Outside The Confines: Can’t beat fun at the ol’ ballpark

If anyone wants to send me a pizza, let me know. We have Mountain Mike’s around here, but there isn’t one in my near vicinity and I’ve never tried their pizza. But I’m willing to give it a shot. The closest one is about 15 miles away.

• The Mariners and Angels got into a real old-fashioned baseball brawl with punches thrown and everything on Sunday after Angels pitcher Andrew Wantz hit Jesse Winker with a 91 mph fastball. These kinds of fights are so uncommon these days that I almost thought I could see Willie Wilson and Pascual Perez in there.
• Daniel Kramer gets the reaction from the Mariners players involved in the melee.
• This fight led to one of the cuter stories of the season as one Mariners fan ordered a pizza be sent to Winker at Angel Stadium because “You deserve it, big guy.”
• Here’s the whole Twitter feed from the Mariners fan about the journey of the pizza and the DoorDash delivery person who went to the stadium. It’s a little long to post the whole thing here.

• Normally a no-hitter would be the lead story on Outside the Confines, but since it happened on Saturday and there was a brawl with pizza, it gets moved to the second position. Astros pitchers Christian Javier, Hector Neris and Ryan Pressley combined to no-hit the Yankees.
• Here are some “amazing” facts and figures from that no-hitter. My favorite one is the last time the Yankees were no-hit? It was a combined no-hitter by the Astros in New York in 2003. That was at the old Yankee Stadium though. This is the first one at the new park.
• The weird thing is that the Astros then took a no-hitter into the seventh inning on Sunday, setting an expansion-era record of 16 consecutive hitless innings. (That’s as far as the records go back.) But the Yankees stormed back and won the game 6-3 on a walk-off home run by Aaron Judge in the tenth inning.
• Here’s more on that 16-inning no-hit streak.
• Speaking of Judge, the he and the Yankees settled on a new contract for 2022 before an arbitration hearing on Friday. Judge will make $19 million with incentives this season.
• Andy McCullough writes that Judge’s next judges will be 30 MLB owners in free agency this winter. (The Athletic sub. req.) Well, probably not 30 owners. As much as I’d like to see the Athletics, Rays, Reds or Pirates hand Judge a $300 million contract offer, I don’t think that’s happening.
• Can Judge hit 60 home runs this season? It’s hard to believe no one has done it since Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa both did it in 2001. Judge’s teammate Giancarlo Stanton hit 59 in 2017.
• Before we leave the Yankees and Astros, Jon Heyman writes that Yankees fans need to stop booing Jose Altuve. Not only was Altuve not responsible (and didn’t participate) in the sign-stealing scandal, Heyman writes that booing Altuve is counterproductive because he feeds on that.
• Here is one of the most shocking stories this year. Twins pitching coach Wes Johnson is resigning to take the same position for the LSU Tigers baseball program.
• It’s completely unprecedented for a major league coach to leave mid-season to take the same job at a college program. Aaron Gleeman and Dan Hayes has more about Johnson and the Twins situation. (The Athletic sub. req.) While Gleeman and Hayes don’t have a definitive reason why Johnson left the Twins, they do report that his salary with the Twins was $350,000 a year and the offer from LSU is for $750,000 a year. Which is an indication that college athletics is completely out of hand.
• There’s bad news for the Phillies as outfielder Bryce Harper broke his thumb after he was hit by a pitch by the Padres’ Blake Snell.
• Another former number-one draft pick on the Phillies, Mark Appel, got his first major-league call-up. Appel retired for three years before making a comeback with Philadelphia. He’s been quite good out of the bullpen in Triple-A this season.
• Matt Gelb has a lot more on Appel’s quest to make the major leagues at last. (The Athletic sub. req.)
• He doesn’t get as much attention as Appel, but Brittany Ghiroli has the details of Blue Jays’ rookie pitcher Matt Gage’s seven-year, 13-team quest to make the majors. (The Athletic sub. req.)
• With their team already having a huge number of players on the injured list, White Sox manager Tony La Russa has instructed several players not to run hard to first base on routine grounders. He announced this because he doesn’t want fans to think the players are dogging it.
• Zach Crizer examines how the Cleveland Guardians became the surprise contenders in the AL Central this season.
• Jake Mailhot writes that there is no clear favorite in the NL Rookie of the Year race.
• Alden Gonzalez recaps Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman’s emotional return to Atlanta.
• Ben Clemens looks at Oakland starter Frankie Montas and how he’s turned himself into one of the best starters in MLB this season. The amazing stat? Montas has a 2.0 fWAR this season. The rest of the A’s combined? 1.8. That’s some Steve Carlton in 1972 stuff there.
• Montas figures to be one of the hottest names in the trade market next month. But if you want to go beyond the big names, Jeff Passan has the 148 players most-likely to be dealt before the deadline. (ESPN+ sub. req.)
• Congratulations to Ole Miss, who won their first College World Series in Omaha over the weekend, beating Oklahoma two games to none.
• Dayn Perry asked Ole Miss and Oklahoma fans in Omaha whether they’d prefer their team win a national championship in baseball or football. If you polled all the fans of those schools, football would win easily, but these are fans who specifically travelled to the College World Series. The voting was more even.
• Gabe Lacques notes that with MLB adding more and more teams to the playoffs, the best team in baseball doesn’t win the World Series very often.
• Jayson Stark has his regular update of the weird and wacky in baseball. (The Athletic sub. req.) This one with tic-tac-toe!
• Zach Buchanan has the details of Hall of Fame president Josh Rawitch and his love of the Dave Matthews Band. (The Athletic sub. req.) Next up, Rawitch reveals his love of Sandra Lee’s Kwanzaa cake and mayonnaise on Wonder Bread sandwiches, since that’s the culinary equivalent of the Dave Matthews Band.
• The White Sox made a seven-year-old cancer patient’s dream come true as he ran the bases at Guaranteed Rate Field.
• And finally, Tyler Kepner has the story of “The Relief Room,” or a Phillies phan who has turned his bathroom into a shrine to Phillies’ bullpen pitchers through the ages. Click on the link just to see the photos, if anything. Former Phillies (and Cubs) reliever Scott Eyre has “relieved” himself in it. And now Mark Appel really has something to look forward to.

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