I am amazed that the longer I watch baseball, the more I see things I have never witnessed before.
I was watching the May 31 Yankees-Athletics game at Sutter Health Park in West Sacramento with mild interest when the Athletics jumped off to a 3-0 start against Will Warren, who is having a breakout season for New York.
However, Jacob Lopez is not having a breakout season, and that would quickly bite the Athletics in the top of the third. The Athletics’ grip on that 3-0 lead proved to be extremely tenuous. By the time Lopez left and was replaced by recently recalled right handed reliever Michael Kelly, the A’s were trailing 4-3. The bases were loaded and Kelly had no outs on the board.
By the time Kelly left, the score was 13-3. The Yankees batted around twice. All told, the inning lasted 43 minutes. Three A’s combined to throw 75 pitches. Jack Perkins was the third pitcher of the inning. The A’s staged a bit of a rally to close to within 13-8, but that one inning was like nothing I had ever seen before.
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Speaking of amazing, the collapse of the Detroit Tigers — just 4-21 in their last 25 games — has been quite remarkable.
For much of 2025, A.J. Hinch’s club was playing great baseball. The Tigers finished play on July 8 at 59-34, 15.5 games in front of the Cleveland Guardians in the American League Central.
From that point on, the Tigers went just 28-41 and lost the division to a rampaging Guardians team. They did pull it back together to beat the Guardians in a best-of-three wild-card series. They were bested by the Mariners in a five-game division series, including the 15-inning heartbreaker that allowed the M’s to advance.
This season, the Tigers are tied with Colorado for the worst record in baseball (22-38).
If that sounds familiar in Baltimore, it should. That sounds eerily similar to the way the Orioles played the last seven or eight weeks of 2024, which led to a miscalculation by Mike Elias on how to build back without ripping things apart again.
This season, the Orioles have played a dangerous game of falling way behind the top two teams in the American League East (New York and Tampa Bay), leaving themselves in a pitched battle for the last two wild cards in the AL.
Unlike the Tigers, the Orioles haven’t fallen off the edge of the earth, but the situation is still precarious.
Like the Orioles, the Tigers have been filled with IL stints galore. With the situation unfixable in 2026 and Tarik Skubal’s free agency looming, do the Tigers move him ahead of the Aug. 3 trade deadline?
The Tigers’ situation is a lot like the Orioles’ handling of Manny Machado’s march to free agency in 2018. That hesitation cost the Orioles dearly in their return for Machado.
Skubal won’t have much guaranteed time with a new team, but if healthy, he can really give a team like the Dodgers, Yankees or Rays an amazing chance to win the World Series this season.
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One of the most interesting stories going on in the first two months has been the in-season comeback of the Philadelphia Phillies.
Sitting with a miserable 9-19 record on an off day on April 27, team president Dave Dombrowski made the decision to pull the plug on Rob Thomson’s highly successful tenure and replace him with Don Mattingly, the father of Phillies general manager Preston Mattingly.
In his five seasons at the helm in Philly, Thomson’s record was 355-270 with four consecutive playoff appearances and two consecutive National League East titles.
Dombrowski admitted he offered the job to Alex Cora, who had just been fired from the Red Sox. It was Dombrowski who first hired Cora as manager of the Red Sox. Whatever the reason, Cora elected to keep getting paid by Red Sox owner John Henry and rest up a bit.
All Mattingly has done is preside over a 21-10 renaissance of the Phillies that sees them at 30-29 overall. They have clearly signaled that there is still more than a little fight left in this Phillies team.
But maybe more miraculous has been the work of starter Zack Wheeler, whose return from the injured list for his thoracic outlet syndrome surgery happened to crisscross with Mattingly’s hiring. Wheeler, who returned just two days before Thomson’s dismissal, is 4-1 with a 2.27 ERA and 0.85 WHIP through seven starts (43.2 innings). He has walked just nine batters while striking out 40. He has given up five home runs, with four of them being solo shots in his May 29 start against the Dodgers.
If you look at the history of the names that have had the TOS surgery, it’s a grim group with very few success stories and mostly pitchers who were never close to what they were before the surgery. The list includes Chris Carpenter, Chris Archer, Tyson Ross, Luke Hochevar, Phil Hughes, Kenny Rogers and perhaps most notably Stephen Strasburg.
Perhaps because the surgery was so new and the symptoms called for desperate measures, I am not sure the pitchers knew quite what they were up against.
There are a couple variations of the surgery — neurogenic (nerves) and venous (blood supply). Wheeler’s was the venous type, which is usually done to remove blood clots in the shoulder. In a neurogenic procedure (seemingly more common), a rib that is pressing against nerves and causing severe numbness is removed.
The venous surgery variation is much less invasive and doesn’t require the need for a pitcher to completely relearn his delivery.
Wheeler is clearly trending in the right direction. And that may just be trouble for the rest of the National League if he can keep pitching like an animal again.
Photo Credit: Kenya Allen/PressBox