Monday night at PNC park the Pirates had a 2-0 lead going into the top of the 9th vs the St. Louis Cardinals. Dennis Santana came in for the save with the 2 run lead and struggled.

Santana allowed a solo home run to Pedro Pages and allowed another solo shot to the very next batter JJ Wetherhold  to tie the game. Jose Fermin hit a tie-breaking two-run double to give the Cardinals the lead and then eventually the win.

The blown save by Santana is the eighth blown save of the season for the Bucs which is tied for third in the league with the Chicago White Sox and the Athletics. The Washington Nationals have the most with 10.

The bullpen has been an issue to start the season for the Pirates and Monday night just proved it even more. Dennis Santana was a reliable guy for the first couple of weeks of the season but we are starting to see him struggle and not be a dependable closer anymore.

The starting pitching once again continues to be one of the strengths in Pittsburgh. Monday night was a bullpen game for the Bucs, with Mason Montgomery starting and only pitching one inning. Wilber Dotel pitched four innings and threw well allowing no hits and three strikeouts. 

For as good as the starting pitching has been, the Pirates bullpen needs to be better. With how tough the NL Central is, Pittsburgh can’t afford blowing division games like that. Every team in the NL Central is above .500, so every time there is an opportunity to beat a divisional opponent, the Pirates have to take advantage. 

If the Pirates want to be a legit playoff team this year, the bullpen has to get close to the level of the starting pitching. If the bullpen cannot improve and become dominant, then it will be another disappointing season for the fans in Pittsburgh. 

The Mets have placed right-handed pitcherKodai Senga on the 15-day IL due to lumbar spine inflammation.

In a corresponding move, right-hander Christian Scott was recalled from Triple-A Syracuse.

Speaking before Tuesday's game, manager Carlos Mendoza said Senga complained about the back issue after his last start. Following an MRI, Senga was given an epidural. He will not throw for seven-to-10 days. 

The situation with Senga in the rotation had become untenable, with him being unable to pitch more than 3.1 innings in any of his last three starts.

After Sunday's game, Senga acknowledged his poor performance but was non-committal when asked if he would accept an assignment to Triple-A Syracuse.

With Senga to the IL and Scott up, it stands to reason that Scott will slide into Senga's rotation spot.

What happens when Senga returns remains complicated, though.

The Mets could theoretically move Senga to the bullpen, but that seems like a very poor fit given his routines. 

Beyond that, the Mets already have three starting pitchers working in relief roles -- David Peterson, Sean Manaea, and Carl Edwards, Jr. They also have Tobias Myers in the bullpen, and he is often relied on for multiple innings at a time.

It has been an up-and-down tenure for Senga in New York.

He burst on the scene with a 2.98 ERA in 166.1 innings in 2023, but missed all but 5.1 innings of the 2024 regular season due to injury.

In 2025, Senga got off to a hot start before suffering a hamstring injury. After returning, Senga struggled, which resulted in a demotion to Triple-A. Senga was unable to right the ship in the minors, and did not return to the majors late in the season, as had been expected. 

Senga, with more zip on his fastball than he had last season, was strong in his first two starts of 2026. But he was hit hard in his last three, ballooning his ERA to 9.00.

The 33-year-old has one more guaranteed year remaining on his deal, and is owed $15 million for the 2027 season. There is a conditional club option for 2028 that the Mets will have the ability to exercise if Senga has Tommy John surgery or a right elbow injury that keeps him on the IL for 130 or more days. 

We knew this was happening but it is official. Trey Yesavage has been added to the active roster and will start tonight. Chase Lee was sent back to Buffalo. I’m sorry for Lee, he looked pretty good yesterday, but we knew he was only up for the day. I’m sure we’ll see him again this year, they can send him down 5 times and I’d bet he’ll get there this year.

Yesavage hasn’t been great in his rehab starts, 4 games, 12 innings, 15 hits, 10 earned, 7 walks and 16 strikeouts, but the fastball is where it was last year. He wasn’t going to throw 200 innings this year, so having him miss the first month isn’t a bad thing for the club.f

He was rather amazing in the playoffs, with an ERA of 3.48 over 6 games, 5 starts. In 27.2 innings he allowed 18 hits, 2 home runs, 4 walks and 17 strikeouts. Let’s hope he picks up right where he jumped off.

No pressure Trey. Just that our season is balancing on your right arm.

Shi Davidi tells us that the Jays hitters have seen the fewest pitches per at bat in baseball this year. Whether that is a good or bad thing is up for debate. There are a few of the guys who could do with being a little more selective at the plate. But then some of the more selective hitters are on the IL

It is a tough balance, you don’t want the pitcher to get ahead on the count, but then we have guys swinging at pitches well off the plate. And it isn’t like the guys with great strikezone judgement are tearing things up either. Davis Schneider takes a lot of pitches and he’s hitting roughly what you or I would, so for this season. Well, more you. The only way I’d reach base is if a pitch hit me.

Connor Rogers and Joe DeMayo diagnose more losing baseball on the latest episode of The Mets Pod. The guys go long on all of the Mets' problems, from the front office, through the coaching staff, to the entire roster. 

Who is to blame, why is it happening, what can be done, and will changes soon be made? 

Connor and Joe also go Down on the Farm to check in on the literal ups and downs of Christian Scott, and the recent promotion of top prospect A.J. Ewing to Triple-A Syracuse.

The show wraps up with a Mailbag to answer questions about lack of hitting development, signing veterans to short-term deals, and a fun but also sad scenario for first base.

Be sure to subscribe to The Mets Pod at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I had it in my mind to write this article a day or so ago after hearing the rankings of MLB teams on successful ABS challenges.

So you’ll forgive me for writing it the day after the Cubs failed on two of three challenges in their loss to the Padres, including one by Matthew Boyd in the first inning, that he later said he shouldn’t have made.

Here is that challenge [VIDEO].

Yeah, that’s a bad one. Not only because it was pretty clearly a ball, but that’s only the fourth pitch of the game! Perhaps a bit rattled, Boyd wound up walking Ramon Laureano, helping trigger a three-run Padres inning.

But in general, the Cubs have done well in ABS challenges. A new site called Tap to Challenge has taken data that’s been made available by Baseball Savant and sliced and diced it in a number of ways.

This chart shows the Cubs as the sixth-best team overall in challenges at a 60.3 percent success rate (through Monday’s games), just behind the Tigers at 60.4 percent and Mariners at 60.6 percent. The Royals top the leaderboard at 62.3 percent.

Breaking this down further, Cubs batters rank 17th at 46.2 percent (the D-backs lead at 52.6 percent) and Cubs catchers rank second with a 73.3 percent success rate (the Tigers lead at 85 percent).

Just 41 challenges have been made by pitchers, with 17 being successful (41.4 percent). Boyd’s challenge was the second made by a Cubs pitcher so far this year. The other, which was successful, was by Edward Cabrera on April 11 against the Pirates [VIDEO].

The most challenges by a team’s pitchers is five, by the Yankees. Yankees pitchers have been correct three times. Eight teams (Twins, Royals, Padres, Reds, Blue Jays, Rays, Diamondbacks and Brewers) have not had any challenges by pitchers, and in general, teams are telling pitchers not to challenge. The 41 pitcher challenges are just 2.3 percent of the total of 1,767 challenges made in total by all players.

There’s been some discussion here about whether MLB should eventually go to a full ABS system. Personally, I like the challenge system. It creates some strategy — obviously, losing a challenge in the first inning and both challenges by the third hurt the Cubs Monday night. It gets fans involved, you’ve certainly heard the cheering by home fans when their player is correct.

Last week at The Athletic, Jayson Stark wrote an article that detailed more of the things I’ve mentioned here, headlined “When will MLB go ‘full ABS,’ let robot umps take over? Maybe never.” I know that’s going to make some of you unhappy, but here’s some of the reasoning:

Do we really want ABS to tell us whether 700,000 pitches a year are balls and strikes? That’s a momentous question because it would be such a momentous change.

“You should only make changes if it makes the game better,” former Cubs/Red Sox/MLB rules visionary Theo Epstein said, as far back as 2023, in an appearance on the Starkville podcast with me and my co-host, Doug Glanville. “You have to figure out exactly what you’re solving for. With ABS, you don’t want to force a solution without a problem.”

Theo is correct, in my view. What if MLB went to a system like this, with umpires no longer used to calling balls and strikes, and the technology went down? Then you’re asking for trouble, in asking people who wouldn’t be doing this important thing to suddenly have to do it accurately.

The article says that for a time in 2023 and 2024, they experimented with full ABS in Triple-A, then surveyed players and fans on the system. The results might surprise you:

Check out the results from this survey, conducted in August 2024. Players and coaches were asked: Which ABS format do you prefer? You might want to look away because “full ABS” is about to take a hellacious drubbing.

Challenge system — 54 percent
Full ABS — 8 percent
Human umps — 38 percent

(Source: Major League Baseball)

Eight percent? They were being offered a chance to get every call right, and not even one in 10 wanted that? I think they were trying to tell us something.

Fans in Triple A weren’t quite that vociferous. But it was still more than a 2-to-1 runaway win for the challenge system over full ABS.

Challenge system — 47 percent
Full ABS — 23 percent
Human umps 30 percent

(Source: Major League Baseball)

Personally, I think that as the challenge system in MLB gets better because players get better at it, the percentage answering “human umps” in a survey like that would get smaller. And don’t take it only from me, take it from a former player who’s now a Triple-A manager:

Take it from Morgan Ensberg, manager of the Rays’ Triple-A Durham team. He lived through more than 100 games of the full-robot experience. He described those games as having “no color, no spirit.”

“It’s just weird, man,” said Ensberg, a longtime challenge-system fan. “Like, a robotic voice is saying, strike or ball, and you’re going to have problems with that, because you kind of want humans. You know, we all have our brains. And you want to have humans hitting, and humans pitching, and humans calling the games, because we’re going to see things more similarly.”

So that is the “human element” you want. Humans playing and calling the plays, with the technology backing them up. I think that’s a good match. And also, remember this:

Is ABS improving the game?

The answer, from fans who attended games between March 26 and April 19:

Yes — 92 percent
No — 8 percent

(Source: Major League Baseball)

We eagerly await the results of independent polling on this topic. But if you’ve spent even one night in a big-league ballpark during the past few weeks, it couldn’t be more obvious. The buzz that accompanies every challenge cartoon on the scoreboard is telling us that the people paying to sit in those seats are gobbling up this stuff.

“I think that one of the virtues of baseball is, we have things that we can argue about in a bar as we’re watching a game,” the same official said. “So one of the things that makes ABS challenge interesting is, you’re sitting there and it’s a 3-2 count, and a guy gets rung up on a called strike in the third inning with a runner on second. And you say: ‘Why the hell didn’t he challenge?’ I think that’s an interesting aspect of the game.”

Remember: If you let those robot umps call every pitch, you lose all of that.

Because in the end, baseball is entertainment. And in my view, the challenge system definitely provides entertainment.

Stark’s article concludes with some thoughts about where the system might go from here. Maybe you add a third challenge, he cites an unnamed baseball executive, and I could see that happening. The whole article is definitely worth reading, if you haven’t seen it yet.

One last thing and then I’ll let you have at it. Going back to the charts from Tap To Challenge (a fantastic site worth your time), the site also has data on umpires. That’s also worth a look — you’ll find that quite a few umpires have been overturned more than CB Bucknor. Baseball Savant also has quite a bit of ABS data you can peruse.

I’m writing this before the Yankees take on the Rangers Monday night, so it’s subject to change, but at this moment Jazz Chisholm Jr. is the worst player in baseball when it comes to the ABS challenge system. His 14 percent success rate is the lowest in the sport, and this weekend against the Astros we saw two dreadful examples.

The first one annoyed me — it’s an eight-run game in the ninth inning, this is about as close to stat-padding as you get in baseball. The second failed challenge is somewhat offset by the fact that Jazz notched a single a couple of pitches later, but challenges are limited; once you fail you can’t use it again. Chisholm took away a potential review from another player on a call that wasn’t close.

I think Jazz is a pretty good player but it is perhaps time to concede that a guy with a near-20 percent career K-BB rate doesn’t have a great understanding of the zone. Chisholm makes his money by getting his A-swing off and hitting the ball into the gap, not by owning the strike zone the way a Juan Soto-type would. Suffice it to say, Jazz doesn’t get to challenge except in the most obvious of circumstances.

Chisholm isn’t the only guy that’s hurting the team on the review side of things though. The Yankees sit a tick below league average (47 percent) at hitter-induced challenges at 44 percent, and bang on league average on fielder-induced at 59 percent. For a team that has preached strike zone ownership for about as long as I’ve been alive, they’re sure not making any gains in this part of the game.

Four players have been a net positive in the challenge system, with Aaron Judge of course leading the way. The Yankee captain is 3-for-4 with reviews this year, and you could argue that the three-time MVP has been more cautious than he should be. Then again, he has won three MVPs without the challenge system, so while I’m sure he has the greenlight to review any pitch he deems necessary, it might just end up not being a part of his game.

Ryan McMahon and Trent Grisham have gone a combined 5-for-7 so far this year, and if Aaron Judge has a big, emerald-green flag, they have something that’s slightly paler but still very clearly a go. In general, I think challenges should be reserved for times there are men on base, the first pitch of the at-bat, or a potential final pitch. McMahon and Grisham can go outside that band slightly, but not wildly.

Then we have a middle grouping, of guys that have been neutral to slightly bad — the yellow lights. This includes Paul Goldschmidt, Giancarlo Stanton, and José Caballero, the latter of which has called for 10 reviews, the most on the team. I tend to think that Cabby does this as a bit of gamesmanship, in the same way that he refuses to engage the pitcher until the eight-second required mark. Still, these three guys have to sit within tight parameters like discussed above, but as long as they stick to ‘em, they can tap their helmets.

Then there’s the dunce caps. Ben Rice, Austin Wells, Cody Bellinger, and Chisholm have actively cost the team runs with their challenge attempts. They’ve combined to go 3-for-13, which would be a pretty cold weekend series at the plate, and is even worse off when it comes to challenging balls and strikes. For now, unless there’s a deeply egregious call or the entire game can change on the result — a Rob Refsnyder-esque situation — these guys should focus on getting the bat on the ball more than anything else.