Mad for Machado

PLAYERS OF THE WEEK

MLB: Baltimore 3B Manny Machado

Have a night, Manny Machado. It wasn’t just that Machado hit three home runs Friday night. The punctuation mark was a walk-off grand slam, giving him seven RBI in the Orioles’ 9-7 comeback victory over the Los Angeles Angels.

Brewers: CF Keon Broxton

No player on the Brewers’ roster is streakier than Broxton but when he’s on one of his good binges, he can make a major impact. Broxton hit his fourth home run over a three-game span Friday night in Colorado to join the team’s growing 20-homer club.

BREWERS THIS WEEK

The Brewers’ 10-day, nine-game trip continues with stops in San Francisco and Los Angeles, with a day off in-between. The Giants and Dodgers are having slightly different seasons, as evidenced by the 38 games separating them in the standings in the NL West entering weekend play.

DID YOU KNOW?

When the Cubs lost to the Reds, 13-10, Thursday, it marked their first defeat when scoring at least 10 runs since they fell to the Braves, 13-12, in 11 innings on May 28, 2006.

YOU FIGURE IT OUT

When you think tape-measure home run, the players that come to mind are Giancarlo Stanton and Aaron Judge. But St. Louis outfielder Tommy Pham wowed everyone with his ninth-inning shot Thursday night at Pittsburgh’s PNC Park.

In the ninth inning, Pham got all of a Wade LeBlanc pitch and drove it down the left-field line, staying inside the foul pole and landing on the top of the concourse. Statcast recorded the distance at 440 feet, though some of Pham’s teammates thought that number was light.

“That was a monster shot,” manager Mike Matheny said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a ball go up there.”

The exit velocity of the drive was 111.4 mph, the hardest-hit homer by a St. Louis player this season.

QUOTE

“If you hold him to a single, you call it a win.” – Cubs pitcher John Lackey on Cincinnati’s Joey Votto.