The Tuesday Takeaway
With two of the league’s most talented young starters toeing the slab for their team, Mets fans got a glimpse into their future during Tuesday’s doubleheader. And if the twinbill sweep, on the backs of second-year ace Matt Harvey and rookie flamethrower Zack Wheeler, is any harbinger of what is to come, that future could be awfully bright.

Harvey went first, and he cared little about giving Wheeler a tough act to follow. Seven scoreless innings, the first six of them hitless, will do that. Thirteen strikeouts will do that, too. And though Harvey was ultimately charged with three runs—after allowing the first three Braves batters to reach base in the bottom of the eighth and watching LaTroy Hawkins and Scott Rice permit all of them to score—he paved the way to the Mets’ 4-3 win.

The Monday Takeaway
The early returns on the Blue Jays’ off-season shopping spree are not quite as rosy as general manager Alex Anthopoulos might have hoped they would be.

Jose Reyes has been on the disabled list with a severe ankle sprain since April 13. R.A. Dickey’s first 15 assignments have been a rollercoaster ride at best and a disaster at worst. Melky Cabrera has essentially been a replacement-level player, logging a .320 on-base percentage that hardly belongs at the top of a contender’s order. And Mark Buehrle has seen his FIP rise for a fourth consecutive year, from 3.87 in 2010 to 4.48 so far in 2013, and only recently began to right the ship after a brutal first month and a half.

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The Weekend Takeaway
In 2010, the Padres came within a game of the National League West title, finishing a surprising 90-72 and fighting the eventual World Series champion Giants through the season’s final day. The offseason and spring training came and went, and five games into the 2011 campaign, the Padres were 3-2.

Bud Black’s squad carried that winning record into an off day, which the Friars spent waiting for the Dodgers to arrive at Petco Park, and then suffered a 4-2 setback in extra innings that dropped their record to 3-3. The fleeting 48 hours that the Padres spent at 3-2, between their victory on April 6, 2011, and their defeat on April 8, would be the last that they would enjoy with a winning record for more than two calendar years.

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Looking for all of our Baseball Prospectus Day ballpark events for the upcoming season? Well, you’ve come to the right place.

Below, you’ll find the dates that we are scheduled to come to your home team’s stadium. More events will be added as the dates and specifics are confirmed.

Read the full article...

The Thursday Takeaway
The Royals arrived in Tampa Bay early on Thursday morning leading the American League in ERA. Yes, you read that correctly: After finishing 10^th in the junior circuit and 22^nd in the majors with a 4.30 mark as a pitching staff last year, the Royals raced to first in the former and fifth in the latter by paring that figure down to 3.45 over the season’s first 63 games.

Their weekend opponents, the Rays, have gone in the other direction. Buoyed by a deep rotation and a dominant bullpen, Joe Maddon’s club paced the entire league with a 3.19 ERA in 2012, marking the first time that an American League squad had done so since the Blue Jays amassed a 3.49 team ERA in 2008. But as of Thursday morning, Tampa Bay had dropped down the leaderboard to about where Kansas City finished last season, ninth in the junior circuit and 21^st overall, with a 4.26 aggregate clip. As R.J. Anderson wrote a couple of weeks ago, the Rays are still treading water in the hotly contested East division, but they’re doing it with a much different formula than the one that led them to the playoffs in 2008, 2010, and 2011.

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The Wednesday Takeaway
It finally happened: A team finally scored four runs off of Cardinals rookie Shelby Miller, who was well on his way into the history books before the Mets slammed on the brakes.

Miller entered yesterday’s assignment at Citi Field riding a remarkable streak. He had pitched at least five innings and allowed no more than three runs in each of his first 13 major-league starts, a feat exceeded only twice and matched only twice more since 1916. Second only to Clayton Kershaw with a 1.91 ERA, the 22-year-old Miller was beginning to enter the Cy Young Award fray and to run away with the Rookie of the Year race, with only the recently promoted Yasiel Puig posing a credible threat.

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The Tuesday Takeaway
“He’s baaaaaaack.”

After 41 days on the disabled list and a nondescript, 1-for-4 showing on Monday, Giancarlo Stanton officially announced his return to the Marlins last night. With Jim Henderson, also just one outing removed from a stint on the shelf, on the mound for the Brewers, a runner on, and two away in the bottom of the eighth, Stanton unloaded on a hanging slider to turn a 4-3 deficit into a 5-4 lead.

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The Monday Takeaway
Left-handed pitchers, meet your new worst enemy: Jeff Baker.

Signed to a minor-league contract by the Rangers on January 26, Baker came into the 2013 season with a career value of 1.2 WARP compiled over 1,488 trips to the box. He was, essentially, a replacement-level player. But 88 plate appearances into the 2013 campaign, he has already brought Texas—which is paying him $1.75 million per the late-winter agreement—more than one win.

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The Weekend Takeaway
And then there was one. One team, that is, that has made it this far into the season without needing to augment its Opening Day starting rotation with a prospect or scrap-heap addition. That club is the Braves, who enjoy a comfortable lead in the National League East in part because one of Tim Hudson, Paul Maholm, Kris Medlen, Mike Minor, or Julio Teheran has taken the ball in each of their 63 games.

The Braves were left as the last team standing when the Tigers scratched Anibal Sanchez from Sunday’s series finale against the Indians. Like Atlanta, Detroit had thrived on the success and durability of its five starters, all of whom rank in the top 16 in the league in FIP, and four of whom have earned a spot in the top seven. With a porous defense and a lineup that is more star-studded than deep, the Tigers are as reliant on their starting pitchers as any contender. And, nearly 40 percent of the way through the season, not one of them has disappointed.

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The Thursday Takeaway
A little more than two years ago, our editor-in-chief emeritus was struck by a quote from Braves manager Fredi Gonzalez in the wake of an extra-inning loss. The skipper told Atlanta Journal-Constitution beat writer David O’Brien, “When you’re on the road, you’ve got to push guys back a little bit, because you can’t use your closer on the road in the ninth inning of a tie ballgame.”

Last night, we learned that Rangers manager Ron Washington graduated from the same school of bullpen management as his contemporary in Atlanta. The scenarios were different—Gonzalez eschewed his usual set-up men to go with a mop-up man in the bottom of the seventh inning; Washington forewent his closer to go with a scuffling middle reliever in the bottom of the ninth—but the results and the thought processes that led up to them were the same.

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The Wednesday Takeaway
There have been longer extra-inning games than the one played between the White Sox and Mariners yesterday afternoon. There have been games that remained scoreless for far more innings than the 13 the White Sox and Mariners went without plating a run on Wednesday. And there has even been an extra-inning game that ended on an ultimate grand slam and in which the winning pitcher was charged with five runs.

But even if you made searching through the archives a full-time job for the rest of your life, a wilder sequence of events than the one that transpired at Safeco Field on Wednesday you might not find.

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The Tuesday Takeaway
Down 5-2 in the bottom of the fifth inning of last night’s game, the Dodgers needed a jolt. They got one from Yasiel Puig—in the form of a 443-foot, three-run homer that knotted the score.

Up 7-6 in the bottom of the sixth inning, the Dodgers needed insurance. They got it from Yasiel Puig—in the form of a two-run blast that rendered irrelevant the solo shot that the embattled Carlos Quentin would hit moments later.

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