Recently, I wrote an article about the very surprising Max Muncy. That was published on June 4, which is only about a week and a half ago. The way this tends to work, we write articles about players when we can’t ignore their hot streaks anymore, and then, invariably, regression sets in. Not so, in this case. At least, not yet. Since June 4, Muncy has batted 31 times. He has eight walks and ten hits, four of which have left the yard. Muncy has actually gone deep four games in a row.

Muncy didn’t even figure into our preseason Dodgers depth chart. I doubt the Dodgers were thinking too much about him, either. Muncy was projected by both Steamer and ZiPS as a below-replacement player. Well, he’s come to the plate 157 times, and out of everyone with 150 plate appearances, Muncy ranks third in baseball in wRC+, behind only Mookie Betts and Mike Trout. The picture, according to expected wOBA, is only a little bit different — within the same player pool, Muncy ranks fifth, between Freddie Freeman and Joey Votto. The numbers are spectacular, and the size of the sample is only growing.

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The rebuilding Tigers weren’t headed anywhere in particular, quickly or slowly, in 2018, but whatever their eventual destination, Miguel Cabrera won’t be going with them. In the third inning of Tuesday night’s game game against the Twins, the 35-year-old slugger ruptured his left biceps tendon while swinging a bat. He had to be replaced mid-plate appearance, underwent an MRI while the game was still in progress, and was discovered to need season-ending surgery. It’s just the latest frustrating turn in a Hall-of-Fame career that, alas, hasn’t lacked for bum notes in recent years.

Cabrera suffered the injury while whiffing at strike two against Jake Odorizzi. He immediately doubled over in pain, grabbed his left arm and headed towards the Tigers’ dugout:

https://gfycat.com/gifs/detail/UnawareSlipperyHartebeest

“He took a swing, missed the ball, and the thing popped. It’s pretty sad,” said manager Ron Gardenhire.

This is Cabrera’s second issue involving his left biceps this year and his second trip to the disabled list. He missed three games in late April and early May due to a biceps muscle spasm, then played in just six innings of the Tigers’ May 3 game before leaving with a right hamstring strain that sidelined him for four weeks. Despite the injuries, he had been productive if not his dominant in his 38 games, hitting .299/.395/.448 with a 123 wRC+, 0.8 WAR, and a modest three homers.

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If you’re like me, then, before Tuesday, you didn’t know the name Stu Scheurwater. We all know the names of some umpires, and maybe you know the names of most umpires, but it’s almost impossible to keep track of all of them. Scheurwater, previously, wasn’t anywhere on my radar. And honestly, that’s probably a good thing, since we get to know umpires in the first place because they do something that ticks us off. We don’t seize many opportunities to congratulate umpires for a job well done. In that way they’re kind of like closers — their success is almost assumed. They’re supposed to get it right. They can’t always do that. Every little mistake makes thousands of people upset.

I’d like to take this moment to applaud Scheurwater’s performance. One call in particular has placed him on my good side. Scheurwater didn’t do anything he wasn’t supposed to do. He simply followed the rule book, which is much of an umpire’s job. Yet many other umpires wouldn’t have made the same decision. When it comes to how baseball is played, I don’t have many strong opinions. I’m open to the pitch clock, I’m open to changing the mound, and I don’t care either way about the DH. With Brandon Nimmo at the plate Tuesday, Scheurwater called a ball. I strongly believe any such sequence should be called the same way.

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Ron Gardenhire’s experience in the game extends far beyond his 14 seasons as a big-league manager. The 60-year-old “Gardy” has also spent time as a coach and a minor-league manager — and, before that, he played nine seasons as an infielder in the New York Mets system. Primarily a shortstop, Gardenhire appeared in 285 games with the NL East club between 1981 and -85.

He’s also a lifelong fan of the game. The bulk of Gardenhire’s formative years were spent in small-town Okmulgee, Oklahoma, where he collected bubble-gum cards, religiously tuned in to The Game of the Week, and cheered for his heroes. Then he got to live his dream. Gardenhire played with and against the likes of Dave Kingman, Rusty Staub, and Pete Rose. As he told me recently at Fenway Park, “I’ve been fortunate.”

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Ron Gardenhire: “I was an Okie, so I followed the guys who were from Oklahoma more than anything else. Mickey Mantle, Johnny Bench, Bobby Murcer. I also watched the Dodgers, Don Drysdale and those guys, because my dad was in the military and we were out in Arvin, California when he was overseas in Korea. That’s when I really got into baseball. I collected bubble-gum cards, and all that stuff, with my cousins out there.

“Every Saturday we would hunker down in front of the TV and watch the Game of the Week. In our area — this is when we were back in Oklahoma — a lot of the time it was the Cardinals. They were prominent there. We’d also get to see the Yankees quite a bit, and the Dodgers.

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Back in April, I examined current A’s center fielder Dustin Fowler’s pending lawsuit against the White Sox, arising from the injury he suffered when he ran into a concealed electrical box whilst running after a fly ball. Fowler filed a negligence suit, which requires that a plaintiff plead and prove the existence of a duty owed by the defendant to the plaintiff, a breach of that duty, an injury proximately caused by the breach, and damages.

On Tuesday, retired NFL running back Reggie Bush won a case that, as reader Sean Logue has anticipated, might be relevant to Fowler’s lawsuit. Here’s the pertinent information, per CBSSports’ Sean Wagner-McGough:

Midway through the 2015 NFL season, then-49ers running back Reggie Bush suffered a season-ending knee injury when he slipped on the concrete ring surrounding the field at the Edward Jones Dome, the Rams‘ former home in St. Louis. More than two-and-a-half years later, the Rams were found liable for the injury.

On Tuesday, a St. Louis jury ordered the Rams, who now reside in Los Angeles, to pay Bush $4.95 million in compensatory damages and $7.5 million in punitive damages for a grand total of nearly $12.5 million, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Dan Allmayer, a lawyer for the team, said that they plan to file a motion for a new trial.

Like Fowler has, Bush also sued in negligence. Here’s his complaint. The factual allegations of their cases differ: Fowler ran into a hidden electrical box, while Bush tore his ACL on a “slippery concrete surface” surrounding the playing field. (Here’s video of the injury, for context.) From a legal perspective, however, the lawsuits are remarkably similar. Both allege that the respective defendants had exclusive control over the respective stadia, that the defendants knew about the existence of a hidden dangerous condition, and neither defendant took any steps to warn players.

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Back in March, this contributor presented Billy Hamilton with an idea that he described as the “stupidest thing” he had heard in his life. I didn’t think it was so bad and neither did his spring-training clubhouse neighbor, Scooter Gennett. Today, this author thought he’d revisit the subject.

Hamilton is one of the game’s fastest players — he ranks third in sprint speed this season. He is one of the game’s best outfield defenders and most efficient baserunners. But his bat has eroded his value throughout his career and is doing so again this season. The idea I presented to Hamilton basically was this: to artificially increase his on-base percentage — to get Hamilton and his game-changing speed on the bases more often — Hamilton should be employed as a pinch-runner very early in games and then remain in games to take advantage of his outfield defense and speed.

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Ever since Rich Hill tossed convention aside and began using his curveball at an unusually high usage rate, other pitchers have followed the template. That’s how copy-catting best practices typically work. Drew Pomeranz started Hill-ing. So did Lance McCullers and, to a slightly less pronounced degree, Charlie Morton. Other have followed suit, too.

Well, we might have another pitcher on the Hill Plan — or, at least a modified version of the plan.

After throwing his curveball at 16.6% and 17.4% rates in each of the previous two years, Seth Lugo threw his curveball 32% of the time on Sunday night, nearly in line with his 31.2% rate on the season. It worked. While it’s not Hill-level usage, a 100% increase in pitch usage is notable. In his second start of the year against the vaunted Yankee lineup, Lugo allowed just two hits over six shutout innings striking out eight and allowing no walks.

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Eric Thames was activated from the disabled list yesterday, which makes this a good time to unearth a conversation I had with the Milwaukee Brewers slugger in spring training. It was originally going to run a handful of weeks into the season, but then Thames went down with a thumb injury. Consequently, the interview was shelved, as well.

Prior to landing on the DL — he was hurt diving for a ground ball on April 24 — the 31-year-old first baseman sported a .976 OPS and had gone deep seven times. The start was reminiscent of last season, when he’d been even better in the early going. Back from a four-year stint in South Korea, Thames had 11 bombs and a 1.276 OPS when the 2017 calendar flipped to May.

His summer wasn’t nearly as sunny. Thames scuffled more often than not, and by the time September rolled around his slash line was down to .235/.349/.510. Then came a late-season surge. With the Brewers battling for a playoff berth — they ultimately fell a game short — Thames reached base 12 times in his final 23 plate appearances. After closing August on a 2-for-27 skid, he logged a 1.004 OPS in September.

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Thames on his up-and-down 2017 season: “After my hot start, Ryan Braun went down [from May 25-June 27] and I had no protection in the lineup. Guys started pitching around me a little bit and I responded by being more aggressive. I wanted to hit a home run every time — I tried to do too much — and that doesn’t work too well. I became my own enemy, right then and there.”

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The Mets started out hot in 2018, needing just 12 games to record 11 wins. It would take the club another 30 games to get their next 11 wins, however. Even then, at 22-19, the team’s prospects for contending seemed decent. Twenty-one games and just six wins later, a once-promising season looks much less so. The graph below shows the team’s playoff odds since the start of the season.

Even heading into May, the playoffs looked like a 50/50 proposition. A week later, it was one-in-four, and now the Mets’ odds of making the playoffs are basically 1-in-10. In what figures to be a very competitive National League playoff race, the Mets’ record is better than only the Marlins’ and Reds’. To make the playoffs, they will have to pass eight teams. Unless the club turns things around quickly, they might find themselves as sellers in a month. The question, though — if indeed the Mets do becomes sellers — is “Who precisely do they sell?” The two best players on the team are ace-level starting pitchers controlled beyond this season in Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard. Buster Olney recently argued the team should at least gauge their trade value.

So deGrom is everything that the New York Mets really need right now, in their worst of times, in his dominance and his leadership. But given the current challenges of the organization — the gray-beard age at the major league level, the lack of depth at the top of their farm system — they owe it to themselves to welcome offers from other clubs for deGrom and Noah Syndergaard, to at least understand what’s possible.

If the Mets were to start a rebuilding process, deGrom and Syndergaard would be the first to go. With deGrom in arbitration through 2020 and Syndergaard controlled through 2021, the duo would fetch a huge prospect haul. For sake of comparison, after the 2016 season, the White Sox traded Chris Sale for Yoan Moncada, Michael Kopech, Luis Basabe, and Victor Diaz, and then traded Jose Quintana last year for Eloy Jimenez, Dylan Cease, Matt Rose, and Bryant Flete. If the Mets were to trade both deGrom and Syndergaard, they would probably come pretty close to that kind of haul.

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One of my favorite baseball games of the decade was played in Cincinnati, Ohio, on June 6th, 2017, between the Cincinnati Reds and the St. Louis Cardinals. That’s the day that Ryan Joseph Gennett hit the 39th, 40th, 41st, and 42nd home runs of his then-five-year-old career, and in so doing became just the 17th player in baseball history to hit four home runs in a single game. Nothing else of any real import happened that night; my delight in its existence is driven entirely by the improbability of Gennett’s accomplishment.

As our own Jay Jaffe noted for Sports Illustrated that week, Gennett was at the time — with the possible exception of Mark Whiten — the most unlikely four-homer player in the long history of the game, and his remarkable power surge appeared then to be one of those strange, miraculous occurrences that baseball occasionally throws at us as further evidence of its unpredictability, like Bartolo Colón throwing 38 consecutive strikes against the Angels, or going deep that one time against the Padres. Nothing, I thought, could be stranger than Scooter Gennett hitting four home runs in one game.

I was wrong. It turns out that hitting for power is kind of Scooter Gennett’s thing these days. In fact, since June 7th, 2017 — the day after his four-homer game — just 27 of the 67 players with as many plate appearances as Gennett’s 635 have a higher isolated slugging percentage than his .220. Since June 7th, 2017, Gennett has a higher ISO than Kris Bryant. Throw in his four-homer day — it did, after all, really happen — and only 16 players top his .239 mark. Gennett’s four-homer game was surprising a year ago. It would be far less surprising now. Scooter Gennett currently has the 10th-highest slugging percentage in baseball (to be fair, his ISO, which strips out the effect of his extremely high BABIP, is significantly lower). One way or another, he should probably be an All-Star. But why? What’s changed?

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