Tuesday's Historical Offensive Explosion Proves MLB Is Back With A Bang
Runs and Homers galore make for a fun night...
When we examine the 2023 MLB season in full, we will no doubt look back on the events of Tuesday night as one of the defining chapters in baseball’s emphatic revenge tour.
As home runs pierced the skyline across America and runs piled up at an absurd clip, you couldn’t help but sit back and crack out a vindicated smirk. America’s Favorite National Pastime hasn’t felt this relevant and this fun in a long, long time.
Indeed, the past four months or so have proven to be incredibly healing and fruitful for baseball’s very soul. The slew of rule changes introduced prior to the 2023 season breathed new life into a sport that had turned stagnant and was stuck in a time capsule, the ever-growing mystique and magic of Shohei Ohtani has captivated a whole new and, more importantly, younger audience and, speaking of youth, a wave of fresh, exciting talent has taken over the game and has played a part in attendances being up across American ballparks.
Major League Baseball is in the best, healthiest shape it has been in for eons.
And Tuesday night was a shining example of why.
If you missed it, the best way for me to describe what happened across baseball was a mass eruption of pure and mesmerizing offense.
The bats went off and then some.
To put exactly what happened into context, here are some pretty impressive stats that paint the picture perfectly:
A grand total of 12 teams scored 10+ runs on Tuesday, tied with 5/30/1984 for the second most runs on a single day all-time, behind only 7/4/1894 which saw 13 teams achieve the feat.
Four separate games ended with both teams scoring at least 10 runs, tying the all-time MLB record for the most such games in a single day. The other times? July 4 and July 9 of 1894, when the average team scored 7.38 runs per game (teams are currently scoring an average of 4.60 runs per game in 2023).
If that wasn’t enough, six players each had multiple home runs in the same day. It is the first time it has happened this season.
We’re talking some rarified air when reflecting on the sheer magnitude of the offensive exploits that took place on Tuesday. But, outside of the cold hard stats, it was just a fun night to be a baseball fan and it shifted the sport to the front of talk shows and newspaper columns.
Exactly where baseball belongs.
Arguably the biggest source of entertainment was to be found in Atlanta where the Diamondbacks outlasted the Braves 16-13 in an absolute slugfest for the ages. The game had absolutely everything, including Atlanta’s Austin Riley and Arizona’s Christian Walker blasting two homers each, and it was the kind of pulsating, offensive chess match that set the tone for the rest of the night. Oh, and the Braves have lost three straight games for the first time since May 14.
Being a Mets fan, I was obviously locked in on what was happening in Queens and, let me tell you, my heart rate still hasn’t slowed down. Man, this team just doesn’t make life easy for themselves and the bullpen continued to be a heart attack waiting to happen after allowing five runs in the seventh inning. The fact the Mets won this game by one run despite having leads of 8-2 and 11-4 should tell how this year has gone. Thank God for Francisco Álvarez, who carried this team yet again with a two homer game. The phenom catcher has been an offensive juggernaut for a team that has struggled to generate a lot of offense, and he now leads all catchers in home runs with 19. That total is now the second most in a season for a catcher aged 21 or younger. Hall of Famer Jonny Bench set the record with 26 with the Reds in 1969.
As much of a dumpster fire as this year has been for the New York Mets, there can be a lot of comfort taken from the fact that Álvarez seems pretty legit at this point.
Thrilling offensive duels to the bitter end were the order of the night on Tuesday. The Detroit Tigers came back from a 11-6 deficit but couldn’t quite close the deal against the Kansas City Royals, who managed the remarkable feat of putting 11 runs on the board without needing the long ball. Then, as if we hadn’t had enough excitement for one night, the San Francisco Giants kept throwing haymakers until the Reds eventually threw in the towel in an 11-10 slugfest.
None of those four games went to extra innings either, by the way.
Oh, and in what was another gift from the Baseball Gods, the ageless Joey Votto also blasted his 350th career homer on Tuesday just to add to the madness of it all.
It isn’t a stretch to say that the sheer level of offense we witnessed on Tuesday hit new unprecedented levels, and it isn’t something we’ll see every day.
Even non-baseball fans would have been absolutely hooked and compelled by the flurry of runs that were being piled up, and that’s what has been great about the 2023 season.
There’s been something to entertain the masses every single day.
Baseball purists and die-hards have had to put up with critics rushing to bury the sport we love for so long, but this year the tide has been turned and America’s National Pastime is riding the crest of relevancy once more.
Major League Baseball is cool again. It’s fun again. Baseball is back.
And nights like Tuesday, where the little kid in all of us could get all romantic and misty-eyed about the constant sounds of balls cracking off the bat and flying high into the air at an almost impossible clip, are the perfect illustration of that.
