Weekly Scorecard: Jun. 6 - 12, 2026

Alright, I'm late. Things are perhaps a little shallower this week—blame my headache—but I have some guest writing from Daniel Wilder again to make up the difference. Bear in mind that I'm totally ignoring everything that happened yesterday, unless it's about the Knicks.

The Scoreboard

To get the hard stuff out of the way first: the Giants' pitching staff opted to pull a homophobic stunt during Pride Night on Friday. As a queer person, I struggle with a lot of considerations in sharing this kind of news. It never stops feeling bad to hear about, but I hate burying my head in the sand; ultimately, it's better to confront these issues and ensure they don't fly under the radar.

Instead of dissecting it further here (the folks at McCovey Chronicles did a great job already), I want to offer a counterweight: this story about the late Rod Beck's support of HIV/AIDS activism and the creation of the Giants' first Until There's a Cure Day. We're experiencing a moment where bigots feel especially emboldened to express themselves in the public eye and the LGBTQ+ community is a prominent target. That doesn't change the fact that there's hope for the future enshrined in the past.

In less sobering news:

• The first SABR Defensive Index rankings of the season have been released. Some highlights:
  • Luis Torrens leads NL catchers by quite a bit and ranks 4th in the NL overall.
  • Nolan McLean leads NL pitchers and is tied for 24th among all NL players.
  • Rookies JJ Wetherholt, TJ Rumfield, and Brandon Valenzuela are all holding their own quite well.
  • Of course, the SDI may be completely fraudulent, since Pete Alonso is leading AL 1B by a decent margin. (It's not, but I'll pretend it is for this one result.)
• I switched over to the Phillies-Brewers game on Friday night in the bottom of the 8th inning, having seen something about Jacob Misiorowski getting yet another ludicrously high-velocity strikeout. When I went looking for his pitching line, I did a hard double take before telling everyone I knew to put the game on, certain they'd give him the 9th. Sure enough, they did, and the result was one of the greatest pitching performances this century—on the one-year anniversary of his debut, no less. In fact, it's one of the most impressive Madduxes ever.
  • Bonus: the Phillies talked a lot of shit when Miz was selected for the All-Star Game last year. I won't deny that I also had a dismissive reaction, but at least I don't play professional baseball. Glad to see it come back to bite.
  • He did also hit Tyler Freeman in the head with a 98.2 MPH cutter last Sunday, which was terrifying. You never, ever want to be hit in the head with any pitch, but definitely not from the hardest-throwing guy in the game.
• It's not always about the money, Spider-Man. The Mets wrapped up their West Coast trip on Sunday with a series win over the Padres and Carson Benge's first five-hit game. The Cardinals got the best of us at home, but things have generally been enjoyable since the team started paying homage to Peter Parker; the new home run Spider-Mask was apparently a gift from an anonymous fan in Seattle.

On Deck

• As I said on Friday: "Davis Schneider is back, his beard looks fantastic, he's still walking up to Pink Pony Club, and he's using a batting stance he calls the "Juan Soto". LOVE WINS!" It's also important to note that he's using Bad Romance as his secondary walk-up song. Unfortunately, Tyler Heineman was DFA'd amidst all the roster moves.
• Schneider isn't the only Blue Jay who made a long-awaited return, as Dylan Cease and Max Scherzer returned from their IL stints on Tuesday and Wednesday respectively. Cease's start went pretty darn well; Scherzer's not so much, but he did hit 3,500 career strikeouts.
• The Mets have had mixed news on their injured players. While Francisco Lindor is making good progress, Kodai Senga and Jorge Polanco have faced some setbacks in their rehab.
• Matt Brash is back on the IL, this time with a lat strain, and J.P. Crawford has joined him with a right hand contusion. The universe hasn't given the Mariners enough problems yet, I guess.
• Following his early departure in New York's win over Atlanta on Friday, Spencer Strider returned to the 15-day IL with right elbow inflammation. Despite the fact that he plays for the Braves, my friends and I legitimately like Strider, who made an appearance at the team's Pride Night pregame party and overall seems like a cool guy. The injuries he's been plagued by since his standout 2023 season are deeply unfortunate, and I hope he recovers better this time around.
• Oneil Cruz was placed on the 10-day IL with hand fractures that will likely keep him out of play for at least a month, but his absence didn't stop the Pirates from whooping up on the Dodgers Wednesday night.
• Braden Montgomery made his debut for the White Sox, so now they have two dudes named Montgomery running around out there. Make sure you're tracking first names in your scorebook.
• The Diamondbacks signed the suspended Max Kepler to a one-year deal. Kepler has been allowed to serve his suspension like a starting pitcher, counting down the 80-day timer even though he didn't sign with a team following the end of his contract with the Phillies. Which seems like BS, but whatever.

And now for a little something extra from Daniel, on the subjects of Francisco Alvarez and Tarik Skubal:

Francisco Alvarez had an impressive rehab assignment in Syracuse only three weeks post-op. He caught 29 innings with the Triple-A SMets, during which he had two caught stealings: a sure throw to nab Jonathan Ornelas, and this other beautiful throw to second to catch Duke Ellis. He also had a remarkable pickoff of George Lombard Jr., ending the inning on a very heads-up strike ’em out-throw ’em out.

Alvy showed plenty of confidence in his arm, his knee, and notably, reminded us he knows where the strike zone is. In his first ABS challenge during his rehab start, Alvy got up from his crouch, used the ball he’d just caught for a called ball to tap the side of his mask twice, and walked away. Between Seth Brown’s confusion and Zach Thornton following Alvarez off the field, it’s safe to say Francisco Alvarez has his swag back. Otherwise, Alvy went 3-13, with two doubles, a single, and a walk. Just to prove that he’s fine, Alvarez hit a single in his first game back, hit a home run in his second game back, and served up another healthy single in his third.

Some 500 miles away from Citi Field, another specimen made his first appearance last night. Tarik Skubal, like Francisco Alvarez, hit the injured list rather dramatically, though instead of a torn meniscus, it was with “loose bodies” (which can sort of mean whatever!). On May 6th, Skubal underwent surgery to have the bodies removed, and had an “official” timeline for return. Detroit’s homegrown southpaw was expected to be sidelined for, conservatively, about six weeks, but one week after bone chips were removed from his elbow, Skubal was throwing. A week after that, he was throwing full bullpens symptom-free. Then there was a 64-pitch simulated game. 32 days post-op, Tarik Skubal made his first (and only) rehab start.

As this is being written, Skubal is about five and a half weeks out from surgery. During his recovery, he refused to give an ETA for his return, and before his start yesterday, Skubal didn’t see himself as being ahead of schedule. (Sunday editor's note: based on how that start went, he might have needed to cook just a little longer.)

The Dugout

• Hey, there's the Bo Bichette we were all waiting for! His grand slam on Friday was a real sight for sore eyes. It's kind of ridiculous that 6 of those 8 RBI all came in one game. Per Sarah Langs, he’s the first Met with two home runs through the first two innings of a game multiple times in a career, having done so back on May 19th as well.
• It hasn't been the most impressive week on all fronts for Cole Young, but he's been making a lot of contact. MLB has been running straight up propaganda for his potential All-Star campaign, and if voters typically looked at defensive ability, he'd be running away with it. He currently leads all AL 2B by a substantial margin—and places fifth in the AL overall—in the SABR Defensive Index rankings. Also, for some reason, he's the teammate that Julio Rodríguez would least like to have as an in-law. We all really want to know what that's about.
• Speaking of prospective All-Stars, is Jordan Walker crushing it or what? We're far enough into the season that I think we can say his turnaround is the real deal. He and Cole Young share the peculiar distinction of almost having gone to college with me, but choosing to turn pro instead. I'm inclined to say they made the right decision.

Home Plate

This past week's Box Score Banter was about R.A. Dickey's climb of Mt. Kilimanjaro, which I greatly enjoyed reading about, and David Sandlin's rough outing against the Phillies, which I didn't.

The Scorecard is late this week because I was volunteering yesterday and it's hot as all get-out in Boston, so I was incredibly tired afterwards. I hadn't done much writing in advance since I spent most of Friday drafting another post, which I know I keep saying and not posting anything, but it's true. I got about 1,500 words down about my baseball fan backstory, so there's real movement on that front.

I've also been slowly working on stuff for my SABR presentation. Right now this mainly entails fresh data collection—I'm not really happy with many aspects of my original project, and the data quality is one significant component of that. Instead of a haphazard collection of blogs that were arduous to collect proper text from at scale, I'm shifting my focus to more mainstream journalism, starting with MLB itself. For some reason, it hadn't previously occurred to me that I could pull data from Common Crawl instead of doing it from scratch myself, so I'm completely overhauling my code to enable that. Plus my original code is just a nightmare:

The Backstop

I don't really follow other sports—you probably remember me talking a bit about the Bills and Seahawks at the beginning of the year, but that brief flirtation with football is about as far as it goes. Still, immersing yourself in one sport inevitably exposes you to many others. I've enjoyed the random glimpses of Wemby's personality that I've seen on social media over the last few months. However, as a Mets fan (and really, as one who hangs out with other Mets fans that would never forgive me otherwise), it's Knicks in five. I loved this ArtButMakeItSports post that came out of Game 4:

Okay, I really have to finish writing this before the game ends. LET'S GO BABY KNICKS IN FIVE!!!!!!!!!!! Now let's bring that good fortune to Canes in six.