MLB Bullets is going to be amazin’

Good morning Monday and happy Patriots’ Day if you live in New England.

• Rangers pitcher Bartolo Colon gave us all a thrill last night, but lost his perfect game in the eighth inning and had to settle for a no-decision.
• The Mets won again yesterday, improving their record to 12-2. Craig Edwards tells you why you shouldn’t be surprised the Mets are off to a hot start.
• Why are the Mets so good this year? Maybe because for the first time, their all five pitchers in their much ballyhooed starting rotation are all healthy at the same time.
• Their ace is still Noah Syndergaard, and while I disagree that this pitch “violates the laws of physics”, it is one of the nastiest breaking pitches I’ve ever seen.
• However, since this is the Mets, something bad must happen. Catcher Travis d’Arnaud will miss the rest of the season with Tommy John surgery and the Mets other catcher, Kevin Plawecki broke his left hand after being hit by a pitch and will miss 3-4 weeks. So now the Mets have gone from two catchers to none. As Casey Stengel once said: if you don’t have a catcher, you’re going to have a lot of passed balls.
• Dayn Perry examines the options the Mets have for dealing with their lack of catchers.
• The Mets aren’t the only team off to a hot start as the Diamondbacks are 11-4. Tim Brown examines Arizona’s hot start and how it has the team hungry for more.
• The D-Backs are going so well that they can survive this play. Deven Marrero looked like he had his first Diamondbacks home run on Saturday, except that he passed Alex Avila on the basepaths and was called out on review.
• The Diamondbacks beat the Dodgers on Friday night too, despite Dodgers infielder Chase Utley getting one of the luckiest 2-run singles that you’ll ever see when an easy double-play ball hit the second base bag and went into left field.
• The Dodgers were supposed to run away with the NL West, but instead they’ve started the season 5-9. (That makes the Cubs 7-7 not look so bad.) Anyway, Howard Cole is tired of the Dodgers making the “it’s early” excuse.
• The Pirates are also in first place in the NL Central and Jay Jaffe explains why the Pittsburgh faithful should have some cause for optimism.
• The other big news this year is the weather, and Al has already written something about this. But Bob Nightengale takes a look at the current weather issues and that even Shohei Ohtani can’t stop the bad weather.
• Dave Sheinin looks at the crazy Japanese media caravan that follows every move Ohtani makes. Not only crazy, but overworked as well.
• Former Cardinals outfielder and pitcher Rick Ankiel is a big fan of what Ohtani is doing. Ankiel said that if he had not developed the “yips,” he would have loved to try being a two-way player.
• This morning’s annual Red Sox Patriots’ Day game has already been postponed because of the weather.
• I know a lot of people don’t like “Marlins Man” and I have to say, I’m no fan of him either. But I give him a big round of applause for his stunt of going to the Marlins’ British Virgin Islands headquarters to discover (unsurprisingly) that it’s just a post office box and a tax dodge.
• Yankees slugger Giancarlo Stanton says he holds no grudges against Marlins owner Derek Jeter.
• Twins first baseman Joe Mauer got his 2000th hit on Thursday and Jon Tayler has an appreciation of the career of the guy who never left the Twin Cities. Tayler feels that Twins fans don’t appreciate Mauer enough because of his recent string of pedestrian seasons, but he’s off to a great start in 2018. (And he had a good 2017 too.)
• Jeff Sullivan shows how Braves first baseman Freddie Freeman has turned himself into a version of Joey Votto, and that makes him an MVP-candidate.
• Mike Axisa thinks the worst problem with baseball isn’t the length of games, it’s that strikeouts and walks are way up and the problem keeps getting worse.
• The Reds are off to a terrible start and manager Bryan Price is on the “hot seat.” Bill Baer thinks that firing Price is inevitable, but that won’t fix what’s wrong with the Reds.
• Now it’s time for the butcher’s bill. Padres pitcher Dinelson Lamet will undergo Tommy John surgery.
• Diamondbacks pitcher Taijuan Walker went on the disabled list with “forearm tightness” which is always an ominous development. He’ll have an MRI later.
• Orioles second baseman Jonathan Schoop went on the DL with an oblique strain.
• Blue Jays third baseman Josh Donaldson went on the DL with right shoulder inflammation.
• Red Sox outfielder Mookie Betts left Saturday’s game with a foot contusion and he’s day-to-day. As better sportswriters than I have said, so are we all, Mookie.
• This week the deadline passes for teams to gain an extra year of control on players called up from the minors, but the Yankees are not committing to calling up Gleyber Torres.
• And the Braves won’t call up outfielder Ronald Acuna until he starts hitting better. Acuna is hitting .152 in Triple-A Gwinnett so far this year. It’s just eight games though.
• This Indians cap is all sorts of wrong.
• Hall-of-Famer Cal Ripken is moving onto another phase in his life and that includes selling his 21,000-foot mansion at auction.
• Brewers outfielder Hernan Perez is imitating Joey Votto as well, at least in the way that Votto likes to troll fans of other teams. But unlike Votto, it looks like that after Perez teases the fans, he ends up giving them a ball later.
• These are terrific, although you can get lost in them. The Library of Congress has digitized around 1,750 scouting reports written by the great Branch Rickey, mostly from the fifties and sixties.
• With the Rockies playing the Nationals at Nationals Park, a home run hit by Nats catcher Matt Wieters was caught by a young Rockies fan. Later, a home run hit by Rockies second baseman DJ LeMahieu was caught by a young Nats fan. So the two boys did the sensible thing and traded home run balls.
• And finally, we’ve all seen the “bow and arrow” routine of Twins closer Fernando Rodney. Heck, Rodney pitched for the Cubs down the stretch in 2015. But Rodney decided to brave the bad weather in Minnesota this weekend (that postponed their games) to do his bow-and-arrow routine in the snow. He’s becoming a real Minnesotan too as he shared some video of him shoveling snow, although a real Minnesotan would have put on some warmer clothes.

And tomorrow will be a better day than today, Buster.