The Monday Rewind: Week 2

We are still at that stage of the baseball season where nobody actually knows what’s going on. Are the Giants actually good? Is Atlanta actually terrible? Can Wilyer Abreu hit .400 (or .500)? Is Kyle Tucker going to win MVP? Can Anthony Banda win 20 games while throwing 50 innings? We’ll get to all that plus our weekly awards each week we give you who is the running MVP, Cy Young winner, Rookie of the Year and the rest.

But first … check out this fun bit from Sunday’s action:

• Red Sox 5, Cardinals 4 (10) — The Cardinals blew a 4-2 lead in the ninth (a bases loaded walk to Rafael Devers helped) and lost the game in extras when Wilyer Ballgame knocked in the zombie runner.

• Phillies 8, Dodgers 7 — First, the Phillies blew a 6-2 lead. Then, in the seventh, the Dodgers blew their 7-6 lead when Blake Treinen gave up a double to Bryce Harper, walked Max Kepler, gave up an RBI single to Bryson Stott and finally a run-scoring single ground ball when the Dodgers went for the double play but Philadelphia’s Edmundo Sosa beat it out.

• Pirates 4, Yankees 3 (11) — Pittsburgh tried to blow a 4-1 lead in the ninth; well, they actually did blow that lead but won the game in the 11th when former PosCast player of the year Tommy Pham hit the zombie-off single.

• Tigers 4, White Sox 3 — Chicago blew a 3-1 ninth inning lead in our Sarah Langs’ Wheeeee! Game of the Day.

• Astros 9, Twins 7 (10) — Minnesota blew an overall 7-1 lead … and lost the game in the 10th when Houston scored the zombie and then scored, the insurance run when Jake Meyers scored from third on a double steal. Meyers is one of the fastest players in baseball, and I really don’t know what the Twins were thinking. But that team remains a mystery.

• Padres 8, Cubs 7 — The Northsiders blew a 7-3 overall lead and squandered a 7-6 lead going into the eighth. Neither of the runs the Pads scored late were particularly interesting, but the tying run was given up by a reliever delightfully named Porter Hodge, which sounds like the guy who runs the hardware store in “Little House on the Prairie.”

• Giants 5, Mariners 4 — Seattle blew a 2-0 lead, which is no big deal except that with the way this team scores runs, they really can’t give up 2-0 leads. The score was tied going into the bottom of the ninth, and Wilmer Flores hit the walk-off for San Francisco. Also, unrelated to the point of this comeback recap, Mike Yastrzemski promised his 3-year-old daughter a home run and then hit one for her. Yay!

There were actually other smaller comebacks — the Guardians led 1-0 in their loss to the Angels, the Rangers led 3-1 and lost the lead before winning in the ninth — but here’s the point: Teams across the league pounded on the bullpens. Sure, it was probably a one-day anomaly, but it perfectly fits a conversation I was having last week with a baseball executive.

He was talking about the “too many strikeouts/pitcher keep getting injured/starters matter less” conundrum — for people inside the game, this trio is connected and the biggest issue facing baseball — and he was echoing the frustrations I’ve heard again and again from baseball insiders: There is no magic bullet here. Sure, you can limit the number of pitchers a team can use. Yes, you can try to come up with some safety innovations, like a slightly heavier baseball. Of course, you can come up with some inelegant solutions to the starter problem by forcing starting pitchers to go five innings, six innings, seven innings, or whatever you like.

But all of these quote-unquote “solutions” are fraught with risks and potential adverse effects and the very strong possibility they won’t even work.

“You know what needs to happen?” he told me. “Batters are going to have to hit their way out of it.”

I think that’s pretty smart, actually. Baseball has a long history of action and reaction, breakthroughs and counterbreakthroughs. In the 1920s and 1930s, Babe Ruth launched an offensive revolution by swinging for the fences. In the 1960s, Sandy Koufax and the Dodgers launched a pitching era with high mounds and taking advantage of massive strike zones. In the 1990s, McGwire, Sosa, Bonds and the rest of the batters launched an offensive explosion by building their bodies and getting so much stronger. Over the last 15 years or so, teams have turned the game into a strikeout paradise by lining up a drone army of disposable 100-mph relievers who fire the nastiest sliders and sweepers and sinkers the game has ever known.

Obviously, that’s an absurd oversimplification, but hopefully you get the point. You can change the rules somewhat — add a pitch-timer, outlaw the shift, make the bases bigger — but in the end, it is going to be up to the hitters to figure out how to pound on these relievers and force teams to do something different with their pitching. For a day, anyway, that sort of happened.

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