Three Up, Three Down: Bartolo Colon brings 'Big Sexy' back

I'm going to admit that I'm not the biggest fan of whenever baseball decides to make all of its teams play dress-up for a weekend. I'd prefer to see teams stick with small tweaks to their normal uniforms instead of seeing them all blue'd, pink'd or camo'd out. However, MLB got it right with the unveiling of the uniforms that teams will wear for the Players Weekend later this month.

Every team will wear bright and colorful uniforms, and it doesn't stop there. All of the players were given the option to put nicknames on the back of the jerseys in lieu of their last names. We received gems such as Oakland's Josh Phegley going with "PTBNL," Manny Machado declaring himself "Mr. Miami" and Kyle Seager proudly proclaiming himself as "Corey's Brother." This is a good idea, and I can't wait to see what these look like on the field in a few weeks.

Down: Braves lose a player before even throwing out the first pitch

After flirting with .500 around the time of the All-Star break, the Braves have cooled down a bit, and as of the time of writing this, they're currently 10 games below .500. They reached that low point after losing their sixth consecutive game against the Phillies (who are 11-2 against the Braves and 31-67 against the rest of baseball) and are starting to fade. However, Atlanta's struggles against a bad team isn't why we're talking about the Braves now.

No, we're talking about them because they lost their starting shortstop on Tuesday night in extremely bizarre fashion. As the Braves were taking the field ahead of the first pitch of Tuesday's game, Johan Camargo tripped over the foul line and crumpled into a heap. He was diagnosed with a bone bruise on his knee and was placed on the disabled list as a result. It's one thing to lose a player to something like a collision or a being hit by a pitch, but it's another to lose a guy before a pitch is even thrown. Poor Braves, and poor Camargo.

Up: Bryce Harper and Mike Trout share common milestone on a common day

Bryce Harper has returned to form this season and is having a very good campaign, and on Monday night the star outfielder for the Washington Nationals reached an impressive milestone for his age — he slammed his 150th career home run and did so before turning 25 years old. It's always impressive to reach that number and even more so when you consider how young he still is.

The funny part of that is that it's an achievement that Mike Trout has as well. Trout currently has 191 dingers under his belt, and he reached the 150-HR mark before turning 25 as well. In fact, he did it at the age of 24 years and 295 days, which happens to be the exact same age that Bryce Harper was on Monday when he hit his 150th career dinger. You may call it coincidence, but I call it another weird moment of baseball fate giving us another memory to keep in mind as these two stars continue to progress through what will surely end up being illustrious careers.

Down: The White Sox hit rock bottom after the break

Baseball is a weird sport, so when you really think about it then, we really shouldn't be shocked that the AL-worst Chicago White Sox managed to take a series off of the AL-best Houston Astros. With that being said, I'm sure that this came as a huge relief for baseball fans on the South Side, because they had been scuffling mightily since the All-Star break. 

At one point, the team was in a 3-19 hole after the unofficial halfway point of the season, and that was good enough to plunge the Pale Hose into serious contention for the No. 1 overall pick in next year's draft. That might be good news for pragmatic White Sox fans, but it's still tough to watch your favorite team bottom out like that — and they truly bottomed out. According to SB Nation's South Side Sox, the White Sox have been baseball's worst hitting team and worst pitching team during that stretch. If you want to hit rock bottom, that's the path to follow.

Up: Big Sexy is back!

A while back, the Braves decided that they were done with Bartolo Colon after his ERA bloated to a size that was absolutely untenable for even a rebuilding team to handle. It seemed as if Father Time had finally caught up with Colon, and we had finally had to accept the era of Big Sexy had come to an unceremonious close. However, it's August now, and apparently Colon has decided that this was the time and place to bring sexy back. 

He started off the month by throwing a complete game for the Twins against the Rangers (to put this in perspective, he had a stretch in late May-early June where he struggled to get through nine innings over the course of three starts) and then followed that up by throwing seven shutout innings against the Brewers. It's just two starts, but the ageless wonder continues to leave us all in wonder of how he continues to defy Father Time and his best efforts to catch him.

Down: Pirates fan gets hit by dinger in worst possible place

It's totally understandable if a Pirates-Padres game on a Friday night in the middle of August got past you. With that being said, this was a night that one Pirates fan in particular will never forget. Carlos Asuaje hit a ball that cleared the fence at PNC Park but had to be confirmed via review after it bounced back into the field of play.

The ball returned to the field because it struck a very unlucky Pirates fan in the most unfortunate of spots. The fan tried to be nice by not interfering with the play, but his mindfulness ended up costing him as he took a shot to the jewels. What made it worse is that it got replayed over and over again, which meant that the fans and players in attendance were able to either cringe at the man's pain or laugh at his misfortune. Either way, it was a rough night — the Pirates lost and the unlucky fan went home very, very sore.