Three Up, Three Down: The MLB hot/cold report

Welcome to Three Up, Three Down: The MLB hot/cold report. Every week, we'll try our best to break down who's heating things up in the baseball world and who's currently stuck in the back of the refrigerator in a state of deep chill.

This week, Big Sexy continues to make the experts look like fools, and while the Red Sox are heating up, every baseball team in the Midwest is literally cooling down due to the weather.

Three Up

Bartolo Colon is somehow at it again

It's 2018, and Bartolo Colon is still somehow defying the laws of time and space by continuing to pitch into his 40s. It seemed like Colon was finally ready to concede to Father Time after he had an underwhelming season with the Braves and Twins in 2017. In fact, he was released by the Rangers near the end of spring training before they brought him back so he could make a spot start.

As it turns out, bringing Colon back ended up working well for them because, inexplicably, he still has something left in the tank. He proved this on Sunday when he took a perfect game into the eighth inning against none other than the defending World Series champion Houston Astros, in Houston.

It's pretty easy to be skeptical of Colon's longevity at this point in his career, but it's also easy to point out that Colon has been defying all of his doubters for nearly a decade now. It's clear that the last active remaining Montreal Expos player will go out on his terms, and we have no idea when or where that will be. For now, we should just continue to enjoy the ride that Big Sexy continues to take us on.

Puerto Ricans shine in Puerto Rico

The Twins and Indians played a two-game series this week in Puerto Rico, and it'll be memorable for multiple reasons. The second game of the series started on Wednesday night and bled into Thursday morning after the two teams ended up playing a whopping 16 innings, which was only two innings longer than what the White Sox and A's played earlier that day! The score was 0-0 for 13 of those innings before the Twins mercifully walked it off thanks to Eddie Rosario.

In fact, Rosario was not the only Puerto Rican player who had a memorable moment playing big league baseball on his home island. Jose Berrios pitched a gem over seven innings as he absolutely befuddled Cleveland's batters while he was on the mound. Berrios is well on his way to becoming a star, and he had to feel good with such a solid performance in front of the Puerto Rican faithful.

Prior to that, the first game was especially memorable due to Francisco Lindor bringing a jolt of excitement to his hometown fans when he hit a home run to open the scoring. It must have been like something out of a dream for Lindor to not only be able to play a big league game in front of his hometown fans, but also hit a dinger while doing so. He was floating around the bases, and the emotion in the ballpark was palpable even through video. It may have only been two games, but you'll have a hard time forgetting this series.

Red Sox are firing on all cylinders

On Wednesday night, the Red Sox had a ho-hum 9-0 win over the Los Angeles Angels. That was their ninth win out of 10, and they've gotten off to a fantastic 15-2 start so far this season. Not only are they winning games, but most of those wins have been similar to last night's game — an easy victory with the game well in hand before the ninth inning rolled around.

Going into this season, we knew that the Red Sox would have the pitching prowess to make yet another run to the playoffs. Their offense was a question mark, however. That is no longer the case after their offensive output during the early stages of the season. Here's a crazy stat for you: The Red Sox have already hit four grand slams this season after hitting a grand total of zero all last season. It's early yet, but the AL East has a clear front-runner — and it's the crew from Fenway again.

Three Down

Stanton and the Yankees come jogging out of the gates

In other AL East news, the Yankees are off to a mediocre 8-8 start and already 6.5 games back of their hated rivals in Massachusetts. This isn't really cause for concern since there is still plenty of baseball left to be played, but this is New York that we're talking about here so people are naturally starting to get antsy about the way things have gone so far.

The main cause of Yankees fans' anxiousness has to be the sluggish start that huge trade acquisition Giancarlo Stanton has gotten off to. After Tuesday's game, the 2017 NL MVP has started life in the AL in a bit of a slump, currently hitting .197/.293/.409 with three home runs over 75 plate appearances. The biggest issue is that he's striking out a ton — his strikeout percentage is currently at 38 percent, and he's already been on the receiving end of boos from the home crowd on multiple occasions.

The boobirds were out in full force Tuesday night after the Yankees got drilled by the Miami Marlins. Just one night after taking care of business 12-1, the Marlins somehow managed to get the best of Masahiro Tanaka and ended up coming just three runs short of completely reversing the previous night's result with a 9-1 win of their own. It's still very early, but the Yankees are going to have to get it into gear really soon if they don't want to fall into a major hole in these early stages.

Atlanta bullpen blows it big time

While they may not be on the same level as the New York Mets, the Braves are off to a pleasant start, sitting on a 10-7 record. They've picked up most of those wins against NL playoff teams from last season and doing this without super-prospect Ronald Acuña Jr. as well. It appears that the Braves are about to make the leap from being bad to being competitively mediocre, which is progress!

Unfortunately for the Braves, Acuña probably wouldn't have saved them from the extremely unfortunate fate that befell them Saturday afternoon. At one point during that day, they held a 10-2 lead against the Cubs. Then their bullpen took over, and once the eighth inning rolled around, a leaky dam turned into a full-scale flood.

The Atlanta bullpen gave up seven walks (two of those HBPs and one of those an intentional walk) and ended up conceding nine runs to the Cubs in just one inning. As a result, a 10-5 lead going into the eighth inning turned into an eventual 14-10 defeat. It was one of the most stunning collapses that you will ever see, and that's saying something considering an Atlanta sports team was involved.

Baseball gets put into freeze mode

One of the factors in the aforementioned Atlanta collapse was the fact that the conditions at Wrigley Field over this past weekend were absolutely appalling. The two games they managed to get in were both played under very cold and very wet conditions, and Sunday's game was canceled after the forecast remained the same — and after both teams complained about having to play through that weather for two straight days.

This was not just a Chicago thing, either. Sunday alone saw a whopping six games get postponed due to inclement weather. This included a double-header that was scheduled in Detroit due to bad weather wiping out the scheduled game on Friday and Minnesota having to postpone an entire series due to snow.

While the early start to the season definitely played a factor, you still can't predict the weather, and I don't think anybody could have seen this coming. Mother Nature decided that winter would last into mid-April in the Midwest, and all we can do about it is complain on the internet. At least Milwaukee was smart enough to put a roof on its place, right?