The Bats Wake Up

For two nights, the bats slept. Two complete games. Two two-hit shutouts. Twenty-seven innings of baseball in which the New Jersey Bobcats and the Komodo Dragons, between them, produced exactly three runs and four hits and the kind of pitcher's-duel silence that begins, after a while, to feel less like a baseball game and more like a long, slow art-house film about the inevitability of zeros. On Sunday afternoon, in the bright glare of a one-thirty-five start at Komodo Park, the silence broke.

It broke, fittingly, with the bats of the team that owns the best offense in the league, and with the bat of the player who had not, until Sunday afternoon, taken a single swing in the series.

Jazz Chisholm went three-for-five with a home run, a double, three runs scored, and four runs batted in. He did this from the two-hole in a Bobcats lineup that had not produced more than four runs in any of the previous three games and that had been, since the second inning of Friday night, the offensive equivalent of a man on a very long fast. Chisholm, who had left Saturday's game in the bottom of the first inning after sliding hard into second base on a six-four-three double play and who had spent the entirety of Saturday evening in the clubhouse training room wrapped in ice and being asked by reporters whether he was, in fact, still alive, was alive enough Sunday to homer to right-center in the fourth inning, double to the gap in the sixth, and drive in the eighth and ninth runs of a game that finished ten to five.

The Bobcats win the third game of this series, ten to five. They lead the series, two games to one, with two to play at Komodo Park.

The breakout came in waves. The first wave came in the second inning, when Matt Olson, the Bobcats' first baseman who had gone hitless in the series to that point and who had taken Drew Rasmussen's cutter on the outside corner three times in a row to end Saturday's game in the kind of called-strike-three that has the quality, the next afternoon, of an unfinished argument, drew a leadoff walk against Joe Ryan on six pitches. Manny Machado followed with a line single to right. Cody Bellinger walked. Bases loaded, none out, two batters into the heart of the Komodo Park crowd's afternoon. Ryan, who is the kind of left-hander whose stuff plays up in the early innings and tends to flatten as the game proceeds, did not have his usual command from the first pitch — he had walked Wyatt Langford in the first inning to lead off the game, gotten out of it with two strikeouts, and was working, in the second, with the kind of edge that pitchers work with when they know that the previous inning had taken thirty pitches and they are already, with a four-pitcher staff behind them, on a budget.

Salvador Perez, batting fifth, took a 1-1 changeup and hit it three hundred and ninety-one feet down the left-field line. The ball curled, in the late June Komodo air, just inside the foul pole. Three runs scored. The Bobcats led, three to nothing, four batters into the second inning, and the day was no longer a pitching duel of any kind. CJ Abrams followed with a single. Adley Rutschman walked. Wyatt Langford, batting ninth in the Bobcats' deepest-since-last-Tuesday lineup, hit a sacrifice fly to right. Four to nothing. Ryan was through twenty-six pitches in the second inning alone and had been on the mound for fifty-six pitches total through one and a half innings of work, which is the kind of pitch count that, in late June, in a series in which the rotation behind you has just thrown a complete game and four innings of relief in the previous two days, is the pitch count of a pitcher who is going to be gone by the fifth.

He was gone by the fifth. He was, in fact, gone by the fifth before he had thrown a pitch in the fifth — Coach Triblehorn walked to the mound at the end of the fourth inning, took the ball, and pointed to the bullpen. Adrian Houser, who had been working long relief all season and who had, the previous Thursday, thrown three innings against the Yankees in a different sort of game, came in to start the fifth. By that time the score was already six to two — Chisholm had homered in the fourth, the Bobcats had scored another in the third on a Soto sacrifice fly, the Dragons had answered in their own third with a Henderson double and an Alonso single, and the game had assumed the loose, unhurried shape of a contest in which the team with the better offense was finding its rhythm and the team with the thinner pitching staff was trying to husband whatever it had left.

This is the shape that games take, sometimes, in the middle of a five-game series when the first two games have been complete games. The bullpens, in theory, are rested. The bullpens, in practice, are loaded with the same six or seven names that any given bullpen is loaded with on any given afternoon — Cade Smith, Bryan Abreu, Devin Williams, Yates, all of them theoretically available, all of them theoretically rested. The complication is the starting rotation. The complication is that the team that used four pitchers in Game One in a losing effort is now, in Game Three, asking a fifth starter to do the work of a third starter on three days' rest, and is asking a sixth starter, in long relief, to swallow innings that no one budgeted for. The Komodo bullpen, this afternoon, was the Komodo bullpen plus Houser and Bibee — both of whom were nominally available as long-relief options but neither of whom was, in any meaningful sense, supposed to be the third pitcher used on a Sunday afternoon in a game that was supposed to be Ryan's to win or lose.

Houser was not bad. He worked a clean fifth — Bellinger flyout, Perez groundout, Abrams strikeout looking — and then ran into a different sort of problem in the sixth, the kind of problem that long-relief pitchers run into when they are facing a major-league lineup for the second time through and the lineup has already begun to make notes. Soto led off the sixth with a walk on four pitches. Chisholm doubled to the gap in left-center on the next pitch — a 2-1 fastball that Houser left up and away, the kind of fastball that the Bobcats' second baseman has been hitting like batting practice all season. Two runs scored — Rutschman had reached on a walk in the fifth and stayed on, Soto walked in the sixth, and Chisholm's double cashed both of them. The Bobcats led, eight to two. Houser left. Eovaldi Bibee — by which the Komodo Dragons mean Hayden Bibee, the right-hander who has been working in long relief for the last six weeks — came in. Bibee retired Tucker on a groundout, walked Olson, gave up a Machado RBI single, and was pulled. The score was nine to two. The Bobcats had scored four runs in the inning, three of them on Chisholm's double, the fourth on Machado's single.

The Bobcats were not finished. Chisholm came up again in the eighth, with the bases loaded and one out and the score nine to four — Komodo had pushed across two more runs in the seventh on a Buxton single and an Alonso sacrifice fly — and he singled hard to right field on a 2-2 cutter from Brent Bender that scored the tenth Bobcats run. Bibee had been replaced by Bender, who had been replaced by Carlos Estévez in the same inning, who had pitched out of a bases-loaded jam by getting Rutschman on a soft pop to short. The damage by that point was already done. The Bobcats had ten. The Dragons had four, with three innings of mop-up to come, and a Komodo bullpen exhausted enough that Devin Williams was warming in the bullpen to throw the ninth, which is the kind of bullpen usage that you do not, normally, see in a five-run game in the eighth.

Logan Gilbert, on the other side of the dugout fence, was having the kind of afternoon that quality No. 3 starters have when they are pitching with the largest run support of the series. He worked into the seventh — six and two thirds innings, seven hits, four runs, three earned, two walks, six strikeouts, ninety-eight pitches. It was not a brilliant outing in the way that Skubal's Game One had been brilliant. It was something more pedestrian, more workmanlike, more in the mode of the kind of pitching that wins baseball games when the offense behind it is producing ten runs. He gave up the Henderson double in the third. He gave up the Alonso single. He gave up two more runs in the sixth on a Buxton single and a sacrifice fly. He worked deep enough into the game to save the Bobcats' bullpen, which is, perhaps, the most important contribution any starter can make on the third day of a five-game series. He left to a polite, somewhat-disappointed road-crowd ovation, with two outs in the seventh and a runner on second, having done exactly what a No. 3 starter is supposed to do, which is keep his team in front and turn the ball over to relief with the game still in his column.

The Bobcats' bullpen finished the work. Cade Smith got the last out of the seventh on a comebacker from Diaz. Bryan Abreu pitched a clean eighth. Devin Williams worked the ninth, the score by then ten to four, and gave up a leadoff Henderson single and a Buxton double that scored a fifth Komodo run before retiring the side in order, which is to say not retiring the side in order at all but retiring the next three Komodo hitters after the fifth run had scored, which is the kind of distinction that matters mostly to the people who keep box scores. Final: ten to five. New Jersey leads the series two games to one. The Bobcats are forty-one and twelve. The Dragons are thirty and twenty-three.

What happened, between Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, to the Bobcats' offense? Probably nothing. Probably the offense came back the way offenses come back — by virtue of being the offense, by virtue of the regression that statistics describes and that baseball players experience as a return to the form that has been their form all season. The Bobcats are not a team that gets shut out twice in a row, except for the two nights they were. The Bobcats are not a team that hits .074 across two games, except for the two games they did. The Bobcats are, on the macro level, a team that scores five and a half runs per game and produces nine hits per game and is, by most reasonable accountings, the best offensive club in baseball. Two games of zeros does not change those numbers very much. Sunday afternoon's ten runs are merely the regression. Sunday afternoon's ten runs are the team being the team again.

And yet there was a particular quality to the way the runs were produced. There was, in the first inning, the Langford leadoff walk that did not lead to anything. There was, in the second, the patient four-batter sequence — walk, single, walk, three-run home run — that suggested a lineup that had spent the morning in the video room watching Joe Ryan's last six starts and had decided that Joe Ryan, when he is not in command of his fastball, is the kind of pitcher who can be made to throw the cutter that hangs in the middle of the strike zone. Salvador Perez hit the cutter that hangs in the middle of the strike zone. The Bobcats are, on the year, slugging .610 against cutters left over the inner third. The Bobcats are not a team that misses pitches when the pitches arrive. The Bobcats are a team that misses pitches when the pitches do not arrive, which is what Skubal and Rasmussen did to them on Friday and Saturday — the pitches did not arrive. The Bobcats, on Sunday, got the pitches to arrive. The runs followed.

There was, in the fourth, Chisholm's home run, which had the particular quality of a player who has spent the previous twenty-four hours being asked whether he is hurt and who responds, in the way that baseball players respond, by hitting the first fastball he sees four hundred and twelve feet to right-center. Chisholm did not have a good Game One — he had not played. He did not have a good Game Two — he had played for two and a half pitches and had slid into second base awkwardly trying to break up a double play and had left the field hobbled. He had not played in the series, in any meaningful sense, until Sunday afternoon. Sunday afternoon, he played. Sunday afternoon, three for five, the home run, the double, the four RBI. Sunday afternoon, Bob Monaghan's lineup card — Langford, Chisholm, Soto, Tucker, Olson, Machado, Bellinger, Perez, Abrams, Rutschman, with the pitcher's spot of course filled by the DH in this league — looked like the lineup card that has produced forty-one wins in fifty-three games. The two and three hitters, who had been collectively zero-for-eleven through the first two games, were collectively four-for-eight on Sunday. The lineup that had not produced a runner past second base in the fifteen innings of complete-game shutout that had preceded the afternoon produced eleven baserunners in the first six innings on Sunday. The Bobcats remembered they were the Bobcats.

There was, in the sixth, the long inning — Soto walk, Chisholm double, Tucker groundout that did not score Chisholm because Chisholm had been the runner on first who scored on Chisholm's own double which is the kind of sentence that does not parse correctly until one realizes that Chisholm hit the ball into the gap and ended up on second base while two runners scored ahead of him, including the runner who would have been at third base if anyone had been at third base, which there was not, because the runner from first had scored too. The accounting is complicated. The result is not. Two runs. Then Olson walk. Then Machado RBI single. Then Bellinger walk. Bases loaded, two out, Bibee on. Perez grounded out. Four-run inning. The Bobcats led eight to two and the game was, by any reasonable accounting, over.

It is interesting to note that of the ten Bobcats runs scored Sunday afternoon, exactly one was scored on a home run — Perez's three-run shot in the second. The other seven runs (eight if you count Perez's, but the three of those are the home run runs and the other seven are not) came on singles, doubles, sacrifice flies, and walks. The Bobcats did not, in any meaningful sense, slug their way to ten runs. They walked their way to ten runs. They singled their way to ten runs. They strung at-bats together — twelve walks total, including five issued by Ryan in his four-plus innings, three by Houser, two by Bibee, two by the rest of the Komodo bullpen — and they made the Komodo pitchers throw seventy-eight strikes out of one hundred and forty-three pitches, which is fifty-four point five percent, which is below league average, which is the kind of strike percentage that produces twelve walks and ten runs.

That, in the end, was the difference. Friday night, Skubal threw sixty-three strikes in seventy-six pitches, which is eighty-two point nine percent — one of the most economical performances we have seen in quite some time. Saturday night, Rasmussen threw forty-one strikes in sixty-one pitches, which is sixty-seven point two percent, which is more normal for a complete-game pitcher but still — given that he was working out of multiple walks in the late innings — exceptional. Sunday afternoon, the Komodo pitching staff threw seventy-eight strikes in one hundred and forty-three pitches. The Bobcats, who had been victims of two extraordinary pitching performances in succession, were beneficiaries of a pitching performance that was very nearly the inverse. The math of baseball is the math of strikes. The strikes were not there. The Bobcats took the walks. The Bobcats took the runs. The Bobcats are up two games to one.

Monday's game features Joe Ryan — but no, not Joe Ryan, who threw eighty-three pitches in four and a third innings on Sunday and will not be available for another four days. Monday's game features Joe Ryan's replacement in the rotation slot, which is to say either a bullpen game from Komodo or the appearance of the fifth starter, who is Logan Webb's counterpart in the Komodo rotation, which is to say, Joe Ryan. Which is to say, the Komodo Dragons, on Monday, will throw a bullpen game.

This is the small, secret cost of two complete games. The starting rotation that did its work on Friday and Saturday has bought the bullpen two days of work, and the starting rotation slot that was supposed to come on Sunday has been used in the first four innings of a game in which the Komodo bullpen was, by the fifth inning, already being deployed for relief work that should have come from the starter. The bullpen has not, in this series, been overworked yet. The bullpen will be overworked Monday. The Bobcats know it. Bob Monaghan knows it. He has been managing in this league for nineteen years and he knows what a bullpen game looks like from the other dugout. Monday, the Bobcats will face one. Monday, the Bobcats will, in all likelihood, do something with one.

Monday, of course, is also when Coach Triblehorn — the Komodo manager who has now spent three days watching his pitching staff first produce a complete-game shutout and then absorb a ten-run loss — must produce something from a roster that has, on paper, the depth to do it and, in practice, has run out of starting pitchers. The Komodo Dragons listed Logan Webb as the probable starter for Game Four before the series began. Webb is on full rest. Webb threw four innings on Friday in a long relief role after Skubal's Game One was already out of hand by the third inning, which is the kind of detail that does not matter very much until it matters very much. Webb has had two days of rest. Webb is, by the manager's reckoning, available. The rotation slot, on the surface, is filled. Monday is Game Four. Bobcats lead, two games to one. The math of the series is the math of the series.

The math of Sunday afternoon, however, was the math of an offense that remembered itself in the second inning and never stopped remembering itself for the next two and a half hours. Ten runs. Twelve walks. Thirteen hits. Chisholm's home run. Perez's home run. The bats woke up. The bats woke up loud. The Komodo crowd, which had cheered through the first two innings with the kind of careful, hopeful enthusiasm of a crowd that knows it has a precariously young rotation pitching to a precariously good offense, went quiet by the fourth and stayed quiet through most of what remained. Late in the game, after the eighth, with the score ten to four and the Komodo eighth coming up and Buxton at the plate, a few thousand fans began to file out toward the parking lots in the slow, resigned way that crowds file out when they have watched their team's best chance at winning the series slip away in the middle innings.

The Bobcats lead, two games to one. The Bobcats lead the series, leading the season, leading the league. The Bobcats are the Bobcats. The bats are awake. The series will, by all evidence, be five games. The Komodo Dragons have one home start left and one pitcher of any reliability left in the rotation, which is to say Webb, on three days' rest after long relief work, in a Game Four that is now a must-win to extend the series. Webb is good. Webb has been good all year. Webb against the Bobcats is a different matter than Webb against most lineups, but Webb against the Bobcats has, this year, produced exactly the kind of starts that good number twos produce against great offenses — six and two thirds, three runs, an honest line. Monday is Monday. Sunday afternoon is Sunday afternoon. The bats are awake. The Bobcats are the Bobcats. The series goes on.

The clock at Komodo Park read just past four-thirty. The afternoon sun was beginning to slant across the third-base seats. The visiting clubhouse, after the game, was loud — the kind of loud that road clubhouses get when a team has been silent for two days and has just remembered, in the most emphatic way possible, that silence is not its natural state. Jazz Chisholm, asked about his ankle, smiled, said he was fine, said the ice had worked. Salvador Perez, asked about the home run, said he had been waiting for the cutter and had gotten the cutter. Bob Monaghan, asked about the next game, said the next game was a different game. He always says that. He always means it. Tomorrow is tomorrow. Tonight, however, was Sunday. The Bobcats had ten. The Dragons had five. The bats had returned. The series continued.

There is a particular sound that an injured baseball player makes when he is asked, the morning after, whether he is going to play that afternoon, and the answer is yes. It is a sort of half-grunted, half-sighed exhalation, the kind of sound a person makes when they have spent the previous night being asked the same question by sixteen different reporters and have answered it sixteen different ways and now have to answer it a seventeenth time, this time with the audio recorder up close. Jazz Chisholm made the sound on Sunday morning at eleven forty-five, when the Bobcats' beat writers — three of them, working their way around the clubhouse before stretching — asked him about his ankle. He said he was fine. He said he was playing. He said he had iced it for nine hours. He said something profane about Drew Rasmussen, with affection, and then he laughed, and the reporters laughed, and that, more or less, was the morning interview.

Five hours later, Chisholm was three-for-five with a home run, a double, three runs scored, and four runs batted in, and the Bobcats had won the third game of the series ten to five. The ankle, by all evidence available to the human eye, was fine.

This is what good players do, in baseball. They go down. They get up. They come back the next day and play, sometimes worse, sometimes better, sometimes — as on Sunday — the best they have played in a week. Chisholm had not been having a particularly impressive series before the Saturday slide. He had not, in fact, recorded a hit through Game One — though he had walked twice, both times in the late innings, both times stranded — and his at-bats against Skubal Friday night had the particular quality of a hitter who had been on the road for ten days and who was, in late June, beginning to feel the small accumulated soreness of a long season. The Saturday slide was an act of frustration as much as it was an act of competition. He went in hard to second on Matt Olson's grounder. He did not, by the eye, slide dirty. He simply slid with the kind of edge that hitters slide with when they have not produced anything in the box score for two weeks and are looking, on the basepaths, for the run that they could not produce at the plate. The slide produced no extra base, broke up no double play, and resulted instead in the kind of awkward landing that produces ankle tightness and twenty-four hours of postgame ice.

Sunday morning, the ice came off. By 11:50, Chisholm was taking ground balls at second base. By 12:30, he was in the cage. By 1:15, he had hit a batting-practice home run to the right-field bleachers and was, by the assessment of multiple Bobcats coaches, "back to himself, more or less." More or less is the operative phrase. Chisholm, when he is back to himself, is a particular kind of player — the kind of player who does, in a single afternoon, what he did on Sunday: makes contact, hits for power, runs the bases, gets on base by virtue of the kind of approach that has produced a .371 on-base percentage over the past two seasons.

The home run came in the fourth, against Ryan, on a 1-0 fastball at ninety-three miles per hour on the outer third of the plate. Chisholm extended through the zone — short stride, quiet front side, the kind of swing he was making in early April when he hit eight home runs in the season's first three weeks — and the ball left the bat at 105 miles per hour, headed for right-center field. It cleared the fence by ten feet. The Komodo crowd, which had been holding the kind of silence that a home crowd holds when its team is already down three runs in the fourth inning of a game that was supposed to be the series swinger, exhaled in the particular hostile-tinged way that home crowds exhale when an opposing player produces a moment of consequence. The ball cleared the wall. Chisholm rounded the bases with the slight limp of a man whose left ankle is, in fact, not entirely fine but is fine enough to circle four bases in moderate-Sunday fashion. He arrived at home plate, exchanged a fist bump with Soto, and disappeared into the dugout to be congratulated.

The double in the sixth came on a 2-1 fastball from Adrian Houser, who had been brought in to replace Ryan after the fourth and who had been working clean innings through the fifth. The pitch was a sinker up and away — a pitch that, if Houser had hit his spot, would have been at the bottom of the strike zone away. Houser missed up. Chisholm hit the ball to the left-center gap, where Riley Greene took an unfortunate route and arrived at the point of intersection a full second after the ball did, and Chisholm pulled into second base standing up. Two runners scored. The ball was not a particularly hard-hit ball — 96 miles per hour off the bat, which is below average exit velocity for a major-league hit — but it was placed in the precise spot where the Komodo center fielder was not, and that, in baseball, is enough.

The single in the eighth, with the bases loaded and one out, came on a 2-2 cutter from Bender — a pitch on the inside half, which Chisholm fought off with the kind of inside-out, oppo-style swing that he has been developing over the past two seasons under Bobcats hitting coach Sean Murphy's instruction. The ball was placed in right field. One run scored. Bender was pulled. The Komodo Dragons used five pitchers Sunday afternoon. The Bobcats used five batters in the eighth inning. The arithmetic of the afternoon was the arithmetic of an offensive team finally remembering how it produces runs.

What was interesting about Chisholm's afternoon was the way in which the production was distributed across pitch types and game situations. The home run came on a fastball. The double came on a sinker. The single came on a cutter. He saw twenty-two pitches across five plate appearances — averaging four point four pitches per at-bat, which is above his season average of three point eight — and he had the discipline, in two of the at-bats in which he did not record a hit, to take borderline pitches for balls and force the pitcher into longer counts. The fourth-inning home run came in his second at-bat of the day, three pitches in. The sixth-inning double came in his third at-bat, on a 2-1 count. The eighth-inning single came in his fifth at-bat, on a 2-2 count after he had taken three balls and fouled off two. This is the kind of plate appearance distribution that suggests a hitter is seeing the ball well — that he is in the kind of rhythm with the strike zone where his recognition is fast and his decisions are right.

One of the things you learn covering baseball, over time, is that the difference between a hitter going three-for-five and the same hitter going zero-for-five is, on most afternoons, six inches. Six inches of bat path. Six inches of pitch location. Six inches of timing on a swing decision. Chisholm's six inches, on Sunday afternoon, were correct. The pitches he hit were the pitches he had been waiting for, and they arrived in the eight square inches of the strike zone that he had been instructed to attack, and they arrived at the kind of velocity that he had been instructed to anticipate. His scouting report on Ryan had identified the fourseam fastball as the pitch most likely to leak over the inner third of the plate in fastball counts. His scouting report on Houser had identified the sinker as a pitch that, when missed up, was the pitch most likely to find its way into the left-center gap. His scouting report on Bender had identified the cutter on the inner half as the put-away pitch. He hit all three. He hit all three in the spots the scouting report had identified. He hit all three on the counts the scouting report had identified.

This is the unglamorous part of being a hitter at this level. It is not, despite what the television highlights might suggest, simply a question of having quick hands or a sweet swing or the kind of presence in the batter's box that makes a pitcher uncomfortable from sixty feet, six inches away. It is a question of the morning's video session, the afternoon's pre-game cage work, the in-game adjustments that get made on the bench between at-bats. It is a question of the catcher's signs that the hitter is reading from second base in the third inning. It is a question of the way the pitcher's release point dropped half an inch in the fifth and how the hitter, who had been watching the release point all afternoon from the on-deck circle, adjusted his timing by a quarter-second in the sixth. It is a question of all the small things that go into a major-league plate appearance and that, when they accumulate correctly, produce three-for-five with a home run and four RBI in a series-swinging Game Three.

The ankle, by the way, will be re-evaluated Monday morning. Chisholm reported postgame that he felt "loose, easy, fine." The Bobcats training staff will tape it again, will keep an eye on it through Monday's pre-game routine, will probably send him out there to play, will probably get the same level of production. There is, in baseball, a thing called the post-injury bounce — the phenomenon by which a player who has come back from a minor injury performs, in his first day or two back, at a level above his season average. It is not a real phenomenon, in the statistical sense; it is a sampling artifact. It is also, in the lived experience of being a baseball player, a thing that hitters describe to interviewers. Chisholm described it Sunday: "When you're hurt, you focus more. When you're focusing more, you see the ball better." This is, as a statement of mechanics, partly nonsense. As a statement of what happened on Sunday afternoon, it is also partly true.

Monday's game features Logan Webb on the Komodo side and Joe Ryan — that is, Joe Ryan's understudy, since Ryan will not pitch again until Saturday — on the Bobcats side. The Bobcats' Game Four starter is Tyler Wells, who has been working in the back of the rotation for six weeks and who has not, this year, faced the Komodo Dragons. Wells against a Komodo lineup that has scored exactly seven runs in three games this series is the kind of matchup that, on the surface, suggests another low-scoring game. The Bobcats' lineup against a Webb-and-bullpen Komodo pitching staff is a different sort of matchup. Chisholm will be there. Chisholm, by all evidence available, will play. The ankle is the ankle. The series goes on.

The series is two games to one. The series is four innings from being two games to two. The series, on Sunday afternoon, was not won by Chisholm alone — Salvador Perez's three-run home run in the second was the inning that put the game in front, and Logan Gilbert's six and two thirds innings of three-run pitching was the work that kept the lead from slipping back. But the series was, in some legitimate sense, won by Chisholm. The Bobcats' offense, which had been silent for fifteen innings, came alive in the second and stayed alive for the duration. Chisholm was at the center of every productive inning except the second. He scored three of the team's ten runs. He drove in four. He doubled. He homered. He singled. He worked counts. He took walks. He played second base cleanly — three putouts, one assist, no errors, a 4-6-3 double play turned in the third with the kind of speed and footwork that suggests, again, that the ankle is fine.

The ankle is fine. The Bobcats lead two games to one. Monday is Monday. The series goes on. Tonight's flight home does not exist — both teams are in Komodo City through Tuesday, this being a series with no travel day in the middle — and the bus that will pull out at some indeterminate hour tomorrow night will pull out to the team hotel, where Chisholm will get another ice treatment, another night's sleep, and another morning's question about whether he is, in fact, fine. The answer, tomorrow, will probably be the same answer it was this morning. Yes. He is fine. He is playing. The Bobcats are the Bobcats. The series goes on.