Record: 1-3. Pace: 40-122. Change on 2025: -1.

If there was ever the need for a palette cleanser, after the disappointing sweep in Los Angeles, it was in tonight’s home opener at Chase. Early on, the D-backs delivered in no uncertain fashion. The offense matched the entire run production of the opening series in the first five innings. Meanwhile, Michael Soroka’s Diamondbacks debut was one of the best ever. He threw five shutout innings, striking out ten, which tied a career high. Soroka finished things off in the fifth by throwing the fourth immaculate innings – nine pitches, nine strikes, three strikeouts – in franchise history, and the first for the D-backs since Wade Miley in 2012.

Of course, the bullpen, in the form of Joe Ross and Ryan Thompson, did their best – with the help of the umpires – to throw an 8-0 lead away. Coincidentally, that score looks like the emoji for the face most of us were pulling over the course of the seventh inning, where the Tigers scored six runs. But disaster was averted, with Juan Morillo, Taylor Clarke, and Paul Sewald retiring the final seven batters up, for what, in the end, turned out to be a drama-free first save for Sewald. The Diamondbacks won their home opener in front of a sold-out Chase Field, and got into the win column for the first time this year.

Let’s start with Soroka, who only really had one black mark against him, and that comes in the area of efficiency. He needed 25 pitches to get through the first inning, which included two strikeouts, but also a walk and a hit. That set the tone for the evening, with our starter being at eighty pitched after four, and it felt about 50/50 whether he would be able to get through the fifth inning and qualify for the decision [speaking of which, the 50/50 raffle set a home opener record, finishing north of $330,000] His slurve – a slider/curve hybrid was working well, but there had been a lot of full counts, driving up the pitch count. And then the fifth inning happened:

As documented above, an immaculate inning is something recorded far less often than a no-hitter [though this is in part due to incomplete records from the early days] There had been only three previously by the team: Randy Johnson (August 23, 2001 vs. Pirates), Byung-Hyun Kim (May 11, 2002 vs. Phillies), and Wade Miley (October 1, 2012 vs. Rockies). The last-named was only the third rookie at the time to do so. Michael Soroka now joins the list, and also became just the third pitcher in baseball history to record an immaculate inning in his first start of the season. The three K’s gave him ten on the night. That tied his career high and was the most ever by a D-back in their first game, breaking the Big Unit’s mark of nine in his 1999 debut. Oddly, RJ was at the ballpark tonight.

Of course, we all expected Eduardo Rodriguez and Michael Soroka to be our most effective starting pitchers, the first time through the rotation, didn’t we? On the other side, we were facing Justin Verlander, a triple Cy Young winner. And we had to do so without Pavin Smith: he homered three times off Verlander in 2024, but went on the IL earlier today. We needn’t have worried. Father Time remains undefeated, and 43-year-old Verlander is a shadow of the nine-time All-Star. He was hit and hit hard by Arizona from the very start. Ketel Marte had a 107.5 mph single, and Corbin Carroll followed with a 107.4 mph RBI triple, then scored on a Gabriel Moreno ground0ut.

The Diamondbacks then posted another crooked number in the second, courtesy of Carroll’s first home-run of the year (above). That three-run shot made it 5-0: it was 107.8 mph, and came on the heels of singles by Ildemaro Vargas and Jordan Lawlar, both in three digits. [Though the hardest-hit ball off Verlander tonight, was a screamer just foul by Moreno, clocked at an amazing 115.6 mph] The Detroit starter was yanked in the fourth, and Arizona added three more runs in the fifth, driven in by an Alek Thomas double, a Lawlar walk, and an Allen Campbell challenge, which turned a Marte groundout into an RBI single. That’s the 8-0 mentioned earlier, and I figured I was safe to start work on the recap.

The Arizona bullpen laughs in the face of such hubris. Though as I mentioned in the GDT, if you’re going to discover that Joe Ross is who you thought he was, doing so with an eight-run lead is the best time to do so. After Soroka, Kevin Ginkel worked a clean sixth. But in the seventh inning, Ross allowed five hits and a walk, all six runners coming round to score. That forced Torey Lovullo to go to Ryan Thompson. Unfortunately, Joe West decided Ryan Thompson’s mechanics now constituted a balk, for failing to come set. After that was called twice, Thompson (probably understandably) lost composure, allowed a double, then walked consecutive batters on four straight balls.

Suddenly, it was only 8-6 to the D-backs, with the Tigers having the bases loaded. Fortunately, Juan Morillo got arguably the biggest out of his young Arizona career, ending the top of the seventh. Ildemaro Vargas, DHing in place of Smith, then added a welcome insurance run in the bottom of the inning, making the score 9-6. Lovullo turned to Taylor Clarke, who had been swatted around in Los Angeles. But he was fine here, retiring all three batters faced. This set the stage for Paul Sewald’s return to the closer’s role and that was refreshingly drama-free. He, too, posted a 1-2-3 inning, notching save #1. Worth noting, he was consistently hitting 92 mph, reproducing the improved velocity he showed in spring.

Click here for details, at Fangraphs.com
Immaculate Conception: Corbin Carroll, +27.9%
Immaculate Reception: Soroka, +17.5%; Morillo, +11.8%
Soiled: Ryan Thompson, -15.2%

It’s interesting to note that Thompson’s negative WP was more than twice as bad as Ross’s -7.5%. Also, even at the worst point of that seventh inning, the Arizona probability of victory never dipped lower than 76.9%. Not that you’d know it from the dooming on Twitter, of course. And I must admit, it didn’t feel like we were better than 3-1 on favorites! An awesome Gameday Thread, with 378 comments. Comment of the Night to gzimmerm, with an honorory assist to ChefAZ:

Same two teams tomorrow, as Arizona seek to establish a winning streak. We complete our initial turn around the rotation with Brandon Pfaadt, and it is a slightly more civilized game time, with a 6:40 pm first pitch.

My dad used to always tell me that you only get one chance to make a good first impression. He’s right, though thankfully in baseball, the playoff teams aren’t chosen based on their first impressions.

For their first series of the season — a putrid, feckless, and deeply uncompetitive sweep at the hands of the New York Yankees — the San Francisco Giants made a very obvious impression.

If you were to prorate that series to a full season, you would have a team with a blatant identity:

1. Basically no offense, but…
2. Intermittent flickers of offense that are met by emphatic rally killers
3. Pitching that’s pretty good, but can’t resist giving up the big hits in the crucial moments
4. The occasional late-game rally that comes up frustratingly short

The Giants have been gifted 159 games to adjust and restore their identity so that it doesn’t align with the first impression, and I like their chances, because my one bold prediction for the 2026 season is that the Giants won’t be the hands-down worst team in the history of professional baseball.

San Francisco hit the road on Monday, and took their first step towards restoring the narrative, with a move both so bold and so simple that only a new coach who hasn’t yet been hardened by the realities of Major League Baseball could think of it: the reverse Uno card. Tony Vitello witnessed the script that had led to an 0-3 start and thought, hey what if instead of doing that, we have the other team do it?

It worked. And by a margin of 3-2 over the San Diego Padres, the Giants have their first win of the season — and Vitello his first victory as an MLB manager.

While it was remarkable just how good of an impression of the Giants the Padres did, the Giants first warned you that they might reprise the role for a fourth time. Facing old frenemy Walker Buehler, the Giants had a remarkably Giantsy first inning. Vitello opted for the unconventional decision to move Willy Adames, the coldest hitter on the team, into the leadoff spot to jump start him, and Adames responded with a single to open the game. Three pitches later, Rafael Devers erased that single with a double play, and Buehler would later end the inning with just 10 pitches thrown.

It doesn’t get more Giant. Except apparently it does. The Padres are what “getting more Giant” looks like.

San Diego’s offense was useless for much of the game, which is, yes, a great bit to talk about, but mostly a testament to how awesome Landen Roupp was in his season debut. Roupp has spoken openly about his desire to go pitch for pitch with Logan Webb, and Monday’s start was one hell of an audition for the role of co-ace.

He set down the side in order in the first inning, striking out Jake Cronenworth and Manny Machado. He cruised through the second, giving up a single but striking out Gavin Sheets and Ramón Laureano. He needed just seven pitches and one magnificent bit of leather wizardry from Adames to defeat the third.

It was the fourth inning where the Padres slowly started to shift from their first bullet point of the Giants identity to the second one. Fernando Tatis Jr. led off the inning with a walk, putting a fearsome runner on the basepaths ahead of the heart of San Diego’s lineup. Machado got ahead in the count 2-1, but Roupp fired back, inducing a groundout, which moved Tatis to second. With Tatis in scoring position and just one out, Roupp faced San Diego’s wunderkind, Jackson Merrill, and got him to ground out as well, with Tatis moving to third. One more groundout — this time Xander Bogaerts — and Roupp was out of the inning.

Yep, that’s a dandy Webb impression.

The fifth was another smooth inning for Roupp, who issued a one-out walk but struck out a pair of batters to cruise through the inning. But the sixth is where the Padres really began to embody the Giants.

After striking out Cronenworth to open the frame, Roupp ceded a one-out single to Tatis. The Padres were desperately trying to get back in the game — they trailed 3-0 — and who better to help them achieve it but Machado, one of the great Giant Killers of this era?

With his night nearing an end, Roupp dug deep in a 1-1 count, and tossed a confounding curveball that darted away from the right-handed Machado, dipping below the zone and on the outside edge. Machado simply couldn’t resist, and swung with his entire body off-balance, chopping the ball right back to Roupp.

The 1-4-3 double play isn’t the easiest thing in baseball, especially in the first week of the season. But with the Padres playing like the Giants and, critically, the Giants not playing like the Giants, there was only one possible outcome: Roupp plucked the ball cleanly, spun balletically, and fired a fastball to Luis Arráez, who gracefully passed the ball onto Casey Schmitt, all while Machado could hardly be bothered to release the clutch, let alone shift out of first gear.

Roupp yelled with excitement and a touch of something else. The Padres looked uninterested, and ready to go home. The contrast between the teams was stark.

Which brings us to the other side of the ball. The Giants only scored three runs, but they did so in a way that they grew accustomed to watching the Yankees do on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday.

It started with the thing that Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton did to them: a singular swing of the bat that in and of itself provides enough offense to feel like a finishing blow to a team that can’t score. For the Giants, it came in the third inning off of Buehler. After mild-mannered first and second innings, the Giants were ready for action in the third thanks to their leadoff hitter in the inning, Harrison Bader.

One could make the case that Bader will be the litmus test for the Giants offense. If he hits like he did a year ago, when he was on the Minnesota Twins and the Philadelphia Phillies, he’ll help anchor the heart of the lineup. If he hits like he did in the three prior years, he’ll be the Patrick Bailey of the outfield grass: a player who is valuable, but would be even more valuable if you could find a way to skip his turn in the batting order. It’s not hard to see a strong season from Bader representing everyone on offense clicking, or a poor season signifying disappointment across the board.

Four games is too early to tell. It’s too early to judge the first three games, in which Bader looked like he’d never swung a bat before in his life, while his teammates followed his lead. And it’s too early to judge after a fourth game, when the Giants finally put runs (plural!) on the board, after being jumpstarted by a 1-2 annihilation of a helpless Buehler curve that caught far too much strike zone.

Gorgeous. The swing of the bat, yes, but also the hair.

But while Bader’s homer — the first of the year for the Giants — was the most impactful swing of the day, it didn’t feel like the most meaningful. Instead, a pair of swings jockeyed for that distinction, and they both occurred just one inning later, in the fourth.

With one out, Matt Chapman, who is in quite a slump to start the season, ripped a single at 107.4 mph, the hardest-hit ball of the day for the Giants. That brought up Jung Hoo Lee, who is in quite a slump to start the season, and he drew a six-pitch walk, moving Chapman into scoring position.

But Bader popped up for a second out, and suddenly it felt like the Giants were back to their rally-killing ways.

If Chapman and Lee have been slumping to start the season, it’s nothing compared to the Nos. 8 and 9 hitters, Bailey and Schmitt. But sometimes it’s those players who provide just what the team needs.

And they did exactly that. With two on and two out, Bailey took a 1-0 curve off the plate outside, and did the sensible thing with it: he poked it the other way, into left field, notching his first hit of the season, and scoring Chapman.

Up came Schmitt, who worked the count to 2-1, and then ripped a high fastball through a hole in the infield, notching his first hit of the season (he would add a double later in the game), and scoring Lee.

Those were the sorts of hits the Yankees kept piling up against increasingly-frustrated Giants pitchers. It was delightful seeing the Giants turn the car around and send it scooting off in the opposite direction.

But while the Giants eschewed their 2026 first impressions in this game, they couldn’t completely shake off the identity that they’ve spent the last few decades perfectly curating. There had to be some ninth-inning torture.

And so, after Matt Gage cleanly handled the seventh inning, and Keaton Winn thoroughly dominated in the eighth, we got our first look at Ryan Walker as the 2026 closer.

It started off very grim, with the control issues that plagued him this time last year. Facing the top of the order, Walker couldn’t find the strike zone against Cronenworth, issuing a leadoff walk on just four pitches.

But Walker bit down on his mouthguard. With some help from Tatis seemingly forgetting that he could challenge pitches, he struck out San Diego’s superstar, then got Machado to ground out. Two sliders sandwiched around a fastball later, and he was up on Merrill 1-2, with the Giants a strike away from winning the game.

Merrill fought back, fouling off a pitch, and then spitting on two pitches off the corners to load the count. Finally, on a get-it-in 3-2 slider, Merrill uncorked an obscene amount of power, lifting a ball comfortably over the wall, and pulling the Padres within a run.

But as I mentioned, those occasional late-game rallies are designed to fall short, as they did for the Giants on Saturday. And so, after a brief meeting with his teammates, Walker settled in and got Bogaerts to ground out, ending the game, and giving the Giants their first win since their last win, which was, you know … last year.

The win is always the most important thing, but there were other thing to delight in. Roupp really was fantastic, giving up just two singles and two walks in his six shutout innings, while finishing with seven strikeouts. He only needed 88 pitches to get through those half-dozen innings, and likely would have stayed in for the seventh if we were a few weeks into the season.

With the Giants holding a lead for the first time this season, we got to see how Vitello would deploy the bullpen in a leverage situation. It seemed very likely that Walker would be the closer, but the setup man remained a mystery.

Enter Winn. Despite his subpar spring results, the Giants seem to have woken up to the idea that a 99-mph fastball paired with a wipeout splitter is a deeply valuable thing to have, and it was a treat seeing Winn get the opportunity to take down the eighth in a tight game.

So what did he do? He struck out Laureano on four pitches, getting him to chase a pitch that skirted the dirt for strike three. He struck out Nick Castellanos, who helplessly swung through two splitters, and then gave up and watched the third pitch of the at-bat find Bailey’s glove for a K. And he struck out former Giant Bryce Johnson, who put up a fight but never looked comfortable.

Three batters. Three strikeouts. Five swings-and-misses. Not even a single foul ball.

Pure filth from Winn. Now we wait and see if he’s the full-time setup man, or if it’s a fluid situation. It wouldn’t be surprising if Vitello turns to Erik Miller for the eighth inning when left-handers are due up. But I’d sure love to see Winn keep this role, unless he steals Walker’s at some point.

And with that, the Giants have a win, and Vitello has an everything shower … and not the enjoyable kind.

Now it finally feels like the season is underway. Beating the Padres will do that to you.

Sometimes normalcy feels great.

Even though the Mariners were winning most of the game, it still felt like they were going to have to win on a comeback, which they eventually did.

The Yankees were dominating the ABS challenge system, and the Mariners had a few defensive miscues, driving all the focus to the Yankees’ half-innings. Meanwhile, despite putting up a run in the second inning, the Mariners bats had mostly gone down quickly and quietly. So as we reached the midpoint, this was one of those games where it was easy to forget that the Mariners were winning.

But winning they were because that second-inning run was enough to hold the lead throughout Luis Castillo’s six innings of work. La Piedra came out firing for his first start of the season, hitting 96.5 mph with his fastball, something he only topped four times before May last year. He left one a little too close to middle-middle against Aaron Judge for my comfort, but he got away with it and eventually jammed him on a sinker running all the way in on his hands. You might chalk the velo spike up to first-game adrenaline, but he held it for most of his outing. With his fastball unhittable, why would he go to anything else? Well, because his slider was as about as sharp as it gets. So the first time through the order, he only threw one pitch that was anything but a four-seamer or slider—the sinker that finished off Judge.

Of course, Yankees were still reaching base. Twice, a can of corn dropped in shallow left: the first time due to an early-season miscommunication, and the second time because both Donovan and Rivas lost the ball in the lights. And for as well as Castillo was pitching, the Yankees were all over Mike Estabrook’s mistakes behind the plate, successfully challenging five calls in the fourth inning alone.

But overall, Castillo was too sharp to be beat. He surrendered just two “hits”: one on the lost-in-the-lights pop-up and the other a weakly hit groundball that Castillo himself couldn’t quite handle. But his seven strikeouts were all well earned. The most visually pleasing was when Cody Bellinger couldn’t come within a foot of either a backfoot slider or a fastball up out of the zone. But the most notable was Castillo’s final punchout of the night, the 1,500th of his career.

It didn’t have to be a strikeout. It started off on one of his worst pitches of the game—a slider left right over the heart of the plate. But just like he did in his first-inning face-off with Judge, Castillo got away with it. “[Judge] looked at me and smiled,” Castillo said after the game. He says the two of them have admired each other from a distance, leading to something like a friendship from afar. “But I think if I threw that pitch again, there’s no way he’s not going to swing, there’s no way I get to strikeout 1,500.”

Fortunately, he proceeded to throw three better sliders, the final one of which might have hit Judge if he hadn’t swung at it. Castillo laughed about that final pitch with his teammates in the dugout watching on the iPad afterwards. “I was looking at the movement of the pitch. It was so weird. It was moving like, I don’t know, like a splitter-slash-changeup? Like I don’t think I’ve ever thrown a pitch like that in my life. It’s nothing like the slider I throw.” For being both weird and contributing to a milestone, that pitch also earns Luis Castillo tonight’s Sun Hat Award, an honor I give out in my recaps to the player who made a notable individual contribution to the game.

That completes the Mariners’ first turn through the rotation for 2026, in which the five starters put up a combined 29.1 innings with 38 strikeouts to six walks, 13 hits, and six runs. After a down year last year, the early returns from the rotation suggest it will once again be one of Seattle’s strengths.

Castillo left with the lead thanks to a second-inning sequence in which Randy Arozarena led off with a single, Mitch Garver moved him to second by turning an 0-2 count into a 10-pitch walk, and Cole Young batted him in with his first of three hits on the night. But as soon as Castillo departed, the Yankees were able to tie it at 1-1 because while Jose Ferrer got the three ground balls you hope for, he couldn’t turn them into outs.

But while the Mariners left two runners on in each of the fifth and seventh, the fact that they were getting baserunners and that Gabe Speier and Matt Brash had dominant outings gave you the sense that the Mariners bats would eventually pull this one out. Letting Gabe Speier pitch to Aaron Judge was an inspired choice, speaking to the well-founded confidence the team has in him to face righties. Technically, Judge won the battle with a hit, but I’m still giving Speier the victory since it was on a 79-mph ground ball. Brash finished his inning with the nastiest slider of the season (so far) to get revenge on Amed Rosario for his earlier game-tying RBI.

Still, despite the rising feeling that a walk-off was imminent, when Leo Rivas and Brendan Donovan reached the corners to open the ninth, it brought up the ice-cold heart of the Mariners order, and suddenly it wasn’t such a foregone conclusion that the Mariners would win.

For his part, Cal Raleigh is dismissive of the cold start. “A lot of people across the league are fighting the same thing. Guys are trying to find their timing. And it’s more under a microscope, more so now than it is in the middle of a season, just because it’s the start of the season, everybody’s excited, they can keep up with certain numbers.”

He says he feels fine in the box. And tonight he was able to execute, sending a decent Paul Blackburn cutter down the right field line for the Mariners’ first walk-off win of the year. “It’ll be OK,” he said. “I think everybody’s going to be just fine.”