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David Bote’s pinch-hitting heroics on Sunday night ensured that Cole Hamels‘ sterling start did not go to waste, but for the rest of the Cubs’ rotation, such outings have lately been more the exception than the rule. On Tuesday afternoon against the Brewers at Wrigley Field, Jose Quintana dug his team a three-run hole in the first inning, serving up a leadoff homer to Lorenzo Cain on just his second pitch of the afternoon and, three batters later, allowing a two-run blast to Ryan Braun. Two innings later, Braun added another two-run shot.

Last Saturday, it was Jon Lester allowing two first-inning runs to the Nationals, and nine in 3.2 innings of a 9-4 Cubs loss. On Friday, it was Kyle Hendricks allowing runs in the first and second innings before righting the ship in a 3-2 win. Lately, it’s always something.

Somehow, the Cubs own the National League’s best record (68-50, .576) despite having one of its most disappointing rotations. Including Quintana’s start, the team’s starters collectively rank 10th in the league in ERA (4.20), 12th in WAR (3.8), and 13th in FIP (4.71). Just after the All-Star break, Craig Edwards noted that the rotation’s performance was on pace to be its worst by WAR since 1974, and somehow, despite the team going 13-12 in the second half (that despite being outscored by 28 runs), it has continued to lag:

The starters are 13th among NL clubs in ERA (5.39) and 11th in FIP (4.85) since the All-Star break. The trouble has begun almost immediately; in the first inning, the starters have posted an 8.64 ERA (last in the NL) and a 5.84 FIP (12th).

The Cubs’ survival and success thus far is testament both to their offense, which is cranking out 4.88 runs per game (second in the league) with a 103 wRC+ (first), and to their bullpen, which is second in the league in ERA (3.35) and fifth in FIP (3.84), though the latter unit has been mid-pack thus far in the second half. But whether it’s the added stress of so many postseason innings, the impact of the change in pitching coaches from Chris Bosio to Jim Hickey, or the difficulty of their newcomers in acclimating — and it could well be some combination of all three — the Cubs can’t be brimming with confidence in their costly, underperforming rotation as they look towards September and October. Hamels, with a 1.00 ERA, 1.94 FIP, and 29.0% strikeout rate in three starts since being acquired from the Rangers, is the exception; Edwards has a breakdown of the 34-year-old southpaw’s ace-like performance here.

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Braves rookie Ronald Acuña has been on a tear lately. On Monday against the Marlins in Atlanta, the 20-year-old phenom did something that only three other players have done in over a century: lead off both games of a doubleheader with a home run. In the opener on Monday afternoon, the makeup of an August 1 rainout, Acuña clubbed Miami starter Pablo López’s fifth pitch of the game, a center-cut 93 mph four-seamer, an estimated 414 feet to center field:

Acuña later added a two-run double in that contest, which Braves went on to win, 9-1. In the nightcap, he hit the first pitch of Merandy Gonzalez’s first start, also a well-centered 93 mph four-seamer (jeez, kid, watch the tapes) an estimated 441 feet to center:

The Braves took that one as well, 6-1. With that pair of homers, Acuna etched himself in the record books:

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With trades for Manny Machado and Brian Dozier, the Dodgers did more to improve their playoff odds in the weeks before the July 31 trade deadline than any other NL team, at least according to the projections of Dan Szymborski. However, they didn’t do a whole lot to address one area of glaring need, namely their bullpen, instead choosing to rely upon their internal depth despite a host of injuries. After the past four days in Denver, that looks as though it might have been a serious mistake.

In a four-game series at Coors Field that began on Thursday night, the Dodgers (64-55) lost “only” three games to the Rockies (63-55), but all of them came in the late innings, the last two via walk-offs. For as critical as these intradivision contests between contenders are, the team also endured an even more important and unsettling loss, that of closer Kenley Jansen. After Thursday night’s 8-5 victory, which was closed out by Scott Alexander instead of Jansen, manager Dave Roberts told reporters that the latter had been hospitalized before the game due to an irregular heartbeat then sent back to Los Angeles to undergo tests. He was also placed on the 10-day disabled list. The Dodgers subsequently reported that Jansen’s condition had stabilized, that his issues are considered manageable, and that he will have a follow-up appointment with a cardiologist on August 20, the day before he is eligible to return from the DL. Beyond that, the prognosis is unclear; if the 30-year-old righty is put on blood thinners, he could be out four-to-six weeks.

This is the third time during Jansen’s nine-year major league career that he’s experienced an irregular heartbeat. He missed four weeks in 2011 and three weeks in 2012 with a similar problem; the second episode also occurred in Denver. After the latter season, he underwent cardiac ablation surgery to correct the problem. He also had an incident of high blood pressure while in Denver for a 2015 game, but he returned to action a few days later.

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Once upon a time, 12 teams and 15 years ago, Edwin Jackson was a Dodgers phenom who outdueled Randy Johnson in a major-league debut that happened to fall on his 20th birthday. Six trades, one All-Star appearance, one no-hitter, and several free-agency signings — some lucrative, some humbling — later, he’s the co-holder of a record for colorful laundry. Forget the “E Jax” nickname, the 34-year-old righty should be known as “Transaction Jackson.” Suddenly, he’s come back from the brink of professional oblivion to pitching as well as he has in half a decade with a performance that has not only helped the upstart A’s take possession of the second AL Wild Card spot, but has almost exactly coincided with their surge past the Mariners.

Jackson, who tied Octavio Dotel’s major-league record of 13 teams played for when he donned the green and gold for the first time, has been on quite an odyssey since that 2003 debut. He’s been traded in deals involving Danys Baez and Lance Carter (from the Dodgers to the Devil Rays in 2006), Matt Joyce (from the Rays to the Tigers in 2008), Curtis Granderson, Max Scherzer, and Ian Kennedy (from the Tigers to the Diamondbacks in a three-way, seven-player deal in 2009), Daniel Hudson (from the Diamondbacks to the White Sox in 2010), Mark Teahen and Jason Frasor (from the White Sox to the Blue Jays in 2011), and Dotel, Corey Patterson, Marc Rzepczynski, and Colby Rasmus (from the Blue Jays to the Cardinals on that same July 27, 2011 day, without even getting to suit up for Toronto). In his first taste of free agency, he signed a one-year, $11 million deal with the Nationals in February 2012. In his next one, he signed a four-year, $52 million deal with the Cubs in December 2012 — the first big free-agent deal of the Theo Epstein regime — but after a so-so first season (8-18, 4.98 ERA, 3.79 FIP, 2.0 WAR), his performance deteriorated to the point that in mid-2015, having delivered just an additional 0.8 WAR and converted to a relief role, he was released with $15.63 million remaining on his contract.

It’s at that point, on July 27, 2015, where this particular journeyman’s journey through the majors reached the lightning round; since then, Jackson has pitched for the Braves (2015), Marlins and Padres (2016), Orioles and Nationals again (2017). Over that three-season, six-team span (including his final months with the Cubs), he threw 215.2 innings with a 4.92 ERA, 5.24 FIP and -0.6 WAR, the last mark the second-lowest total of any of the 204 pitchers with at least 200 innings in that span. In his three starts for the Orioles and 13 for the Nationals last year, Jackson pitched to a 5.21 ERA and a career-worst 6.14 FIP in 76 innings, “good” for -0.3 WAR.

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The outcome seems unthinkable, but the trendlines are undeniable and the conclusion unavoidable: Félix Hernández, for so long the ace of the Mariners, is doing more to hinder the team’s bid for a playoff spot — and thus end the longest drought in North American professional sports — than to help it. As the Mariners try to claw their way back into the second AL Wild Card spot, his place in the rotation is in jeopardy. The 32-year-old righty fondly known as “King Félix” may not be dead, but his exile from a job at which he’s excelled for so long may be imminent.

On Tuesday night against the Rangers in Arlington, a hellish place for a hurler even when the first-pitch temperature isn’t 98 degrees, Hernández was torched for a career-high 11 runs. Granted, just seven of those were earned, due to a pair of errors when hot smashes deflected off the normally reliable glove of Kyle Seager, but by the time those happened, the reality was already clear: the Hernández who had breezed through the first two innings on just 23 pitches, retiring all six hitters and making his pal Adrián Beltré look silly on an 0-2 curve, had left the building:

Alas, there was little joy in what transpired after that. After getting ahead of Robinson Chirinos 1-2 to start the third, Hernández’s command deserted him. He threw three straight balls for a leadoff walk, then surrendered hits to four of the next five batters, plating four runs (two on Rougned Odor’s double) before Beltré grounded into a double play. A one-out walk to Joey Gallo in the fourth, followed by Seager’s first error, set up the Rangers’ fifth run, via a Willie Calhoun sacrifice fly. A two-out, one-on error by Seager in the fifth was soon followed by a three-run homer off the bat of Jurickson Profar to run the score to 8-4.

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While the AL East race appears to have tilted decisively towards the Red Sox over the past five weeks, an even more dramatic turnaround has taken place in the AL wild card race over an even longer timeline, one involving the Mariners and A’s. This one has yet to be decided, which is good news, because it’s practically the last race standing in the Junior Circuit.

Through June 15, the Mariners were running neck-and-neck with the Astros despite a massive disparity in the two teams’ run differentials, a situation that — as I had illustrated a few days earlier — owed a whole lot to their records in one-run games (22-10 for Seattle, 6-12 for Houston). The A’s, though solidly competitive to that point, were something of an afterthought, far overshadowed by the Mike Trout/Shohei Ohtani show in Anaheim:

On June 16, despite placing Matt Chapman on the disabled list with a contusion on his right thumb, the A’s, who had lost to the Angels 8-4 the night before, kicked off a five-game winning streak, taking the two remaining games of the series that weekend, then two from the Padres at Petco Park and the first game of a four-game set against the White Sox in Chicago. Though they merely split a four-gamer on the South Side, they swept four from the Tigers in Detroit, sparking a six-game winning streak that also included two victories at home against the Indians. Remarkably, they’ve strung together two separate six-game winning streaks since then, as well, one against the Giants (a pair of walk-of wins) at home and the Rangers in Arlington from July 21 to 26 and then another from July 30 through August 5 at home against the Blue Jays and Tigers. Alas, that one ended on Tuesday night against the Dodgers.

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The 2018 season is looking like another one in which the Giants’ even-year magic has deserted them. Amid a barrage of bad news about Brandon Belt, Johnny Cueto, and Pablo Sandoval — not to mention unsettling signs regarding Madison Bumgarner and Buster Posey — they were inactive at the July 31 non-waiver trade deadline and now look ill-suited to leapfrog nearly half the league in order to get to October. After a crushing 3-1 loss to the Astros on Monday night via Marwin Gonzalez’s three-run homer off Will Smith with two out in the ninth inning, they’re 57-57, six games out of first place in the NL West and six back in the Wild Card hunt. Their playoff odds (2.8%) suggest they’re fated to play out the string.

Mind you, coming off a 64-98 season, the Giants never appeared to be a juggernaut. Offseason trades for Evan Longoria and Andrew McCutchen did fill a couple of obvious holes, albeit with players whose best years are probably behind them, but the team’s preseason odds (23.9%) still suggested more than a puncher’s chance at relevance. Yet the Giants haven’t been in first place in the NL West since March 31, and have spent just five days in second since I last checked in on them on June 7, two days after Bumgarner made his belated season debut. Then as now, they were a .500-ish team — 30-30 before Bum’s return, and 27-27 since — but as time has run off the clock, the hits have kept coming. Not the good kind, either.

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A three-homer game by Steve Pearce, a pair of stifling pitching performances by Rick Porcello — an 86-pitch complete game, the fewest needed for a nine-inning outing since 2014 — and Nathan Eovaldi, and an after-midnight comeback from a 4-1 deficit. With that, the race for the American League East flag is all over but the shouting. At Fenway Park this weekend, a banged-up Red Sox squad swept four straight against a banged-up Yankees squad, widening their division lead to 9.5 games, their largest margin since 2013.

At 79-34 (.699), the Red Sox are on a 113-win pace. Even if they go 24-25 the rest of the way, they would surpass the 1978 team’s win total of 99 — still a Bucky Dent homer short of what they needed — for the franchise’s highest win total in the post-1960 expansion era, and they have a good chance of surpassing the highest winning percentages of their pre-expansion forebears:

A recently as July 1, when they were fresh off losing two out of three in the Bronx, Boston (then 56-29) was in a virtual tie with their pinstriped foes (54-27) for at the AL East lead; the two teams owned the top two records in all of baseball. Since then, the Red Sox have gone 22-6, the Yankees just 15-14. A picture is worth a thousand words:

To be fair, the Red Sox have played the cushier schedule of the two teams since that point, with their three-game series against the Nationals from July 2-4 their only games against a team with a winning record until their July 30-31 pair with the Phillies. In between, they played the Royals, Rangers, Blue Jays, Tigers, Orioles and Twins – six of the seven worst teams in the league, a combined 144 games below .500 through Sunday — with a two-game split in Baltimore the only time they failed to win a series.

While they were luxuriating on that pillow-soft slate, the Yankees faced the Braves, Indians and Rays, and won just the first of those series; they also split six games with the Orioles and two with the Mets. That’s a tough way to catch up under the best of circumstances.

Neither lineup has been whole in this span. The Red Sox have been without Dustin Pedroia for all but three games this season in the aftermath of an experimental cartilage restoration procedure in his left knee, and Eduardo Núñez has been so bad that he (and Brock Holt) topped the second base list in my Replacement-Level Killers series. The catching tandem of Christian Vazquez and Sandy Leon also earned a spot among the Killers even before Vazquez suffered a fractured right pinky that required surgery. Likewise for third baseman Rafael Devers, who first missed time due to left shoulder inflammation and then went back on the DL in late July due to a left hamstring strain. Even Ian Kinsler, who was acquired from the Angels on July 30 in order to shore up the keystone, got in on the injury racket by straining his hamstring in his third game for the Sox. Boston also lost starter Eduardo Rodríguez to an ankle sprain just before the All-Star break, and has been without Chris Sale since July 27 due to shoulder inflammation.

On the other side, the Yankees began this stretch without catcher Gary Sanchez, who has been scuffling for most of the season. After being sidelined from June 25 until July 20 with a groin strain, he played in just two games before reinjuring himself, but not before a dumb, only-in-New-York controversy involving his apparent lack of effort in chasing down a passed ball (the point at which he apparently re-aggravated the groin) and then grounding into a game ending force out. Second baseman Gleyber Torres suffered a right hip strain on July 4, sidelining him for three weeks, and then, most devastatingly, Aaron Judge suffered a chip fracture in his right wrist when he was hit by a Jakob Junis pitch on July 26.

Masahiro Tanaka missed a month due to bilateral hamstring strains from running the bases during an interleague game; he returned on July 10. On top of all this, J.A. Happ, whom the Yankees acquired from the Blue Jays on July 26 with an eye towards his career-long success in Fenway Park, missed this weekend’s series because, like the Mets’ Noah Syndergaard, he came down with a case of hand, foot and mouth disease. Chance Adams, who was recalled from Scranton/Wilkes-Barre to make his major league debut in his stead, gave the Yankees a five-inning, three-run performance that simply wasn’t enough opposite Eovaldi’s eight shutout innings.

Judge has been the Yankees’ most productive hitter all season, hitting .285/.398/.548 for a 157 wRC+, good for the fifth highest wRC+ in the league. From July 2 until he went down, he was humming along at a similar clip, but remarkably, four Sox hitters have been even hotter in that span:

The Yankees have gotten average-or-better production at every position besides catcher and first base during that span — and it just hasn’t been enough to keep up with the Sox. Pearce, acquired from the Blue Jays for High-A infielder Santiago Espinal on June 28, has clubbed five homers in just 71 PA since the trade, tied with Betts for second on the team behind Martinez’s eight. In other words, he’s even hotter than the players who have ranked second and third in the league in wRC+ overall this year. Those scorching performances have helped to offset the replacement-level ones at second base and catcher, though of course it was Leon’s 10th inning single off Jonathan Holder — just his fourth hit in 34 at-bats since the All-Star break — that turned into the winning run on Sunday night. Everything’s coming up Milhouse.

While there’s been only a slight separation between the two teams on the offensive side, the separation has been massive as far as the rotations go:

Sixty-four percent of the innings thrown by Yankees starters in this span have gone to pitchers hit for ERAs well above 5.00. Most glaringly, Severino has failed to last six innings in any of his last five starts while allowing eight home runs, likely ending his Cy Young hopes. Sabathia has apparently run out of gas, and Gray, an enigma since being acquired from the A’s at the 2017 non-waiver deadline, has pitched his way to the bullpen; his next turn will be taken by July 31 acquisition Lance Lynn.

On the other side, both Sale and Rodriguez were stellar within this stretch before landing on the DL, and Eovaldi picked an outstanding moment in which to put together back-to-back scoreless starts for the first time in his career. As a group, the Sox starters have a home run rate that’s half that of the Yankees (0.9 per nine versus 1.8) while striking out more (9.6 per nine to 8.6) and walking fewer (2.4 per nine to 3.4). Good morning, good afternoon, good night.

I’ll spare you the bullpen table, but where it had tilted towards the Yankees prior to this series (a 3.13 ERA/3.32 FIP ERA versus a 3.87 ERA/3.42 FIP),
it’s now tilted towards the Sox, thanks to the work they did this weekend: 3.79 ERA/3.57 FIP to 4.08 ERA/3.50 FIP. Much of the damage on the pinstriped front owes to Thursday night’s debacle, when manager Aaron Boone pulled Sabathia after three innings and two runs allowed, then sat on his hands as Holder, who entered the night with a 2.06 ERA and 2.52 FIP, allowed seven straight batters to reach base, serving up four extra-base hits including one of Pearce’s homers. Boone then called upon Chad Green, who retired just two of the five hitters he faced. By the time the dust had settled, a 4-2 lead had turned into a 10-4 deficit, and that was before Cessa, who had retired Pearce with runners on the corners to end the frame, allowed five garbage-time runs in his next three innings. As for Sunday, while Aroldis Chapman has looked wobbly lately due to left knee tendinitis, with a 6.10 ERA and eight walks (but 22 strikeouts) in 10.1 innings dating back to June 25, it was only his second blown save of the season.

Both Boston’s Dave Dombrowski and New York’s Brian Cashman were active in the days and weeks leading up to the July 31 deadline, with the former adding Pearce, Kinsler and Eovaldi and the latter Zach Britton, Happ and Lynn. Playoff odds-wise, none of what they did had much effect because the two teams are so far ahead of the pack; per Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections, the Yankees’ moves added about one percentage point to their chances of winning the division at the expense of the Red Sox, but those chances are now less than a third of what they were less than a week later because of the Boston trouncing.

It’s not that the Yankees are a bad team — they’re still projected to win 99 games this year. But right now, 99 wins in the AL East gets you a set of steak knives and a date with either the A’s or the Mariners in the Coin Toss Game. This Red Sox team has gotten hot at the right time, and they’ve left the Yankees eating their dust.