioles after all, the least they can do is make sure they have live arms later on (they’re missing a few right now, by the way), if only to keep the embarrassments per game from happening too soon, too often.

* Milt Pappas, who died in 2016, once claimed Paul Richards put him on strict pitch limits early enough to ensure his long career. Except that Pappas pitched fifteen complete games in 1959 and eleven in 1960—and, as Rob Neyer once pointed out, it’s kind of tough to throw 26 complete games in two seasons if you’re on a 90-pitch game limit. And from 1959-1965, Pappas pitched 79 complete games, second most in the American League in that span.

The facts include that Pappas averaged nine complete games per 162 games lifetime; he averaged almost seven innings per start lifetime; and in his ages 32-33 seasons—managed as a Cub by Leo Durocher, a man not exactly sensitive to the physical drain of pitching—he threw, respectively, fourteen and ten complete games, including eight shutouts and a no-hitter.

But perhaps those ages 32-33 seasons took more out of Pappas than he was willing to admit. After a very down 1973, he was finished . . . at 35.

There may have been a small stretch when Richards nursed Pappas as a 19-year-old major league pitcher but that seems to have been it. I’m no expert but I think it’s a safe guess to say that Pappas simply was a stronger physical specimen than his fellow Baby Birds. There’s no other explanation, other than that he lived on control instead of hard throwing (his money pitch was a firm slider), for why he forged a sixteen-year career despite Richards’s general carelessness with those pitchers.

Moments after he celebrated Bryce Harper’s (right) Sunday afternoon ICBM, Rhys Hoskins (left) took one for the team en route the Phillies’ opening weekend sweep.

“It really pisses me off,” Phillies manager Gabe Kapler said Sunday afternoon, “when balls go underneath Rhys Hoskins’s chin.” Especially when the only thing Hoskins did to deserve one was to bat in the Phillies’ lineup behind Bryce Harper.

Harper’s mammoth home run in the bottom of the seventh off Braves reliever Shane Carle, after he’d spent the earlier part of Sunday’s 5-1 conquest of the Braves walking twice and doubling once, got Hoskins drilled after he’d fouled off the first pitch from Carle.

That first pitch was down the pipe. The second pitch crossed the plate head high and nailed Hoskins in the shoulder after he turned to avoid having his head torn off. Even on a sub-50 degree evening when, as Phillies pitcher Jake Arrieta said, it was like trying to grip a cue ball, a batter getting drilled almost immediately after another batter goes long distance is suspect.

All Harper did was linger just a few seconds after he swung before running out the leadoff blast that landed almost in the rear end of the lower right field seats. Maybe what happened after he crossed the plate stuck a bug in the Braves.

These Phillies are an exuberant bunch. They take Harper’s mantra from 2016, “Make Baseball Fun Again,” seriously. They don’t just shake hands or bump or lock elbows when celebrating a buddy’s big hit, they have routines that include comic pantomimes.

Including but not limited to Harper and Andrew McCutchen buttoning up imaginary suits. Or Harper and Mikael Franco channeling their inner Usain Bolts and shooting imaginary arrows in the sky. Or assorted nutty handshakes. Or Harper and Hoskins’ elbow lock after Harper’s Sunday ICBM.

They’re baseball’s version of An Evening at the Improv when life is good and the Phun Phillies win. And if the other guys think it’s about as funny as a screen door on a submarine? Hoskins himself had one answer: “Don’t give up the home run, then.”

The good news is that Carle’s would-have-been decapitation wasn’t a three-season-delayed response to a postseason home run. Hunter Strickland, then with the Giants but now with the Mariners, thought of that when he drilled Harper in the hip in a May 2017 game—over a pair of blasts Harper’d hit off Strickland in the 2014 National League division series.

The second of those blasts sailed so straight above the foul line that Harper waited until he was dead last certain it would be called fair. It was—and it landed in McCovey’s Cove behind Oracle Park. (Oops—it was called AT&T Park then.) No matter. The only thing more astonishing than the blast itself was Strickland not facing Harper again until three seasons later and letting him have it.

The bad news is that nobody can prove for dead last certain whether Carle was trying to assassinate Hoskins but everyone can agree on one thing: it’s terrible optics when you’ve been taken to the last station on the downtown subway and you drill the next man up in the lineup. Especially at the end of a set in which Hoskins was brushed back a few times.

That’s probably what hit the mind of plate umpire Rob Drake when he tossed Carle without hesitation after Hoskins took it off the left shoulder. Brian McCann, the veteran catcher who’s returned to the Braves this season, pleaded in vain for his man. Considering McCann’s history of lecturing players on the spot about the Sacred Unwritten Rules, this was like Bonnie and Clyde acting as character witnesses for Ma Barker.

On the other hand, this might have been slightly out of character for the Braves. As Atlanta Journal-Constitution writer Mark Bradley observes, “[S]eeing Harper do anything good really irks the Braves. Usually, though, they just throw at him.”

But then there was Braves manager Brian Snitker. “He lost the ball, and unfortunately it hit him. I hate that,” Snitker said of Carle. “Umpire had to do what he thought he had to do, but there’s no way in hell that he’s trying to send a message or anything like that. The ball just got away.”

So, apparently, did the optics. And watching a replay of the pitch several times, Carle was trying to throw up to the attic and into it if Hoskins hadn’t done the twist upon final approach.

The National League East was supposed to be a dogfight this season, right? Well, the four top dogs squared off among themselves to open the season. And one of them is undefeated so far while the other is the Show’s only club without a win to open their season.

The Mets took two out of three from the Nationals, and the Nats at least showed some life after a few Opening Day malpractises to win Sunday with a little help from a pocketful of Met mistakes. The Phillies swept the Braves and, as good as you suspected the Phillies would really be, this sweep felt almost like watching an F-22 shoot down a Douglas DC-3.

The Phillies out-scored the Braves 23-11 on the set. The bullpen was a collection of calves with Carle himself appearing twice and showing a 27.00 ERA for his effort; they haven’t blown any saves but, as Bradley rather cruelly noted, “They haven’t had a save to blow.”

Julio Teheran started Opening Day and surrendered “his usual” (Bradley’s term) first inning bomb, this one to the Phillies’ freshly imported Andrew McCutchen batting leadoff. The Braves’ import Josh Donaldson, on the comeback trail, spent the opening set going 1-for-11.

Harper, the Phillies’ $335 million dollar man, and one who’s going to become a father for the first time in August, spent the opening set going 3-for-9 with all three of his hits for extra bases while taking three walks, one intentional. And every Phillies regular except for catcher Odubel Herrera had at least two hits to open the season. Not to mention Aaron Nola pitching like Aaron Nola on Opening Day and Arrieta, despite not having quite his best, having enough to make it count Sunday night.

The Braves? Only four of their regulars have more than a single hit to open the season. They have only five extra base hits so far, and while seven RBI might impressive any other series those came against those score-happy Phillies. The Braves’ pitching finished the weekend with an 8.63 team ERA next to the Phillies’ 3.67. The Braves surrendered eight home runs; the Phillies, in the National League’s arguable friendliest hitters’ park this side of Wrigley Field, three.

Now of course one weekend doesn’t make a full season, and the other big fish in baseball’s river didn’t look too good opening weekend either. We have the Red Sox, the Cubs, the Indians, the Astros, the Yankees, the Cardinals, and the Nats sitting 1-2. If you’re handing out the prize for the most embarrassing 1-2 of the lot, hand it to the Empire Emeritus: they went 1-2 against the Orioles—the Orioles.

But last year’s Braves never saw a single day below .500. This year’s opened the season under it. Last year’s Mariners never saw a single day below .500, either. This year’s opened their season 5-1 beginning with that jaunt to Japan. (Want some real embarrassment? The Marlins, of all people, opened the season at .500.)

The Mariners didn’t sit on their third-place, never-below-.500 laurels. The Braves couldn’t really afford to sit on their surprise NL East title laurels, but now they need to spend a little more time solving the problems that came in the wake of general manager Alex Anthopolous’s less-than-stellar off-season and a little less time avenging mammoth home runs by punishing the innocent next up.

Because the Phillies are a solid team. They finished opening weekend as the Show’s only undefeated team so far. And they have fun being a team. The Braves aren’t a disaster waiting to happen just yet, but opening weekend wasn’t exactly a rescue attempt. And, yes, this game’s supposed to be fun, the unwritten rules be damned.

But even the most fun fellow on the field will grant that the Braves won’t have an awful lot of fun if they don’t solidify. And soon. The season is long, but it often has a way of turning into a bullet train if your eyes are wide shut.

And guess who play each other sixteen more times the rest of the season? Don’t think for one minute that the Phillies won’t be watching very carefully. “If it happens, it happens,” Hoskins said about further reprises of Sunday’s rough stuff. “It will get taken care of.” Just as long as the NL East dogfight doesn’t turn into gang war.

Mitch Moreland—two three-run homers in back-to-back pinch hitting assignments a mere five months apart.

Before Friday night, Mitch Moreland was last seen pinch hitting in Game Four of the World Series. With his Red Sox down 4-0 in the top of the seventh in Dodger Stadium, pinch hitting for Matt Barnes. And, hitting a three-run homer about half way up the right field bleachers off Ryan Madson, pulling the Red Sox to within a run in a game they’d end up winning, 9-6.

After Friday night, you might be forgiven if you think team advance scouts begin re-editing their books to advise pitching staffs not to even think about letting the Red Sox land in a position to pinch hit with Moreland with two on. If any teams are still running kangaroo courts in their clubhouses, the fines may go up if Moreland’s allowed to keep this up.

Because there he was in Safeco Field, facing Hunter Strickland, a newly minted Mariner who’s been known to surrender a long ball or three since his years with the Giants. Pinch hitting in the top of the ninth for Christian Vasquez, who’d struck long in the top of the eighth, pulling the Red Sox to within two of tying. After spending the previous three innings in the tunnels loosening up just in case, since he doesn’t start against lefthanded pitchers.

Strickland already looked shaky as it was. He fought shoulder tightness during his turn, surrendering a leadoff double to Rafael Devers and watching Devers take third when Mariners catcher Omar Narvaez lost the handle on a fastball, before hitting pinch hitter Blake Swihart with a pitch but escaping disaster temporarily when Jackie Bradley, Jr.’s grounder to first was thrown home to nail Devers at the plate.

Out to the plate came Moreland with first and second. Two balls later, down the pipe came Strickland’s two-seamer and over the right field fence Moreland hit it on a high line. Making it 7-6, Red Sox, which held for the win when Barnes, for whom Moreland hit so memorably in Game Four, rid himself of the Mariners quickly on an inning-opening ground out and back-to-back strikeouts.

“When you get to that situation or think you might be in it,” said Moreland to reporters after the game, “you try to prepare the best you can and be ready for it when it comes.” Yeah, nothing to it, folks. So what’s with this coming off the bench late and hitting them out with men on base anyway, Mitch? “Yeah, I hit it pretty hard. It felt pretty good.”

C’mon, Mitch. You know how many guys who pinch-hit three-run homers back-to-back five months apart with the first one starting a World Series comeback?

“Yeah, that always helps, I guess, to be in that situation,” Moreland said. “The more preparation you can get and experience you’ve gotten with it, the better you can prepare. Obviously it’s a little bit different. But yeah, still, all the same, you’re trying to go up there and do your job.” Right. Just another night at the office.

Moreland would rather talk about the Red Sox bullpen, which has looked better than their starters over their season’s first two games. “The bullpen did a great job,” he told the Boston Herald. “The offense kept scratching back and creating opportunities. It gave us that chance to win. We’re feeling good right now ready to go tomorrow.”

Red Sox manager Alex Cora still isn’t going to name an official closer from most indications. Done walking the tightropes with Craig Kimbrel, who still hasn’t found a new employer, the Red Sox decided to try the committee approach without quite calling it that. Barnes’s finish followed perfect innings from Brandon Workman in the seventh and, striking out the side, Brian Johnson in the eighth.

The Mariners led 6-1 at one point and had their sharp-looking rookie starter Yusei Kikuchi primed for the win, striking out five and keeping any Red Sox damage to a pair of earned runs on four hits, two of which happened to be home runs from Xander Bogaerts and J.D. Martinez.

But after being destroyed by the Mariners in the Red Sox’s season opener in Seattle, the Olde Towne Team and defending world champions for the fourth time this century had no intention of letting the Mariners drop another safe on them from the twelfth floor.

The Mariners threw the dice and sent their excellent closer Edwin Diaz to the Mets in the deal that also took second baseman Robinson Cano’s contract off their hands and freed up some much needed financial room. But after sweeping the Athletics in the season-opening set in Japan and burying the Red Sox Thursday, the Mariners pen looks like a big question mark.

Zac Rosscup, a lefthander who spent most of 2018 on the shelf with finger and calf injuries, escaped disaster in the seventh when he relieved Festa with one on and two out, overcoming a wild pitch allowing Travis to second by striking Bradley out swinging. But he opened the top of the eighth 2-0 on Vasquez before feeding the Red Sox catcher a fastball so well placed in the middle of the plate Vasquez would have faced a kangaroo court fine if he didn’t send it over the left field fence.

All this on a night the Mariners first looked like they’d have a re-run of Thursday night at Nathan Eovaldi’s expense. The postseason hero whose magnificent turn in the eighteen-inning Game Three marathon probably saved the Series by saving the bullpen for the Red Sox, despite losing on Max Muncy’s game-ending eighteenth-inning homer, picked the wrong night to show up only human and prone to multiple long distance charges.

Eovaldi surrendered solo bombs over the first three innings, to Mallex Smith and Domingo Santana in the first and to Narvaez in the third, before being dismantled in the fourth on an RBI double and back-to-back sacrifice flies. He eked his way through five innings but turned it over to the Red Sox pen in the hole, 6-3.

Then Vasquez closed the deficit to two, Moreland came up from the tunnels to strike, the first Red Sox pinch hitter to hit a go-ahead bomb in the ninth or later since Mike Carp in 2013, and the twelfth in team history to do it. And just like that the Red Sox were back to .500. With a long road to travel yet.

And if you think the Red Sox will avoid weirdness, you didn’t see what happened in the eighth after Vasquez’s bomb. One out, the bases loaded, and Eduardo Nunez at the plate. Nunez hit one rolling slowly up the first base line. Mariners reliever Cory Gearrin, who’d taken over for Rosscup, ran and grabbed the ball on the line and fired home to bag Andrew Benintendi at the plate.

Nunez froze and ducked in front of Gearrin, perhaps thinking the last thing he needed was to have his head taken off by the throw, though Gearrin didn’t quite have to throw it through Nunez. Nunez rejecting potential decapitation enabled Narvaez to throw on to first to finish the jam-escaping double play.

“It’s such a freak play. I’ve never seen it in my life,” Cora said after the game. “It just happened to look that way. It looked bad and probably people are talking about it, tweeting about it, but I bet anybody who’s here would have done the same thing.”

No worries. Nunez and Cora kept their heads. Leaving room for Moreland  and Barnes to make it all freakishly elementary in the end, anyway.

Paul Goldschmidt hitting the second of his three Friday night bombs . . .

Going 0-for-3 on Opening Day embarrasses lesser players than Paul Goldschmidt. But not many of them atone for it the way Goldschmidt did Friday night.

There’s nothing like a three-bomb night to make a newly-minted, newly-extended, $130 million Cardinal feel as though he’s right where he belongs after all those years it was sworn he was wedded to Phoenix for life.

The franchise face the Diamondbacks could no longer afford became a Cardinal in a December trade that cost the Cardinals Luke Weaver, Carson Kelly, Andy Young, and a competitive-balance pick. Goldschmidt premiered with three strikeouts and a walk against the defending National League Central champion Brewers. Not exactly the way even the modest Goldschmidt wanted to take his bow.

So naturally he faced Freddy Peralta with one aboard and nobody out in the top of the first, wrestled to a tenth pitch, then drove the down-and-in fastball off the rim of the middle level behind the left field bullpen. Then, after the Cardinals and the Brewers took turns abusing each other’s starting pitchers, Peralta and Joe Flaherty, Goldschmidt opened the top of the sixth against reliever Taylor Williams. This time he only needed eight pitches to send a full-count slider that climbed over the middle of the plate into those middle level seats.

That one broke a four-all tie. And to think Goldschmidt wasn’t even close to finished. Top of the seventh, Matt Carpenter singling home Kolten Wong with two out, and up stepped Goldschmidt again, this time against Jacob Barnes. And into the seats behind the Club Goodwill sign above the left center field fence went the sixth-pitch slider behaving very close to the one Williams threw Goldschmidt.

Guess the man was just a little impatient to make it 8-4.

Maybe the least surprising part of the night was Goldschmidt batting in the top of the eighth and Brewers manager Craig Counsell taking no chances with first base open and a leadoff double from pinch-hitter Tyler O’Neill. Counsell ordered Brewers reliever Chase Anderson to yield the free pass. And Anderson managed to strike out the side around the threat.

Then Jordan Hicks got rid of the Brewers in a hurry in the bottom of the ninth, with two swinging strikeouts and a fly out to center that wasn’t dispatched quite so electrically as the Brewers’ Lorenzo Cain stole a homer from Jose Martinez in the first game of the set. And the Cardinals banked a 9-5 win with a gold gilt edge.

Goldschmidt entering Friday night’s game had 42 percent of his hits go for extra bases lifetime, and he took a lifetime .595 real batting average (total bases, walks, and sacrifices divided by plate appearances) into the game. Friday was the second time in his career he cleared the fences three times in a game. As if that wasn’t enough, Goldschmidt beat out an infield hit with two out in the second but found himself stranded.

Clearly he wasn’t going to let that happen again if he could help it.

“There are times when you’re going to struggle,” said Goldschmidt when it was all over, referring partially to his Opening Day collar. “Sometimes you have success. I can’t really explain it. I pretty much try to do the same thing every day. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t.”

That’s like saying sometimes you make a killing drilling oil and sometimes you take a dry bath. But when it’s come to hitting in Miller Park, Goldschmidt is an oil baron. In 22 games there before this season, Goldschmidt’s slash line is .407/.491/.780. (1.271 OPS.) By about a hundred nautical miles that’s his best performance in any road park in which he’s played 20 games or more.

Don’t ask him to explain it. He can’t. “I’m not sure,” he replied when asked about it. “I just try to have good at-bats. I don’t really have an answer for you. If the at-bats are good, you can have success. But that can change pretty quickly.”

The arguable best first baseman in the National League made the Miller Park audience anything but appreciative of him fattening his percentages at their defending division champs’ expense. They’d probably want to measure him for a noose if told about his career papers in the park before Friday night.

They also had even less appreciation for Goldschmidt’s defense, since he started a nasty double play end the sixth by smothering Yasmani Grandal’s rip up the line, throwing on to second swiftly for an out and then taking the return throw just in time for the side.

Even if defending National League Most Valuable Player Christian Yelich ruined Andrew Miller’s Cardinals debut with a leadoff bomb in the bottom of the eighth. Even if they had the pleasure of former MVP Ryan Braun tying things at three in the third when, after Flaherty faltered enough to let Lorenzo Cain beat out a base hit back to the box and walk Yelich on four straight pitches, the Cardinal starter threw Braun a slider catching too much of the middle of the plate and Braun sent it over the left center field fence.

For the Brewers the loss amounted to making a bad situation worse: earlier Friday they learned relief ace Corey Knebel would be gone for the season, undergoing Tommy John surgery to repair a torn ulnar ligament—after hearing every medical opinion he could solicit tell him better to get the procedure than take the chance of rehabbing without it.

Goldschmidt missed becoming the nineteenth player to hit four out in a game, but it didn’t stop him from entering the history books. He’s the first in the Show ever to hit three bombs in either his first or his second game with a team. And he hit the first two on the night on full counts while not letting the count get quite that far when teeing off the third time.

He’s not normally a great full-count hitter—he took a lifetime .239 batting average on full counts into this season—but he’s made it count when connecting in one, since he also took an .896 OPS on full counts into Friday night’s game.

On Friday night, that was destruction just a little too full for the Brewers, who must be thinking that the NL Central’s road may go through them this year but the others won’t be that easy to leave behind. The new Cardinal made sure they got the message that his new mates don’t plan on being left behind, either.

The pre-game Opening Day fireworks at Dodger Stadium were nothing compared to the ones the Dodgers would explode at the expense of old buddy Zack Greinke and the Diamondbacks.

Baseball kicked off in full Thursday after a winter and spring of free agency discontent, a rash of lucrative contract extensions for still-under-control players, and a few controversies involving service-time manipulations. Not to mention an experiment with several proposed rule changes through an independent league, some of which may enhance the game and some of which may compromise it.

And all of that fell out of a lot of minds on Opening Day thanks to a lot of things happening on the fields, including but not limited to:

* The Dodgers, smashing five home runs in the first six innings then three in the seventh, including Enrique Hernandez and Joc Pederson homering twice, former Dodger Zack Greinke getting chased in the fourth inning, and the Dodger homers setting a major league record for Opening Day formerly held by the Mets (six in 1988) and the White Sox (six last year).

And that was on the first Opening Day without Clayton Kershaw on the mound since 2010. Oh, yes—they beat the Diamondbacks, 12-5. The other Dodger destroyers: Corey Seager, Austin Barnes, Max Muncy (he who ended the World Series’ Game Three marathon with an eighteenth-inning blast), and Cody Bellinger.

* The duel of the Cy Young Award winners in Washington—defending incumbent Jacob deGrom and previous three-time winner Max Scherzer. DeGrom punched out ten in six innings’ work; Scherzer punched out twelve in seven and two-thirds. The problem turned out to be newly-installed Met Robinson Cano: he hit one out in his first Met at-bat, consummated an unusual 5-4-2-5 double play when he threw home as Nats rook Victor Robles tried to score after hesitating and ended up tagged out, and rapped an RBI single off Nats reliever Justin Miller thought the run was hung onto Scherzer’s jacket.

Cano was all the run production the Mets needed. “That’s what happens,” said the Nats’s Adam Eaton, “when two Cy Young winners go head-to-head.” Opening Day wasn’t even two hours and forty-four minutes long and already the National League East started looking like a dogfight.

* The Phillies and the Braves did their part to show it, even if the Phillies’ brand new, $330 million dollar former Nat didn’t have that big a hand in it. Bryce Harper struck out twice and walked twice, but the second walk ended up hitting where it hurt—the Braves put him on to load the bases for Rhys Hoskins after a pair of Atlanta errors set up second and third and left a base open in the bottom of the seventh. And Hoskins hit one over the left field fence.

The Phillies banked a 10-4 win in which they showed themselves dangerous as a whole team. Even veteran Andrew McCutchen, whom they signed to a three-year deal as a free agent, pitched in when he opened the bottom of the first with a 2-0 launch over the center field fence off the Braves’ starter Julio Tehran. This was on a day when Aaron Nola was walking a little on the wild side—as in, five walks in six innings, which was one more than he walked in any 2018 start.

* Another Cy Young Award duel happened in Florida, between last year’s winner and runner-up in the American League, the runner-up just so happening to have a Cy Young Award (2011) in his trophy case as it was. This time, Justin Verlander shook off a leadoff bomb by Austin Meadows, battened down the hatches, and flattened Blake Snell and the Rays on three hits total to help the Astros beat them, 5-1.

George Springer really flattened Snell with a three-run homer in the third, but Verlander wasn’t going to let Meadows knock him out. “I just hit the reset button real quick,” Verlander said. “It’s not something you want to do, to lead off the year with a homer. But I’ve done it before, so it was let’s go turn the page and try to find it.” When you been-there/done-that, it’s an awful lot easier to shake away such leadoff rudeness.

The Reds paid a pre-game video tribute to Hall of Famer Frank Robinson, who died in February and remains the Reds’ all-time greatest position player.

* The Padres rolled against the trend and put touted Fernando Tatis, Jr. on their roster instead of forcing him into yet another service-time manipulation. Their reward was Tatis having a 2-for-3 day including a base hit in his first Show at-bat, making him the youngest to have an Opening Day multihit game since Hall of Famer Robin Yount—in 1975.

His reward was the Padres beating Madison Bumgarner and the Giants, 2-0, even without their own new $300 million man Manny Machado wielding the big bat. That belonged to Wil Myers doing his own Robinson Cano: a two-out bomb off Bumgarner in the third, and an RBI single in the sixth. Good enough to put the Padres above .500 for the first time since 2015.

* Mike Trout, the Angels’ $426 million franchise face, had the best day of any of the half-billionaires with a 1-for-3 with a walk while managing to scare the hell out of Angel fans when he turned up with a leg cramp after a hard slide into second base in the eighth, that following a fourth-inning slide into the same base following a leadoff walk.

The good news: Trout says he’s not seriously hurt despite the “raspberry” he incurred on one of the slides. The bad news, for Angel fans: Khris Davis homering twice, Marcus Semien homering once, and the Athletics beating the Angels 4-0 to shake off the pair they lost to the Mariners in Japan.

* The Mariners may want to open seasons in Japan for a long time to come. Not only did they sweep the A’s in that set, they came home to tear the defending World Series champion Red Sox apart, 12-4—destroying Chris Sale in three innings while they were at it, including three home runs, two by Tim Beckham breaking a personal 0-for-15 lifetime against Sale before teeing off.

And that was after Sale struck out the side in the first before starting the second with a 2-0 lead. “I’m going out there in the second inning, and I pretty much deflated us,” said the man who struck out the side to finish the Red Sox’s fourth World Series triumph of the century. “Three runs, it’s a one-run ballgame, anything can happen and I just go out there and stink the place up. That’s not what I needed to do.”

The Red Sox probably didn’t need to rest Sale for just about all spring training, either.

* 12-4 was also the way the Cubs destroyed the Rangers Thursday. And moving to shortstop (until suspended Addison Russell returns) while hitting cleanup didn’t exactly seem to bother Javier Baez, either: he smashed a pair of home runs including a three-run blast on the first pitch of the fifth from Rangers reliever Jesse Chavez and a solo shot off Mike Minor an inning earlier.

It was all good enough to give Cubs starter Jon Lester his first Opening Day win since he was a Red Sox in 2013—and the Red Sox won the World Series that year. As for the Rangers, Elvis Andrus and Nomar Mazara each hit a two-run homer to account for all the Ranger scoring on the day. It wasn’t enough on a day the Cubs got at least one hit from everyone in the lineup except Willson Contreras and pinch-hitter Daniel Descalso and had thirteen hits on the day.

* One game went to extra innings and, believe it or not, the otherwise hapless Tigers won it, 2-0. On a day Jordan Zimmermann took a perfect game into the seventh—the longest Opening Day perfect game bid since Hall of Famer Lefty Grove threw seven perfect for the Red Sox against the Washington Senators. And that was the same day fellow Hall of Famer Bob Feller threw baseball’s only Opening Day no-hitter at the White Sox.

The perfecto was ruined when Teoscar Hernandez beat out a grounder to the left side of second base and Tigers second baseman Josh Harrison had to slide to stop it before throwing. But on a day three Blue Jays pitchers struck out seven straight Tigers at one point—starter Marcus Stroman (one) to end the seventh, then relievers Joe Biagini and Ken Giles striking out the side in the eighth and the ninth—the game was sealed when Christin Stewart smashed a two-run homer in the tenth to hand the win to Victor Alcantara and the save to Shane Greene.

It was the Tigers’ seventh Opening Day win in eight seasons and the Blue Jays’ eighth straight Opening Day loss.

* Wait till next year? The Jays can take heart: they’re not liable to have the kind of season the Orioles are, after last year’s disaster and an Opening Day 7-2 loss to the Yankees. Or the Marlins, who lost 6-3 to the Rockies. Maybe for the Orioles and the Marlins this year is next year.

* They talked a lot this spring about the new-look Reds after several rather gutsy off-season moves. The talk may ramp up a bit after the Reds knocked off the Pirates, 5-3, and the major damage was done by the reserves: Jose Iglesias doubling twice and driving one in, and pinch-hitting Derek Dietrich hitting a three-run homer in the seventh after Jose Peraza homered.

It kicked off the 150th anniversary of the Reds as a franchise, the 100th anniversary of their first World Series triumph, and it began with a sober tribute to Hall of Famer Frank Robinson, who began his career with the Reds (and remains their all-time greatest position player) and died at 83 in February.

Somewhere from the Elysian Fields where he now reposes (and probably presides over a kangaroo court), Robinson must have smiled on the largest regular-season crowd in the history of the Reds’ Great American Ballpark.