Category: Sports News

I can still remember exactly where I was when Bartolo Colon hit his first career home run, ten years ago today, May 7, 2016.

I was throwing away a poopy diaper.

My son was three months old, and after feeding him, my wife handed him off to me for some dad time while she rested. I took him in my arms and walked to the basement, where I had the Mets game on the television. They were playing the Padres at Petco Park on a Saturday night. I was rocking him and generally enjoying some alone time with him. My daughter was already in bed, and so it was just Dad and Ben time.

And then, as he was wont to do, he pooped.

Being a dutiful father, I got out the mat, the wipes, the fresh diaper, and I got to work, while sneaking glances at the TV. I finished the job, got him dressed, and left him on the floor with a toy while I disposed of the diaper. I could hear the emotion in Gary Cohen’s voice as I was walking back from the garbage, but by the time I got to the TV, I had missed it. Thankfully, it was 2016 and not 1996, so I could rewind the broadcast and watch it in all of its glory. And then watch it again. And again. And text my brother and father to make sure that they saw it.

And then watch it again.

Why was this moment, both then and now, so iconic? Colon was obviously a fan favorite Met, but he wasn’t a long-tenured Met. This start was his seventh of the year, and he was in his third and final year as a Met. But few players before or since made such an immediate or positive impact on the fanbase, if not the club.

Colon’s 2014 was essentially a league average year (0.4 bWAR) for a Mets team that was still figuring itself out. But Colon’s sense of humor, casual nature, and everyman physique made him a fan favorite off the bat. Over the next two seasons, Colon was a steady hand, helping to guide the young aces of Jacob deGrom, Noah Syndergaard, Zack Wheeler, and Steven Matz. Matt Harvey was already established by the time Colon arrived, but it was clearly Bart and the kids in the rotation, and he seemed to enjoy that role.

For the young fans, Grandpa Bartolo was a fun role. For those of us who were already older than most of the Mets in 2016, it was nice to see a guy not just holding onto his dream well into adulthood, but also well into beer belly territory. And for fans even older than Colon, he represented a throwback to a different time of baseball, where you didn’t need to be a physical specimen to be an All-Star player. Colon represented a different type of six pack than many of his teammates.

But perhaps the least heralded reason for the enduring nature of the Bartolo home run is Gary Cohen’s masterful call of it.

Gary Cohen: Colon looking for his first hit of the year. He drives one deep to left field…back goes Upton…back near the wall…it’s outta here! Bartolo has done it. The Impossible has happened. The team vacates the dugout as Bartolo takes the long trot; his first career home run, and there will be nobody in the dugout to greet him! This is one of the great moments in the history of baseball. Bartolo Colon has gone deep.

Ron Darling: I want to say that was one of the longest home run trots I’ve ever seen, but I think that’s how fast he runs!

Cohen: And now they’ll flood up the tunnel and give him his just due. His 226th career at bat. You knew if he ever made contact in just the right way, he was strong enough to do it, and now Bartolo has brought down the house.

Gare is the best of the best, and part of that is because he never loses his fandom and enthusiasm. He was all of us in his call, most especially when his voice cracks in the middle of ‘outta.’ He’s so overcome with the dinger that his voice literally can’t control itself, and Cohen’s voice is conditioned far better than most to control itself.

There are hundreds of great Mets moments that we all count as our favorites, but there is something so Metsian about this moment in particular. It was a game that really mattered, as the Mets only made the playoffs by the skin of their teeth, but it happened in season that ended in disappointment. It was a career that had its highs and lows but never really coalesced into sustained greatness. It was a moment that, on the surface, doesn’t really define anything or truly matter in the grand scheme of the team, the player, or the sport.

But we all know that’s not true. The Bartolo homer matters. The impossible happened.

So, it’s May 7 and it’s the day after the Atlanta Braves finally lost their first series of the season. Getting that deep into the season without dropping a season is simply fantastic. I’ve always maintained that you shouldn’t start taking the standings seriously until around Memorial Day but in this case, it’s extremely hard not to take a look at things and get excited about what may lay ahead for the Braves.

As of right now, they’re 8.5 games ahead of both the Washington Nationals and the Philadelphia Phillies and they’re 11 games clear of the New York Mets already, as well. Getting that much of a gap early on against Philadelphia and New York is huge since those two alongside Atlanta figured to be the real contenders for winning the NL East crown this year and also fighting for any potential postseason spot as well. Assuming there isn’t a complete and total reversal of fortunes in the very near future, the Braves should be going into Memorial Day with a comfortable buffer as they head into the Summer stretch of the season.

So what does it mean? Clearly it’s good, as the chatter about the Braves potentially having the NL East title wrapped up already is beginning to start. It’s certainly premature as there’s still over 120 games left to be played in this season and anything can happen in the span of 30 games — much less 30 multiplied by four.

Still, the early signs are certainly encouraging and indicative of a team that didn’t just get hot early — this team might be here to stay for the whole season.

• The Braves currently have a run differential of +79 and an Expected Win/Loss and Pythagorean W-L record record of 27-11. Nobody else in the NL East has a positive run differential and everybody else is still under .500. Plus, the Phillies are actually overperforming their current record of 17-20 by two games, according to X-W/L.
• The venue hasn’t mattered. Atlanta’s 12-6 at home and 14-6 on the road, which is certainly a positive sign in its own right.
• The projection models also think that the Braves are for real. PECOTA has given them a 96 percent chance of making the Postseason with a 77 percent shot at winning the division. Baseball-Reference has Atlanta at 93 percent to make the playoffs with an 97 percent shot to take the divisional crown. FanGraphs has the Braves at an 81 percent chance of getting back on top of the NL East with a 95 percent shot of making the Postseason. Again, this is all dynamic based on how the team is playing but as long as there isn’t some sort of ridiculous drop-off, this is a very, very nice place to be in at the moment.
• As Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projection model indicated in the linked article above, this isn’t as if it’s a case of a lot of players doing stuff that’s unsustainable. While the pitching might be punching a bit above its weight at the moment, a lot of the contributions that they’ve been getting from the guys at the plate appear to be for real and in line with what’s on the back of their respective baseball cards, so to speak.
  
  From Szymborki’s article:

Of all major league hitters currently projected to get plate appearances over the rest of the season, the Braves have nine of the top 100 [hitters], more than you would expect from random chance. Only three players — Austin Riley, Ronald Acuña Jr., and Mike Yastrzemski — have taken big hits, but they are still projected to be real contributors, though I’m a bit worried about Riley personally.

• It’s still relatively early but Matt Olson appears primed to break his pattern of having a great season in odd years and a relatively disappointing season in even years. He will shortly clear his 2024 season in terms of fWAR production (he’s already at 2.3 fWAR through 38 games — he produced 2.6 throughout the entirety of the 2024 season!) and if he keeps this up, he will also clear what he did in 2022 (3.1 fWAR) as well. If this ends up being at or near a career year for Olson, that would be huge for the Braves. In fact, his 2026 Statcast metrics look very, very similar (and slightly better) to what he did during that amazing 2023 season of his. Watch out!

• It also helps that Ozzie Albies is on track for his best season since 2023 (he’s already cleared his fWAR production in 2026 (1.6 so far) for both the past two seasons (1.3 each), Drake Baldwin appears to be on track for establishing himself as an elite-hitting catcher in baseball and the changes that Michael Harris II made in the second half of his topsy-turvy 2025 season appear to have stuck around as well. Maurico Dubón’s plate production has also been a very pleasant surprise.
• As mentioned above, the Braves have gotten this far with Austin Riley being mediocre at best, Ronald Acuña Jr. performing below his superstar standards, missing Sean Murphy for all but three games and still not having Ha-Seong Kim play a single game. There’s a decent chance that we still haven’t seen the Braves lineup perform at full-strength, which is a frightening thought for the rest of baseball.
• We’re starting to see the pitching fall off but Bryce Elder being for real is a major bonus. JR Ritchie potentially being a regular productive contributor would be huge as well. Walt Weiss’s management of the pitching staff going forward is going to be crucial when it comes to determining just how successful this team can be going forward.

So basically, there’s a lot to love about how this season has started for the Atlanta Braves. I think we’re all smart enough to realize that the division ain’t over yet — not while the Phillies are attempting to ride this “new manager bounce” until the wheels fall off. There’s a lot of time between now and October but with what they’ve done already, the Braves are in a very good position to make sure that they will be playing once October rolls around. The standards are high around here and it appears that the team is back to meeting those standards, so far.

In 2022, the “It’s Not My Money(ball)” series was created in response to the owners’ lockout, which disrupted that year’s Spring Training and arguably cost Clayton Kershaw a perfect game in Minneapolis (I had fun). As the season completes its first month, the World Baseball Classic now a memory, we must conclude the revival of this series as trouble looms in the distance, hanging in the air, exactly in the way a brick does not.

This trilogy in five parts (it’s yet another Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy joke) was initially conceived from a single essay that ballooned in size to the point where a split was necessary. As I worked on Pandora’s Boxand MLB’s Dirty Dozen, I realized there was a deeper story than skinflint owners and a perception problem that the Dodgers are more than happy to lean into.

Like a child who ate everlasting gum, research for this story just kept getting bigger and exponentially worse.

I maintain that issues with private equity pose a greater threat to the league’s long-term health. Today’s final topic is utterly depressing, the exemplar of the times. A true example of greed incarnate, without any semblance of empathy, pretending to be something decent and good, yet being anything but by reducing people to numbers without any empathy. Where have I heard that phrase before?

MLB just embraced this cancer on the sport in a warm, welcoming hug. Subprime mortgages? No, something far more insidious. Today, we examine prediction markets.

The Devil’s Bargain

On March 19, 2026, MLB announced that it had entered into an arrangement with prediction market company, Polymarket. Evan Drellich of The Athleticreported that the deal will pay MLB $300 million over four years. The deal can be voided if courts rule that prediction markets violate state law, a league official who was not authorized to speak publicly said, confirming an ESPN report.

Per Mr. Drellich:

Attorney Doug Mishkin, a partner at the firm BCLP who worked on gambling and commercial transactions at the NFL from 2016 to 2022, said he sees parallels between 2018 and today. That year, the Supreme Court overturned a federal ban on sports gambling, opening up a new world for operators.

“There was this theme that, ‘Oh, how hypocritical of the sports leagues that they’re now getting into bed with all of these, these operators and official sports-betting sponsorships, when they had for years been fighting it and saying it was threatening the integrity of the game,’” Mishkin said. “But strategically, once the law had changed and it was going to be happening regardless, at that point, you don’t really have much of a choice.

“It’s sort of a similar dynamic here. You have the prediction markets they’re operating. They have millions of customers.”

Polymarket this month announced a partnership with data companies Palantir and TWG AI “to identify both suspicious trading activity, as well as trading by prohibited participants who probably shouldn’t be engaging and trading on certain outcomes,” Borod said.

(Emphasis added.)

Palantir is a topic for another day, especially regarding immigration enforcement. TWG AI is a division of TWG Global, a holding company founded by Dodgers’ owner Mark Walter. If you feel like the figurative call is coming from inside the house, you’re not alone.

The league announced the partnership as follows:

Major League Baseball (MLB) announced today two new agreements in the rapidly growing prediction market space. The league named Polymarket MLB’s Official Prediction Market Exchange.

In addition, Baseball Commissioner Robert D. Manfred, Jr. signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Michael S. Selig, Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), one year after MLB wrote a letter to the CFTC calling for strong integrity protections in the rapidly evolving prediction market space. MLB pursued this agreement with the CFTC to further protect the integrity of baseball by ensuring swift response to incidents and anticipating emerging trends more strongly.

The comprehensive integrity commitments in the Polymarket agreement and the CFTC’s clear collaborative intent provides a critical step towards a strong integrity framework within the prediction market space.

As part of Polymarket’s Official Partnership with MLB, Polymarket and its brokers will get exclusive access to MLB marks and logos to be used within their prediction market products. Polymarket will also get access to Official League Data from Sportradar, MLB’s exclusive global distributor of data for prediction markets, and receive brand exposure across MLB’s digital ecosystem and at league events. A key component of the partnership between MLB and Polymarket will be establishing a comprehensive integrity framework, which includes working together to restrict markets that present an integrity risk to MLB, such as individual pitches, manager decisions, and umpire performance, among others. Polymarket will also integrate integrity controls into its US Rulebook to ensure all of its brokers are held to the same integrity standards.

Under the terms of the MOU, MLB and the CFTC memorialized a clear intent to share information with each other regarding the integrity of professional baseball and related prediction markets. Shared information will be treated confidentially, facilitating open lines of communication. Designated representatives will meet regularly to identify and discuss any issues that may impact the integrity of MLB’s games and the MLB prediction market landscape.

While Polymarket will be MLB’s Official Prediction Market Exchange with a set of exclusive rights, MLB intends to have integrity relationships with all other prediction market exchanges offering baseball contracts. Those exchanges will be required to integrate the necessary integrity protections into their individual rulebooks…

…“Polymarket is about bringing fans closer to the moments that define sports,” said Shayne Coplan, Founder and CEO of Polymarket. “By working collaboratively with Major League Baseball and regulators, we can create new ways for fans to engage with the game while protecting the integrity of the sport.”

(Emphasis added.)

Getting access to league data and receiving brand exposure via the league, with plans to expand to other prediction market companies — what could possibly go wrong? In other news, a local skulk of foxes has established rules to guard local chicken coops, with farmers smiling in agreement, anticipating future agreements with the nearby pack of wolves, the kettle of hawks, and the den of snakes from two towns over.

Baseball media was largely silent on the news. Admittedly, I saw, and I was horrified. I bookmarked the announcement with the header “this can’t be good, figure out why ASAP.”

Connor Moylan of sister site Royals Review was on the ball and at least attempted to analyze the events, citing the only other essay I could find on the subject: Mr. Drellich of The Athletic.

If you have been concerned that there are not enough ways in 2026 to gamble on Major League Baseball, then I have good news for you. MLB entered into a partnership with prediction market Polymarket, first reported by Ben Horney of Front Office Sports and then later announced by both organizations. Polymarket gains the right to use official logos and marks, while MLB is reported to receive somewhere between $150 million and $300 million a year from the prediction markets…

…The phrase that really stood out to me is unreasonable integrity risk. I think this [phrase] begs the question, what is a “reasonable” integrity risk? Integrity in the game of baseball is a fundamentally necessary component, at least for me, to continue investing my time and money into the Royals and other MLB teams. I don’t want there to be “reasonable” integrity risks that are not just tolerated, but actively in partnership with the league. I want the leaders of the sport to guard the integrity of the game of baseball like you would guard a nuclear power plant. You don’t want even reasonable risks to be involved where nuclear fallout could be the result of said risks going awry. I want the most reasonable risks and seemingly tolerable to be taken seriously and accounted for when the results of failure could be as spectacular and long-lasting for MLB as Chernobyl was for Ukraine.

Last season, prop bets, which are bets on micro events instead of the game at large, were considered reasonable enough to be legal, even encouraged, by MLB teams and their gambling partners. Then word leaked that Cleveland Guardians relievers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz were being investigated and then indicted for allegedly rigging pitchers for financial gain…

…After the indictment, MLB and its gambling partners announced a $200 cap on prop bets, as well as forbidding the prop bets from being included in parlays. Parlays, which are a series of bets made at once that bring increased payouts if successful but fail if just one part of the bet doesn’t hit, are critically important to sports gambling companies’ bottom line…

(Emphasis added.)

One would wonder why MLB, or any league, would strap itself to such an institution with all the subtlety of someone selling a subprime mortgage without income verification in 2006, or put it another way:

Before we say how the league has committed a blunder of spectacular proportions that has somehow not gone nuclear yet, we must first understand the following question.

What is a prediction market?

Prediction markets are open markets that enable the prediction of specific outcomes using financial incentives, i.e., gambling on real-world events. Now, the preceding sentence should have horrified you. While this idea has existed in one form or another before, generally, there has been enough collective empathy to reject the premise back into the nihilistic horror from whence it came.

Not so, now, which is arguably the goal of prediction market companies like Polymarket and Kalshi. Bet everything, get money — empathy be damned. These companies would argue that they want to turn the wisdom of the crowd into a predictive tool.

In a benign, “not really thinking about it too hard because life is complicated” sort of way, it makes sense. But even a cursory, fleeting, basic look at these markets with even the tiniest scintilla of empathy demonstrates the nihilistic horror involved in literally turning everything into gambling, but with extra steps.

Kalshi and Polymarket would vehemently disagree with this assessment. You might too. But spend five minutes looking into these companies, and you quickly realize that you are not looking at an investment vehicle; you are looking at a sportsbook and an online casino in all but name.

Trevor Hayes of More Perfect Union provides a report on how Polymarket reached out to the outlet to pursue a partnership. What follows is a sobering 21-minute examination of greed gone amok with absolutely no empathy. The report demonstrates how these exchanges are clearly gambling, why they are trying to skirt taxation as a sportsbook by trying and failing to be a commodities exchange, how there is virtually no regulation apart from being enabled by both having Donald Trump Jr. serve as a special advisor to both Kalshi and Polymarket, and general stories of despair from people who are serving as the chafe for the miniscule number of accounts who win, mostly on the back of insider information.

Who could know that writers like Bradbury, Asimov, Dick, and Huxley would imagine dystopias that seem quaint and naive in comparison to the absolute horror unfolding?

Why these prediction markets are bad

If the More Perfect Union report serves as a serious, thoughtful examination of prediction markets. John Oliver of Last Week Tonight comes out rhetorically swinging as he recently used his show’s long-form format to break down prediction markets, including the history of Polymarket, which owns two exchanges, one of which is still banned under US law, yet still and routinely accessible via a virtual private network (VPN).

The entire 32-minute video is well worth your time. Apart from a handful of instances of language, the video is mostly safe for work for the first 31.5 minutes. The final 90-second bit to close out the segment is a callback to some behavior people bet on in the prediction market exchanges (involving people throwing sex toys on the court during WNBA games), involving the audience throwing phallic sex toys at John Oliver (with his consent).

The link to the non-age-gated video is here. Viewer discretion is advised (especially at work).

Mr. Oliver went more in-depth than More Perfect Union. Here are some facts that were left out of Mr. Hayes’ piece in the Last Week Tonight report.

• Kalshi recently received a valuation of $22 billion, up from months ago, with Polymarket trying to get the same, and numerous other companies trying to get in on the act.
• Kalshi became the first regulated exchange in 2020; Polymarket did not receive approval and started anyway around the same time, ultimately paying a $1.4 million fine and banning American citizens from the platform, a ban that is usually circumvented by using a VPN.
• Polymarket has about two million users, and roughly 700 accounts currently hold 2/3rds of all the money on the exchange.
• The CFTC, mentioned in MLB’s announcement, is supposed to have five commissioners: two from the minority party and three from the majority party. It currently only has one commissioner: Michael S. Selig (no relation to Bud Selig), who is such a cheerleader for the industry in response to state attorneys general suing Kalshi. He had the following response: “To those who seek to challenge our authority in this space, let me be clear: We will see you in court.”
• “News” organizations like CNN are entering into partnerships with Kalshi and putting odds tickers up during programming, effectively legitimizing and whitewashing the prediction market’s reputation.

All of this information is open and easy to find. No one who spends even the slightest ounce of effort can pretend not to know the harm that these gambling sites, by any other name, are causing. Which is when you remember that Commissioner Rob Manfred willingly attached MLB to these people for $150 to $300 million over the next four years.

What I would give for the sport of baseball to be run by those who clearly did not hate the sport.

In search of moral redemption

On May 1, Mike Vorkunov of The Athletic reported movement on this issue, especially as to the possibility of insider trading:

Major League Baseball also sent a letter to the CFTC asking that leagues be given a certain amount of latitude in setting predictions markets events because they, the letter said, are “best placed to identify which markets related to their respective sports raise significant manipulation or insider trading concerns.”

Player unions for the NBA, NFL, MLB, MLS and NHL sent a joint letter that argued for restrictions. The letter asked the CFTC to ban what it described as “negative” contracts, which they say are ones that allow people to bet on unders, if a player is hurt or penalized, or if certain words are said during a live broadcast and event. The unions also asked the CFTC to enforce fan conduct policies to protect players inside arenas and venues, as well to ban trading on unauthorized player health data.

Given the person “regulating” these services, I remain skeptical that anything productive will be done.

What’s to be done by the average person? At the risk of overthinking it, it’s pretty simple. Anyone associated with these markets, be it an influencer or a team: starve them of time and attention. Shame them at every opportunity. If the 2008 financial crisis taught us anything is that the party ultimately ends right quick once things become unsustainable, once the madness reaches its peak.

With any luck, by this time next year or the year after, these companies will be thought of in the same way as most cryptocurrency exchanges or whatever fly-by-night outfit we collectively forget as the last dumb fad, which took the money of the foolish and desperate.

When you leave predators in charge of prey, is it any wonder that everyone is gobbled up? But hey, it’s not my money(ball), and I won’t let these jokers have one thin dime. We will provide updates as they become available, but the focus will be on lighter fare, at least until December.

Jasson Domínguez exited today’s game against the Rangers after a scary collision with the left field wall. Brandon Nimmo, Texas’ leadoff hitter, sent a line drive to left, which Domínguez caught before ramming into the wall.

Domínguez immediately went to the ground and Aaron Boone and the team’s trainers quickly ran to the outfield. The left fielder was alert and moving but was taken off the field on a medical cart. Ryan McMahon entered the game for Domínguez, with McMahon taking over at third, Amed Rosario going to right field, and Cody Bellinger shifting from right to left.

We’re all obviously hoping that Domínguez is OK, with the 23-year-old seemingly unable to catch a break early in his career. Fans will remember that his debut run in the majors was cut short by Tommy John surgery, and now, given a chance to prove himself as the team’s primary designated hitter in light of Giancarlo Stanton’s calf injury, he gets injured making one of the finest defensive plays of his career. We’ll keep you updated on his status; if Domínguez doesn’t go on the IL, the club will be a little undermanned for a time, with Ben Rice still on the bench recovering from a hand injury.

Update (2:15 pm EST): Gary Phillips of the NYDN has more news on Domínguez:

It appears Domínguez could be dealing with both a head injury and a shoulder injury. It wouldn’t be surprising to see him hit the IL as the Yankees monitor his symptoms for a potential concussion.

Last season the A’s endured a baffling 1-20 stretch that turned a team that was 2 games over .500 into one that, by early June, was buried in the AL West. In the post-mortem, A’s GM David Forst expressed regret that the A’s had waited so long to address the bullpen (a huge part of the meltdown) and other flawed areas (Denzel Clarke was summoned on May 23rd to end the JJ Bleday Experience in CF).

Fast forward to May, 2026 and the A’s find themselves with a worse record than the 22-20 they held when the über-swoon started but also in a better position in the standings: though only .500 at 18-18 they stand alone in 1st place in a division mired in mediocrity so far.

It won’t last, though. 81 wins is not going to win the AL West or even the 3rd wild card. The cream will rise and the sludge will fall and it is incumbent upon the A’s not to reprise their role of sludgemasters in May-June 2026. So far they are 1-4 in May, but they don’t have to sit around and do nothing again for too long hoping it isn’t the beginning of a contention-ending skid.

Already we have seen some minor signs of the A’s willing to be more proactive. Jonah Heim has been brought in, presumably to replace Austin “.077/.143/.077” Wynns as the back up catcher. The bullpen carousel is spinning but only so far to the tune of replacing one wild reliever, Tyler Ferguson, with another, Brooks Kriske.

The question is whether the A’s will choose now — relatively early, but last year showed it’s easy to wait too long and effectively end your season with 100 games still to play — to make some bolder moves. Here are some choices…

1. Take the plunge with Lawrence Butler

The A’s have committed to Butler long-term and clearly believe in his abilities, but the reality is that by and large Butler is falling apart and it’s not good for him or the team for him just to continue spiraling. He had a week or so where he made better contact, unfortunately with particularly terrible batted ball luck, but mostly he has just really struggled.

He is now at .176/.276/.284, 56 wRC+ for the season, and that’s on the heels of a disappointing .203/.268/.351, 70 wRC+ last season after the 2025 All-Star break. That’s a 91 game sample with about a 65 wRC+ thanks to around a .190 BA and .271 OBP. He has also made a habit of getting picked off and running the bases like he doesn’t know how many outs there are — his head is not in the game and that’s part of the spiral.

In the outfield, Butler is simply badly miscast as a CFer. When he plays RF he’s fine, actually even above average, but in CF he gets terrible reads and jumps, takes poor routes, and simply does not have the sprint speed to overcome. Last night the A’s gave away the first run as a result of having Butler in CF and it’s just the latest example. This is not his fault, it’s just a reality: he’s a RFer, period.

The problem is, the A’s have a LH batting RFer who is producing at three times the level of Butler and that’s Carlos Cortes. Even with his 0 for 3 last night, Cortes enters play today batting a robust .372/.437/.615, 191 wRC+ with impressive BB and K rates of 9.2% and 8.0% respectively.

“The plunge” here would be to option Butler to AAA, getting him out of the spotlight, giving him a reset, and asking him to work on and address weakness, opening up an opportunity for the A’s to improve their outfield both offensively and defensively. How? Here’s how:

2. Call up Henry Bolte to play CF

Recent performance suggests Bolte might be ready for a call up. Bolte’s biggest issue has been strikeouts, but in May so far he has struck out just 3 times in 25 plate appearances. His other vice has been an inability to pull fly balls with success, but last night he not only launched a HR to LF it was, apparently, the longest HR of the season, anywhere.

For the season now Bolte, 22, is batting .295/.376/.518 which, in the hitter-friendly PCL, gives him a 115 wRC+. But his hitting performance comes with benefits: he is an elite base stealer, 15 for 16 this season, 44 for 46 last season. He would add a speed element to the A’s lineup that they generally lack.

As for Bolte’s CF defense, it’s hard to pinpoint where he’s at. Grady Fuson recently opined he was better suited to the COF, whereas Bolte told me in spring training CF was where he felt most comfortable. He makes too many errors and has a plus throwing arm, and his scouting report on MLB Pipeline says, “Bolte’s elite speed translates both on the basepaths and in the outfield, where he’s viewed as a strong defender with a good arm and capable of handling all three spots well.”

My sense? If you’re ranking defensive CFers from 1-10 where JJ Bleday is a 1 and Denzel Clarke is a 10, Butler is maybe a 3 and Gelof perhaps a 7, and Bolte likely would settle in as around a 5 or 6. Offensively, one would expect him to struggle out of the gate (as Clarke did) but he has far more potential with the bat than Clarke comes with.

This would give you a regular outfield of Soderstrom-Bolte-Cortes, with Clarke (when he returns) coming in for late inning defense to replace Cortes (Bolte moving to RF). Colby Thomas can still platoon against LHPs, maybe starting half the time for Soderstrom and half the time for Cortes.

The additional benefit of this outfield arrangement is it frees up Zack Gelof to play 3B, where he could be the every day starter or eventually give way against some LHPs to Max Muncy. If Gelof can hit even at league average level — which the recent indicators suggest might be possible — then as a steady defender (with a weak arm) he becomes an upgrade over the Muncy-Hernaiz options.

Now you have a solid defensive outfield and a solid defensive infield, and this primary lineup looks pretty solid (I lead off Kurtz because I know the A’s will, not because it’s smart):

Kurtz – 1B
Langeliers – C
Soderstrom – LF
Rooker – DH
Cortes – RF
Wilson – SS
McNeil – 2B
Gelof – 3B
Bolte – CF

Bench: Thomas, Muncy (when back) or Hernaiz, Clarke (when back), Heim

Could Gelof and Bolte be black holes at the end of the lineup? Possible. Should we expect to roll our eyes at a string of strikeouts as Bolte acclimates to big league pitching? Yes, that’s liable to happen whenever he’s first called up. But this is a solid defensive unit with plenty of hitting and much more speed and athleticism. And arguably Butler needs anything from a breather to a wake-up call.

3. Fortify the bullpen with proper pieces

The A’s have two glaring problems right now in the bullpen. One is that they lack a LH reliever who excels at getting LH batters out. This is a significant deficit considering how many teams have a pair of LH batters who are among the team’s best hitters but who are not as strong against LHP. On the A’s that’s Nick Kurtz and Tyler Sodesrtrom, on the Phillies it’s Kyle Schwarber and Bryce Harper, and on most teams it’s two batters whom a LH specialist will face in a 3 batter span.

The other problem is that one of the few relievers throwing well is Luis Medina, but he is cast as the team’s long reliever, which means the A’s are hesitant to use him in high leverage situations for fear they will need a long reliever the next day. Calling up a true “long man” allows the team to play around with Medina in higher leverage, be it a 2 inning bridge role or even finding his calling as a set-up man. Right now his usage is also so sporadic it’s not helping with his already known control difficulties: he has walked 7 in 12.2 IP but he has also only thrown 12.2 IP all season.

I don’t know what the A’s see in Brooks Kriske (32 BB in 39.1 career MLB innings), but if they want someone who is too wild but also strikes out a ton of hitters and is a lefty specialist, they should swap Kriske out for Matt Krook (9.2 IP, 15 K at AAA).

A long man is not hard to identify as it can be any SP you are willing to have sit around a bit rather than getting a start every week at AAA. Candidates would be Mason Barnett, Joey Estes, or Kade Morris (not currently on the 40 man). Or if bumped from the rotation, Jacob Lopez or JT Ginn.

Note: I’m not suggesting any of these moves have to happen today. What I am suggesting is that they may need to happen before June 1st because as we know, you can’t win a post-season berth in May but you sure as hell can lose one.