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When your only comfort is that your rival is somehow doing worse, it’s not a great time. Plus: The Padres are selling for $3.9 billion, a long-time minor leaguer finally got his shot and Ken wonders if it’s time to fire up the annual alarm system. I’m Levi Weaver, here with Ken Rosenthal. Welcome to The Windup!

Concerns: Why is NL East such an early mess?

The embarrassing thing isn’t that my preseason NL East guess (Mets or Phillies, obviously) has been so wrong (so far). It’s that I had such a boring and obvious opinion.

Well, so much for that. The Phillies were just swept by the (first-place) Braves over the weekend. That’s a five-game losing streak, and they’re 8-13, which would be the worst record in the NL if not for one team crawling behind them: the 7-15 Mets, whose losing streak has now hit 11 games.

In Philadelphia, bad luck might be a factor. Going into last night’s loss to Atlanta, the Phillies had given up a (by far) league-worst .357 BABIP — batting average on balls in play. League average is roughly .288, so the pitching is due for a positive regression, and should improve further with the imminent return of Zack Wheeler. (Jhoan Duran hitting the IL doesn’t help, though.)
It’s not just Philly pitching getting BABIP’d to death. Going into last night, Phillies hitters had a BABIP of .269. That’s not nearly as big an outlier as the pitching, but it’s still the fifth-worst in the sport. Of their starters, only Bryson Stott and Alec Bohm are having particularly wretched seasons. But Philly’s 75 runs are third-worst in baseball.
One of the two teams below Philadelphia? The Mets, at 72 (the Royals have the fewest, with 71). The offense misses Juan Soto, no doubt. But nobody else has stepped up. Of players with more than 20 plate appearances, only two have an OPS over .700 — Francisco Alvarez (.879) and Luis Robert, Jr. (.737).
Meanwhile, David Peterson has been bad, and Kodai Senga has been worse. Further, both former-Yankee relievers (Luke Weaver and Devin Williams) have an ERA over 7.00. Two great starters — Clay Holmes and Nolan McLean — can’t carry a whole staff.

For more analysis on what is going on with these two (and the 8-15 Astros), I recommend clicking on Ken’s link. Let’s throw it to him now.

Ken’s Notebook: Hot-seat time already

From my latest column: 

Is it something in the air this season? I don’t know, but it sure seems like the “Curse of Samuel Joseph” might strike early.

Longtime readers are familiar with “The Curse of Samuel Joseph,” a potent spell aptly named by the late Jerome Holtzman of the Chicago Tribune.

Samuel Joseph is the oldest of my three children, born on May 21, 1991. On each of the first three days of his life, a major-league manager was fired. First the Cubs’ Don Zimmer, then the Royals’ John Wathan, then the Orioles’ Frank Robinson. So much for the joy of new fatherhood. I was covering the Orioles at the time.

Perhaps Sam, in honor of his 35th birthday, is bucking for an early present this year. His curse already is hovering over three managers — the Mets’ Carlos Mendoza, Phillies’ Rob Thomson and Astros’ Joe Espada.

I’m not saying they will be fired. I’m not saying they should be fired. But seeing as how their respective clubs are carrying three of the game’s seven highest payrolls — and that their owners seem capable of pulling a Steinbrenner (George, not Hal) — I just don’t trust that they won’t be fired.

Oops, sorry for the double negative. I’ll be happy to apologize for botching the English language the moment the owners and heads of baseball operations of the Mets, Phillies and Astros take responsibility for the poor roster constructions that might lead them to scapegoat their managers.

In normal years, clubs typically start changing managers in mid-to-late May, when the season is about one-fourth complete, as opposed to the current one-eighth. The curse did strike a bit earlier last season, when three dismissals — Pittsburgh’s Derek Shelton, Colorado’s Bud Black and Baltimore’s Brandon Hyde — occurred between May 8 and 17. None of those teams fully recovered. None was good to begin with.

In-season dismissals, then, are often unfair. But they are not always unwarranted. A classic example occurred in 2022, when — against my misguided recommendation — the Phillies fired Joe Girardi after a 22-29 start, replaced him with Thomson and made it to the World Series. They then were vanquished by the Astros, whose owner, Jim Crane, celebrated by parting with his GM, James Click.

When players perceive a manager to be too tight, the way the Phillies did with Girardi, it’s time to go. The same is true when players perceive a manager to be too worried about retaining his job. And sometimes when a team looks like it needs new energy, fresh leadership, just something different.

For the rest, click here.

More hot seats: Roster holes can come from a lot of places, but they always point to one place: the GM. In Houston, is Dana Brown’s job in peril?
Moneyball: Padres nearing MLB-record sale

In 2012, Peter Seidler bought the San Diego Padres for $800 million. That’s a lot of Big Macs, but here we are, a mere 14 years later, and the price is up to $3.9 billion — expected to be paid by Chelsea F.C. owner José E. Feliciano and his wife, entertainment mogul Kwanza Jones. Previous high: the $2.42 billion Steve Cohen paid for the Mets in 2020.

As investments go, a nearly 500 percent increase in value with very little risk is about as solid as you could ever hope for.

Of course, the Padres may not be a typical MLB franchise — the Twins and Nationals each struggled to meet selling prices within the last few years — but they are an MLB franchise, and they’re not alone in ballooning values. Franchises have increased in value by multiple hundreds of percentage points over the last couple of decades.

That’s certainly a point that will be brought up during the CBA negotiations, since these increases are happening even without a salary cap. Pair that with the early hot starts in markets like Tampa Bay, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and — yes — 15-7 San Diego, and the “parity” argument doesn’t seem like it’s doing so hot, either.

(I know, I know. We’ll revisit in October.)

Long-awaited: Welcome to the big leagues, 28-year-old

I’m a sucker for the “guy gets called up after a lot of years in the minor leagues” story. But this one isn’t a mop-up pitcher getting a few innings or a backup catcher on emergency duty, as Ryan Ward of the Los Angeles Dodgers had been a progressively better hitter in Triple A over the last few years:

2023: .234 average, .748 OPS
2024: .258 average, .861 OPS
2025: .290 average, .937 OPS
2026: .324 average, 1.020 OPS

All told, he has played 420 games for the Triple-A Oklahoma City Dodgers and 696 total minor-league games since being drafted in the eighth round of the 2019 draft.

One problem: The Dodgers already have a first baseman. A really good one, in fact. And they’re not much less stacked at the corner infield positions.

But when Freddie Freeman went on the paternity list this week, it was finally Ward’s time. And in front of friends and family, he got his first hit and RBI.

Freeman will be back soon — the paternity list allows players to miss between one and three games — but given those Triple-A numbers, Ward will surely get another shot soon.

Handshakes and High Fives

The league leader in OPS plays for the Yankees. No surprise, right? Except it’s not Aaron Judge. It’s Ben Rice, who has earned high praise from his captain.

Cubs third baseman Alex Bregman knows his swing doesn’t look right. He’s working on it.

The Nationals finally threw a shutout. It was not normal, of course.

Borrowing and adapting from the Marlins, the Rockies are “suggesting” pitches from the dugout. Here’s why (and how).

Garret Anderson, who played more games in an Angels uniform than any other (and still holds the franchise hit record at 2,368) died over the weekend at just 53 years old, from a heart attack.

A few of us gave somewhat early thoughts on the 2026 version of MLB The Show.

In softball, Florida pitcher Keagan Rothrock threw her third career no-hitter … and apparently had no idea until it was over. Not mentioned in the video by Jomboy, but something I noticed: Florida has a left-handed catcher!

A touching moment in Colorado: Shohei Ohtani spent time with a 100-year-old survivor of the Nagasaki bombing, who called the two-way star the “pride of Japan.”

Ohtani on-base streak counter: It has officially gotten to the point that we’re doing a counter. With two doubles in the Dodgers’ 9-6 loss to the Rockies, Ohtani is at 51 games. That’s the third-longest streak in Dodgers history, behind Shawn Green (53) and Duke Snider (58).

On the pods: The return of “Starkville,” where Yankees manager Aaron Boone joined for the show’s season debut. Jayson Stark and Doug Glanville are back every Saturday.
Most-clicked in our last newsletter: The Pope hat giveaway by the Chicago White Sox.

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