Gerardo Parra’s first-pitch, solo home run was all Arizona needed to top Miami on Saturday. (Mike Ehrmann/Getty)

Brandon McCarthy’s performance in the Diamondbacks’ 1-0 win over the Marlins on Saturday night was noteworthy in and of itself as he shut out the Marlins on three hits and a pair of walks extending his personal scoreless innings streak to 17. What gave the game historical significance, however, was the timing of the one run McCarthy made hold up over his nine innings of work.

Gerardo Parra hit the very first pitch of the game from the Marlins’ Tom Koehler, a 94 mph fastball that was up and over the inside half of the plate, into the Marlins’ bullpen for a leadoff home run. Another 234 pitches were thrown in the game by both teams over sixty-one plate appearances, but Parra’s home run was the only run-scoring play of the game.

According to Elias, the last time that happened — the only run of a game was scored on the first pitch — was nearly 50 years ago. It was September 2, 1963, when Reds’ rookie second baseman Pete Rose homered off the Mets’ Jay Hook to start the second game of a double-header at the Polo Grounds. Hook and the Reds’ Jim Maloney then proceeded to match zeroes for nine innings as the Reds won 1-0.

If “rookie second baseman Pete Rose” and “Polo Grounds” weren’t enough to suggest just how long ago that was, note the Mets were in their second year as a team, Casey Stengel sent Duke Snider up as a pinch hitter in the sixth inning of that game, John F. Kennedy was president, and Mike Trout’s father was just two years old.

Thanks to that catch and  a fine performance by Chris Capuano, the lone run the Dodgers scored in the fourth held up until the bottom of the eighth when Braves manager Fredi Gonzalez sent Evan Gattis up to pinch-hit for his pitcher with one out and B.J. Upton on first base. Dodgers skipper Don Mattingly countered by replacing the left-handed Capuano with his right-handed relief ace Kenley Jansen.

Jansen fired eight straight fastballs at Gattis. Gattis took the first three to run the count to 2-1, missed the fourth, fouled off the next three. Then did this with the eighth:

Andrelton Simmons followed with a solo home run for an insurance run, Craig Kimbrel nailed down the save, and the Braves won 3-2. Ballgame.

That balked the runner to second, allowing him to score on a subsequent single by the opposing pitcher. In total, Lincecum gave up six runs in five innings in the game to inflate his season ERA to 4.70. Since the start of 2012 he has posted a 5.07 ERA in 239 2/3 innings. Coming into this season, I thought his free agency after this season would be fascinating, but now I’m beginning to think it will just be depressing.

The Astros’ winning percentage puts them on pace to be the worst team since the 1962 New York Mets. (Vincent Pugliese/Getty Images)

It’s a long season, and when you’re only winning about a quarter of your games, you have to get creative in order to find a new way to lose. Such is the case for the Astros, who blew a 4-1 lead against the Pirates on Wednesday night and lost in the ninth inning on a walk-off… collision (GIF courtesy of Chad Moriyama of mlbgifs.com):

The score had been knotted at 4-4 going into the bottom of the ninth. The Pirates loaded the bases with a pair of singles, a fielder’s choice and an error by pitcher Edgar Gonzalez, who recovered to strike out Neil Walker for the second out. Russell Martin worked the count to 3-2 and then hit what appeared to be a routine pop-up into shallow right centerfield. Second baseman Jake Elmore, a rookie playing in just his third major league game, signaled for it, but right fielder Jimmy Paredes, running at full speed, barreled into him just as the ball hit his glove. It fell on the ground, and Travis Snider crossed the plate with the winning run. Paredes was charged with the error.

Not only is it the second time this week that two Astros have collided in the field, it’s the second one involving Paredes. On Monday, he and Jose Altuve ran into each other, with the latter suffering a partially dislocated jaw, though to be fair, that time he looked less at fault.

Converted from the infield to the outfield last August, Paredes doesn’t have much experience in the pasture, just 30 minor league games and 25 major league games. “I like his bat, but he’s bad everywhere they put him. Poor routes in the OF, bad hands in the INF,” said Jason Cole, a member of the Baseball Prospectus prospect team, via Twitter (@LoneStarDugout). A .326/.365/.496 hitter in parts of two seasons at Triple-A, Paredes has hit just .250/.290/.342 in 295 plate appearances at the major league level. He had entered Friday night’s game as a pinch-runner for the defensively challenged Chris Carter in the eighth inning. Elmore was out there instead of Altuve because he was the player the Astros called up when their cult hero second baseman took bereavement leave on Tuesday following the death of his grandmother.

With the loss, the Astros fall to 11-31 for a .262 winning percentage and a 42-120 pace, which would make them the worst team since the 1962 Mets went 40-120 (.250); the 2003 Tigers went 43-119 (.265). As for the Pirates, they ran their record to 25-17, moving them into a tie for second place in the NL Central, 2 1/2 games behind the Cardinals, and tied with the Reds for the wild-card lead.

Paul Goldschmidt now has seven homers in his last 11 games, second in the league behind Justin Upton. (Norm Hall/Getty Images)

It’s a pity the Marlins don’t turn their home run sculpture on for dingers by the visiting team, because the Diamondbacks’ Paul Goldschmidt would have lit it up on Friday night. The Arizona first baseman walloped a pair of towering, two-run homers in each of his first two plate appearances against Miami’s Kevin Slowey, the second of which ended a 13-pitch battle that saw him foul off the previous six pitches. He collected a single and a double as well, and ended the night with four runs scored and four RBIs in the Diamondbacks’ 9-2 victory. Here’s a GIF of the first homer:

Goldschmidt now has seven homers in his last 11 games, including two on May 8, and 12 for the season, pushing him past Bryce Harper and into second in the league behind Justin Upton. He’s batting .338/.421/.656, having surpassed Harper’s league-leading slugging percentage tonight. It’s early in the season, but the 25-year-old slugger is making the five-year, $32 million extension to which the Diamondbacks signed him for 2014-2018 look very shrewd. As the Los Angeles Times‘ Bill Shaikin pointed out, the other first basemen in the NL West have combined for just 14 homers this year.

Goldschmidt is just the fifth player to hit multiple home runs at Marlins Park this year — only one of whom actually plays for the Marlins. As you’d expect, Giancarlo Stanton leads the majors in this category, but he has just three, and hasn’t played since April 29 due to a hamstring strain. The Reds’ Shin-Soo Choo, the Braves’ Evan Gattis and the Cubs’ Anthony Rizzo are the other players with two homers at the park.

As a team, the decrepit Marlins have been outhomered at home, 21-8 including the three by the Diamondbacks tonight (the third by Eric Chavez, who went back-to-back with Goldschmidt’s first blast). They’ve been outhomered 21-15 on the road, but nobody cares, because there’s no psychedelic sculpture to activate when that happens. Seriously, Jeffrey Loria, use the damn thing before the taxpayers who funded your ballpark claim what’s rightfully theirs.

Pete Rose (left) and Mike Schmidt combined for five hits, seven runs scored and eight RBIs in the memorable game at Wrigley Field. (AP)

David Wells’ perfect game isn’t the only memorable milestone with a May 17 anniversary. The annals of baseball history feature not one but two Hall of Famers collecting their 3,000th hits, 45 years apart on this day, as well as the highest-scoring game since 1922.

That game, which took place on May 17, 1979, saw the Phillies beat the Cubs, 23-22 at Wrigley Field, thus exacting a modicum of revenge for the Cubs’ Aug. 25, 1922 26-23 win at Wrigley, the highest-scoring game in major league history. Retrosheet doesn’t record the wind speed or direction in the former, but for both that game and the latter — ”18 mph in unknown direction” — it’s safe to assume it was blowing out.

In the 1979 game, the two teams combined for 11 homers, three by the Cubs’ Dave Kingman, one apiece by teammates Bill Buckner, Jerry Martin and Steve Ontiveros, two by the Phillies’ Mike Schmidt, and one apiece by Bob Boone, Garry Maddox and starting pitcher Randy Lerch. Schmidt and Boone both hit three-run homers off Cubs starter Dennis Lamp in the first inning, chasing him after he allowed six runs while retiring just one hitter. Facing reliever Donnie Moore, Lerch hit a two-out solo homer to run the score to 7-0 before he’d even taken the mound

Sometime during that rally, Phillies broadcaster Richie Asburn, who played for both teams in his career, and thus knew the Wrigley winds well, told listeners, “I have a feeling this might wind up about 19-12.”

Once on the mound, Lerch fared about as well as his counterpart. He allowed singles to the first three hitters, with Buckner’s hit bringing in two runs, and then Kingman’s three-run homer cutting the score to 7-4. He got just one out before departing following Martin’s double. Reliever Doug Bird allowed two more runs before the inning was out, so the score was 7-6 after one full inning. Neither team scored in the second, but then the Phillies erupted for eight runs in the third, capped by Maddox’s three-run homer off Willie Hernandez; the centerfielder had led off the inning with a double. The Phils extended their lead to 17-6 the following inning with RBI doubles by Maddox and Pete Rose.

It wasn’t over, even when the Phillies answered fourth-inning solo homers by Kingman and Ontiveros with a four-run fifth against Hernandez to take a 21-9 lead. The Cubs plated seven in the bottom of the fifth against Tug McGraw via a grand slam by Buckner and a three-run homer by Martin, trimming the score to 21-16. After holding the Phillies scoreless in the sixth, the Cubs closed the gap to 21-19 via a three-run sixth that included another solo shot by Kingman.

Like two exhausted heavyweights in the late rounds, both teams slowed down the returns of their punches. The Phillies scored one in the top of the seventh, and the Cubs didn’t respond until tying the game at 22-22 in the eighth with five singles against Rick Reed. The game stayed knotted through the ninth inning, but Schmidt’s 10th inning solo homer off Bruce Sutter — a battle between two future Hall of Famers — produced the margin of victory.

In all, the 4-hour, 3-minute game featured 45 runs and 50 hits, 23 of which were for extra bases — producing a record 97 total bases. Larry Bowa was the only player to collect five hits, two of which were doubles, and he was one of four players, along with Rose, Kingman and the Cubs’ Ivan de Jesus, to score four runs. Buckner drove in a game-high seven runs, Kingman added six, Boone five, and Maddox, Schmidt and Rose four apiece. The Phillies used five pitchers, the only one of whom didn’t allow at least four runs was Rawly Eastwick, who pitched two scoreless innings for the win. McGraw allowed a team-high seven runs (four earned) while getting just two outs. Of the six Cubs pitchers, Lamp, Moore and Hernandez all allowed at least six runs, with the latter yielding a team-high eight (six earned) as well as seven walks (four of which were intentional) in 2 2/3 innings. The only Cubs pitcher not to allow a run was Ray Burris, who did so in 1 2/3 innings.

Managed by Danny Ozark, the Phillies were an NL powerhouse at the time of the game; they had won three straight NL East titles and came in with the majors’ best record at 23-10. The Cubs, under Herman Franks, were just 16-15 at the time. The two teams wound up close in the NL East standings, with Philadelphia playing sub-.500 ball the rest of the way to finish in fourth place at 84-78, four games ahead of the 80-82 Cubs.

As for the 3,000th hits, on this date in 1925, Tris Speaker became just the fifth player in major league history — after Cap Anson, Honus Wagner, Nap Lajoie and Ty Cobb — to reach that plateau. Playing for the Indians as a 37-year-old, he collected three hits off the Senators’ Tom Zachary, the third of which gave him the milestone. Speaker would go on to lead the AL in on-base percentage that year while batting a sizzling .389/.479/.578 with 12 homers and an amazing 12/70 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 518 plate appearances. He played three more seasons and ran his hit total to 3,514, which still ranks fifth all-time; his 792 doubles rank first. Speaker was voted into the Hall of Fame in 1937, the second year in which players were inducted.

On this date in 1970, Hank Aaron joined the 3,000 club as its ninth player, and the first since Stan Musial had done so in 1958. Playing for the Braves against the Reds in Cincinnati, he went 3-for-5 with a pair of walks in a 15-inning loss. His first-inning single off Wayne Simpson marked the milestone hit, and he added a two-run homer off Simpson in the third and a single off Wayne Granger in the 10th. Aaron would go on to collect 3,771 hits, the third-highest total of all time, and in 1974, he broke Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record with his 715. He finished with 755, a mark that stood until surpassed by Barry Bonds in 2006. Aaron was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1982.

Bryce Harper ran into the wall at Dodger Stadium earlier in the week, leading to fears he had suffered a concussion. (Stephen Dunn/Getty Images)

Thursday night brought a welcome sight, as Bryce Harper was back in the Nationals lineup for the first time since Monday, when he left in the fifth inning after running into Dodger Stadium’s rightfield wall at nearly full speed. The 20-year-old leftfielder went hitless in his first three plate appearances against Padres starter Edwin Volquez, grounding out twice and striking out once, but he fared just a bit better in his final plate appearance against reliever Tyson Ross:

Estimated at 432 feet by ESPN Home Run Tracker, the shot gave Harper sole possession of second place in the NL with 11 homers, though his 1-for-4 evening knocked his batting average below .300 for the first time all year; he’s hitting .298/.393/.629, with the league’s top slugging percentage.

Since running into the wall, Harper had been limited to a ninth-inning pinch-hitting appearance on Wednesday; he grounded out against the Dodgers’ Brandon League. Understandably, the Nationals were plenty concerned about his condition following the collision. He needed 11 stitches to close a gash on his chin — a wound that cost him his goatee — and complained of soreness in his legs, shoulder, wrist and hands in the aftermath, though various X-rays proved negative.

CORCORAN: Other big names returning to contenders this weekend

Harper also complained of nausea the day after the crash, which set off alarm bells because that’s a common symptom of a concussion. Particularly when coupled with the spectacle of his post-collision wooziness, concerns were raised about whether the Nationals followed the concussion protocol Major League Baseball put in place in 2011.

On Wednesday, the Washington Post‘s Adam Kilgore reported that both the Nationals and Harper’s agent, Scott Boras, said that Harper did not suffer a concussion. Head athletic trainer Lee Kuntz told Kilgore that Harper had undergone two SCAT2 (Sports Concussion Assessment Tool, Version 2) tests, one on the night of the collision and the second administered the next day by an outside physician. Designed for first responders and medical personnel, SCAT2 is a standardized method of determining whether a player has suffered a concussion, following guidelines from the National Athletic Trainers Association.

Additionally, Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo told USA Today‘s Robyn Norwood that Harper received the ImPACT test as well:

“We did all the tests, the ImPACT (Immediate Post-Concussion Assessment and Cognitive Testing), and he passed,” Rizzo said. “The first day we did two of the tests, and the next day we did two of the tests.”

ImPACT is a battery of neurocognitive tests that measures a player’s brain processing speed, memory and reaction time for comparison against a baseline set of tests that the player took in the preseason. Even when a player reports the absence of symptoms, such tests can show cognitive deficits.

Not everyone was satisfied by the Nationals’ explanations. Deadspin’s Barry Petchesky pointed to ESPN’s Outside the Lines investigation of ImPACT, which is a commercial product sold to more than 7,000 professional, college and high school teams as well as sports medicine centers, and has become popular thanks to excellent marketing. OTL cited a series of studies published in Current Sports Medicine Reports that concluded:

“[T]he false positive rate appears to be 30 percent to 40 percent of subjects of ImPACT … the false negative rate may be comparable. … The use of baseline neuropsychological testing … is not likely to diminish risk, and to the extent that there is a risk associated with ‘premature’ return-to-play … may even increase that risk.”

Still, when the Nationals maintained that Harper didn’t suffer a concussion, they weren’t necessarily wrong. By MLB standards, if he passed the ImPACT and SCAT2 tests and satisfied the concerns of the physicians who examined him, he wasn’t required to go through the formal return-to-play procedure that’s part of the concussion protocol.

With concerns about the long-term effects of concussions now part of the daily landscape, many observers would have preferred to see him treated with even more caution, with the Nationals using the seven-day concussion disabled list MLB created for such purposes. The team’s decision-makers, doctors and trainers are the ones who know the results of the tests and examinations, and after holding him out of the lineup for two days and gradually introducing more activity — a “building process” of “stack[ing] blocks” as Kuntz termed it, they cleared him to return.

It’s not as though Washington has acquired a reputation for mishandling concussions in recent years the way the Mets have with regards to Ryan Church and Jason Bay. In fact, with their preemptive shutdown of Stephen Strasburg last season, the Nationals demonstrated a willingness to place the welfare of their top players ahead of the team’s fate, a controversial decision that garnered them criticism and even ridicule, and may have cost them a trip to the World Series or more. As such, it’s reasonable to grant them the benefit of the doubt with regards to Harper.

Speaking of Strasburg, he was the Nationals starting pitcher on Thursday night, pitching in front of his hometown crowd for the first time since he reached the majors; he grew up in a San Diego suburb and starred at San Diego State University. Throwing a season-high 117 pitches over a career-high eight innings, he notched his first win since Opening Day. The 24-year-old righty allowed just three hits and three walks, two runs (one earned) while generating a season-high 15 groundballs and striking out four.

Strasburg came into the game carrying a 3.10 ERA, but that mark conceals eight unearned runs. Both his 4.56 RA/9 and his 3.48 FIP to that point were better reflections of his performance, and something of a microcosm of the Nationals’ season. Expected to dominate the rest of the league, they’re now just 22-19, second in the NL East by half a game but two games back in the wild-card race. Perhaps Strasburg’s strong showing and the return of Harper will be the spark the team needs to live up to those lofty expectations.

That’s nine-year-old Alayna Adams throwing out the first pitch at the Rays-Red Sox game in St. Petersburg, Fla. on Thursday night to what turns out to be her father, Lt. Col. Will Adams, who came home a few days early from a one-year tour in Afghanistan to surprise his family. Just before the first pitch, a video from Lt. Col. Adams had played in which he said he would see his family soon and advised his daughter to “Stay focused, throw the ball and I love you.”

David Wells got a hero’s escort from his teammates after retiring all 27 Twins on May 17, 1998. (AP)

Overweight and often controversial, David Wells hardly fit anyone’s ideal of perfection, as he himself would later concede with the title of his autobiography. Nonetheless, on May 17, 1998 — 15 years ago on Friday — while pitching for the Yankees, Wells reached the pinnacle of his 21-year major league career by retiring all 27 Twins he faced, completing the 15th perfect game in major league history.

To view the entire game, see below:

The sterling performance came three days before Wells’ 35th birthday and early in his 12th major league season. The portly portsider had bounced from the Blue Jays to the Tigers, Reds and Orioles before coming to the Bronx as a free agent prior to the 1997 season; a favorite of owner George Steinbrenner, he was the consolation prize after New York failed to sign Roger Clemens. “He goes out there thinking, Ruth played here. DiMaggio played here. He understands Yankee tradition. That’s hard to say about a guy who looks like a beer-league softball player,” Steinbrenner told Sports Illustrated late in Wells’ first season in New York.

After winning their first World Series 18 years in 1996, the 1997 Yankees had fallen short, but the 1998 squad approached the season with a clear sense of purpose. After starting 1-4, they had stormed to a 27-9 mark coming into their Sunday matchup with the Twins in the Bronx.

Despite their championship focus, Wells approached the game against the lowly Twins — 18-23 at the time, headed towards their sixth straight losing season and still years away from returning to respectability — with something less than professionalism. Though 4-1 at the time thanks to strong run support, he carried a 5.23 ERA into the game; two starts earlier, manager Joe Torre had pulled him in the third inning and complained that he was out of shape, remarks that led to a sitdown between the two and pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre.

Though he threw eight strong innings and struck out nine against the Royals in his next start, the lesson may not have entirely taken. In his 2003 autobiography Perfect, I’m Not, Wells conceded that he pitched his gem “half-drunk, with bloodshot eyes, monster breath, and a raging, skull-rattling hangover,” having gone to bed at 5 a.m. and gotten just an hour of sleep. By contrast, the Sunday Yankee Stadium crowd of 49,820 was full of children thanks to a Beanie Baby promotion.

Despite his condition, Wells showed great stuff in his warm up, according to Stottlemyre. His cause was helped by a Twins lineup that was bound to finish 11th in the league in scoring and second-to-last in slugging percentage. As a lefthander, Wells was spared the presence of the team’s hottest hitter, lefty-swinging second baseman Todd Walker, who was hitting .359/.391/.521 thanks to manager Tom Kelly’s platooning. Instead, weak-hitting Brent Gates played second, and in Kelly’s imaginative lineup, batted second as well. Also missing in action was a big first baseman named David Ortiz, who had gone on the disabled list a week earlier due to a broken hamate; he was hitting .306/.375/.531, leading the team in slugging percentage — a problem the Twins would spend the next five seasons trying to correct by making him a singles hitter. “You want me to hit like a little bitch, then I will,” he famously said of the prevailing attitude towards his big swing.

Thus, here was the lineup Wells faced, with their stats leading into that day:

Wells cut through the lineup quickly, needing just nine pitches in the first inning and 13 in the second. He struck out the side in the third with a game-high 19-pitch inning, taking advantage of home plate umpire Tim McClelland’s high strike zone. By the fifth inning, the crowd had caught onto what was in progress, standing and cheering when Wells went to two strikes on Coomer and struck him out with a curve. He followed that by starting the sixth with a pair of strikeouts and then an easy fly ball.

Despite Wells’ dominance, the game was still a tight one at that point. The Yankees led 2-0 thanks to Bernie Wiliams, who hit a leadoff double in the second against Twins starter LaTroy Hawkins (incidentally, the only player in the game besides Derek Jeter who’s still active), took third on a passed ball and scored on a wild pitch. Williams hit a solo homer in his next trip to the plate in the fourth.

With Wells pounding the strike zone, the Twins remained restless, failing to extend him beyond 15 pitches in any inning after the third. They came close to breaking up the perfect game in the seventh, but Tino Martinez beat Gates to first base after fielding a hot grounder, and Wells came back from a 3-1 count to strike out Molitor, by then 41 years old and with well over 3,000 hits under his belt, but in his final major league season.

Once they realized what was in progress, Wells’ teammates shunned him on the bench, wary of jinxing his performance. Catcher Jorge Posada eluded him, and Darryl Strawberry got up and walked away when Wells sat down next to him. It was left to David Cone — who would throw a perfect game of his own the following summer — to provide Wells with some relief. ”I think it’s time ‘to break out the knuckleball,” he deadpanned as the Yankees added two more runs in the seventh via a Williams double, a Strawberry triple and a Chad Curtis single.

With one out in the eighth, Coomer hit a groundball up the middle — the closest thing to a hit the Twins got all day — but second baseman Chuck Knoblauch fielded it and made the play. Shaking with the weight of his potential accomplishment in the ninth as the raucous crowd cheered him on, Wells induced Shave to fly out, whiffed Valentin on a curve — his 11th strikeout of the game — and got Meares to pop harmlessly to rightfield, where Paul O’Neill secured the final out.

Arms aloft, Wells hopped in the air triumphantly, and was soon carried off the field by his teammates. He went on to finish the season 18-4 with a 3.49 ERA and the league’s best strikeout-to-walk ratio at 5.6, a performance that earned him All-Star honors and third place in the Cy Young voting behind Clemens and Pedro Martinez (Cone, who went 20-7 with a 3.96 ERA, was fourth).

The Yankees stormed to 114 wins that year, the highest total in American League history at the time, and won the AL East by 22 games. They rolled through the playoffs, with Wells winning each of his four starts, including Game 1 of the World Series against the Padres, kicking off a sweep. Alas, that would be the last game Wells pitched for the Yankees for a few years. Nervous about his hard partying and his conditioning, the Yankees traded him to the Blue Jays just as pitchers and catchers reported to camp in a deal that finally gave the Yankees Clemens, whom Steinbrenner still coveted.

Despite his questionable conditioning and his penchant for controversy, Wells’ ability to pound the strike zone relentlessly and his reputation for rising to the occasion would help him stick around the major league scene through 2007, including a return engagement with the Yankees in 2002-03. He finished with a career total of 239 regular season wins, plus another 10 in the postseason — none bigger than his perfect game.

The Braves will be glad to get Jason Heyward’s bat back in their lineup, and not because of his bunting. (Icon SMI)

Jason Heyward will become the latest big-name player to return from the disabled list — joining Curtis Granderson, Zack Greinke and Coco Crisp — when he returns to the Braves lineup on Friday. Several more key players will follow in the next few days, including Reds ace Johnny Cueto and Red Sox closer Andrew Bailey, and still others should be back by the end of next week.

The first one back, and the one who could have the biggest impact, is Heyward, who missed nearly four weeks in the wake of an an April 22 appendectomy. Though he was off to an awful start in April (.121/.261/.259), his return could be key to reversing the Braves’ sagging fortunes. Despite catcher Brian McCann’s productive return earlier this month, Atlanta has gone just 9-14 in Heyward’s absence, largely due to a slumping lineup. The Braves scored 4.9 runs per game while opening the season with a 13-2 record, but since then have gone just 9-16 (.360) and scored a mere 3.8 runs per game. If Heyward can pick up where he left off last year rather than last month, his return could come just in time to help Atlanta hold off the charging Nationals, who pulled to within a half-game of first place with their win over the Padres on Thursday night.

Unlike Heyward, Cueto, the Reds ace who returns on Monday and has been out since mid-April due to latissimus dorsi and oblique strains, was off to a strong start. He posted a 2.60 ERA, 1.04 WHIP and a career-high strikeout rate prior to pulling up lame in his third appearance of the season. Also unlike Heyward, Cueto is not returning to a team desperate for him. The Reds have gotten good work out of rookie lefty Tony Cingrani (2-0, 2.89 ERA, 11.9 K/9, 5.29 K/BB, 0.96 WHIP) in five starts in Cueto’s stead. However, Cingrani left  his last start early due to a sore pitching shoulder, which means Cueto’s return couldn’t have been more perfectly timed. Getting Cueto back allows Cincinnati to be careful with the arm of its talented young 23-year-old, be it by skipping him once or shutting him down completely via a DL stay of his own.

With Cueto and Cingrani healthy, however, Mike Leake would likely be Mike bumped to the bullpen. It tells you something about how good the Reds’ rotation is when a 25-year-old, former first-round pick who has been roughly league average in his major league career and has a 2.72 ERA in his last six starts is their sixth-best major league starter. That’s without even bringing Aroldis Champman into the conversation.

Another key Monday return will be that of Bailey. He hit the DL at the end of April with a biceps strain, after which the Sox gave Joel Hanrahan a second shot at the closer’s role only to see him hurt his elbow in his second save opportunity, resulting in both a blown save and what my batterymate Jay Jaffe termed the “deluxe elbow platter“: surgery to repair his ulnar collateral ligament (Tommy John), flexor tendon, and to remove bone spurs. Junichi Tazawa was named the next interim closer, but he hasn’t had a proper save opportunity yet, though he did save his own win with a two-inning outing in the Red Sox’ comeback win against the Rays on Thursday night. Bailey will return to the ninth inning, thereby giving the Boston bullpen some much-needed depth as the Red Sox continue to battle the Yankees and Orioles atop the AL East.

Speaking of depth, Friday night should also see the return of A’s outfielder Chris Young and Indians reliever Vinnie Pestano, while next week could bring the returns of Nationals rightfielder Jayson Werth, Yankees set-up man Joba Chamberlain, Cubs starter and instant trade bait Matt Garza (who had a strong six-inning rehab start in Triple-A on Thursday), Dodgers second baseman Mark Ellis and starter Ted Lilly (the latter taking the place of the newly-injured Josh Beckett in the Dodgers’s injury-plagued rotation), Rockies jack-of-all-trades Michael Cuddyer, and, quite possibly, the White Sox lefty Jon Danks, whose last major league appearance will have been one year ago on Sunday. Here’s hoping the number of key players activated between now and then exceeds the number who get hurt.