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Three Up, Three Down: The MLB hot/cold report
Jamie Sabau/Getty Images

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…

Three Up

Phillies, Braves making the NL East interesting


Bill Streicher-USA TODAY Sports

Unless both the Phillies and Braves have a bit of a weekend collapse and the Nationals have a surge, one of either Atlanta or Philadelphia will be in first place in the NL East going into Memorial Day. That's a pretty big deal, especially when it was widely considered that the NL East would basically be a cakewalk for Washington.

Instead, it appears as if the Nats will have some company at the top of the division this summer, and surely that's a good thing, right? After all, we all love pennant chases, and seeing one team just run away with the division would have been boring. Instead, there will actually be some intriguing storylines in the East.

For instance, the Braves went into the ninth inning of their Sunday afternoon game against the Marlins down 9-4, only to win it after scoring six runs in the bottom of the ninth. How did they follow up that amazing moment? The Phillies welcomed them to Citizens Bank Park and emphatically beat them twice in three games. This division is actually going to be fun, and it's worth keeping an eye on going forward.

Juan Soto hits the ground running as a teenager


Brad Mills-USA TODAY Sports

With that said, the Nationals are still lurking. They've done well to get over their slow start and are playing decent baseball now. We all know that they've got the talent to hit another level and take over what they figure is their rightful spot at the top of the division. They also appear to be getting in on the youth movement as well — it's almost as if they're keeping too close of an eye on what Atlanta and Philadelphia are doing.

Enter Juan Soto. He took a rocket ship from the Single-A South Atlantic League at the beginning of this season to already playing in the big leagues. Granted, he only got this shot because of a bit of an injury crisis, but it's still cool to see a teenager playing in the majors at any point.

Plus, it's even cooler that he hit a dinger in his very first start. The opposing pitcher, Robbie Erlin, must have felt like a bit of a graybeard at just 27 after he gave up that dinger to a kid who is still a couple of years away from being able to legally consume alcohol here in the United States. Baseball is rapidly turning into a young man's sport, and Soto's achievement is the latest example of that phenomenon.

Rays shake things up with new bullpen strategy


Jay Biggerstaff-USA TODAY Sports

The Tampa Bay Rays are currently 22-25 and already 11 games behind the Red Sox for the lead in the AL East. It was unlikely that they were going to make a run at the division, and unlike the surprises in the NL East, they've met their low expectations so far. It's probably going to be a long season in Tampa this year, but that doesn't mean it has to be boring.

For instance, one of the main stories for the Rays this season is their abject lack of starting pitching. They've messed around with a four-man rotation, and when that started to wear thin, they resorted to using one of their relievers to make a start. No, they didn't ask Sergio Romo to go five or six innings — they just had him do his normal duties at the beginning of the game instead of the end.

Romo started two consecutive games for the Rays over the weekend, which brought league-wide attention to the Rays. There are plenty of legitimate questions that have risen in the wake of this strategy. What does this mean for the future of pitching strategy? How will this affect how relievers get paid if more teams decide to employ this strategy? Will teams even pick it up? Who knows, but I'm personally thankful for the Rays spicing things up a bit.

Three Down


Another player gets caught using PEDs


Jayne Kamin-Oncea-USA TODAY Sports

Another week has come and gone, and another player has been suspended 80 games for using PEDs. This time, White Sox catcher Welington Castillo was the one who got nabbed, as he reportedly tested positive for a drug that wasn't a steroid but nonetheless qualified as a performance-enhancing drug.

It's a real shame too, since Castillo has been one of the bright spots on what's been an expectedly bleak season for the White Sox. Of course, the natural caveat with PED suspensions is that the player in question is automatically disqualified from the All-Star Game and postseason action. Considering it's the White Sox, I don't think that the latter will come into play for Castillo once he returns to action.

Cubs, Reds have underwhelming shoving match

I'm going to admit something here: Baseball fights are fun. Yes, beanballing is a dangerous practice, and some of the things that start baseball fights are extremely stupid, but the actual fights themselves are fun to observe. Sometimes you get huge blowups that are talking points for years to come. It's been decades since Robin Ventura made the ill-fated decision to charge Nolan Ryan, and we still talk about it to this day.

One fight we won't be talking about in the future is the shoving match that the Reds and Cubs got into over the weekend. The gist of it is that Javy Baez got mad at Amir Garrett for loudly celebrating his strikeout, and the two got aggressive with each other. Then the shoving began. It was one of the more pointless baseball "fights" that you'll see, and it had everybody who was observing it wondering what the whole point was.

The good news is that nobody got hurt and nobody got beaned either, so it was all really inconsequential in the end. That's the thing about the lamer version of baseball "fights" — they're also way safer, and there's little to no risk of injury in these things. Still, that was such a boring kerfuffle.

Jose Bautista is now team-surfing


Noah K. Murray-USA TODAY Sports

I regret to inform you all that Jose Bautista has entered the "weird uniform" stage of his career. You all should be well aware of what I mean by this. It's basically the point when a once-prominent player who was the face of a team for many years has been cut by the team he was associated with for a long time and is now hopping around from team to team until his inevitable and impending retirement comes along.

For Joey Bats, it appears that he's firmly in that period. After spending his prime with the Blue Jays, he was one of the veterans who suffered from the overall lack of free agent action during the offseason. He eventually latched on with his old GM Alex Anthopoulos by signing with the Braves. After he hit well below the Mendoza line for the couple of weeks he spent with Atlanta, the Braves cut him loose.

Bautista is now with the Mets, and if he looked weird wearing Atlanta colors, then he looks even weirder wearing New York Mets colors. He'll continue to look weird in any uniform until he eventually hangs them up. Then we can finally just remember him for his bat-flipping days in Toronto. Until then, he'll continue to bounce around until it's ultimately time to call it quits.

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