THE MORNING HORSEHIDE HERALD

THE INFIRMARY WARD: JUDGE WALKS OFF IN THE SIXTH WITH A TIGHTENED LEG AND SNELL LASTS ONE INNING IN CINCINNATI — TWO PILLARS OF OCTOBER VISIT THE EXAMINING TABLE IN A SINGLE EVENING

The ward's gravest pair arrived within hours of one another. In Minneapolis, Aaron Judge — restored to the Yankee lineup barely a week from three months lost to the fractured rib — felt a stiffness in the lower right leg from the first inning, struck out twice, and was lifted for a pinch-hitter in the sixth of what became the thirteen-inning defeat the card below records. "I tried to kind of play it off and see how long we could go, because these games are important down the stretch," the great man said, "but I thought it'd be the right move to come out." He anticipates no testing; the club will pour two days of treatment into the Thursday off-day and say nothing sooner. "We're not going to speculate one way or the other," said the manager Boone. "We'll just see how he responds."

In Cincinnati the champions' evening went sideways on the second-to-last pitch of a bullpen warm-up. Blake Snell felt the left groin grab, tried the first inning anyway — nineteen pitches, his fastball down a mile and a half — and reported himself to the trainers rather than test a muscle he has strained four times before. "For me to stop, that's a first. Maybe I'm growing up," said the lefty, who had been untouchable since August, four victories and an earned-run figure of 1.04 across six starts. The manager Roberts filed it under "glad it's not worse," but the stakes need no embroidery: "He just can't afford any more setbacks. We've got to make sure that he comes out ready to go in the postseason." The defeat also postponed the West's coronation, as the card relates.

The lesser cots: in Texas, the Rangers' starter Gore fought muscle spasms through four laboring innings — nine-and-sixty pitches, six-and-thirty strikes — before yielding to the extraordinary relief the card below sings; Baltimore's Jackson Holliday went to the ten-day list with inflammation of the left wrist, his replacement answering in the manner the card describes; and Chicago's Montgomery left the summit's finale with a bruised left wrist from a Messick pitch, though the X-rays came back clean and the man is called day-to-day. The ward keeps its lamps trimmed.

THE MILESTONE DESK: TWENTY YEARS AND ONE HUNDRED SEVEN DAYS OLD, AND NO CATCHER SO YOUNG HAS EVER STRUCK TWO IN A GAME — ETHAN SALAS OPENS HIS CAREER'S ACCOUNT WITH BOTH BARRELS IN THE MOUNTAIN AIR

The first home run of Ethan Salas' major-league life left Coors Field at a measured six-and-twenty feet past four hundred, dead to center, on the first pitch he saw in the second inning. The second left three innings later. At twenty years and one hundred seven days, the Padres' boy catcher thereby became the youngest man ever to catch a big-league game and strike two home runs in it — the youngest Padre at any position to do so, the youngest to homer as a catcher since Iván Rodríguez in September of 1991, and the youngest player of any station with a multi-homer game since Guerrero the younger in 2019. The roll of those who managed it younger in the past twenty years reads Trout, Harper, Soto, and one Manny Machado, who now dresses in the same room. "I'm just a kid playing baseball, man," Salas said. "So it's pretty crazy to be in company with such high-caliber guys like that."

The account had opened slowly — hitless in his first fifteen at-bats before Sunday's triple at San Francisco loosened the hinge — but the club promoted him for the glove, not the barrel, and the glove did its own day's work: a shrewd challenge of the machines ended the first inning with two Rockies stranded, and the veteran Ray, throwing to him for the first time, gave six tidy innings and pronounced him "great back there." The manager Stammen took the wider view: "Playing the position that he plays, it makes it doubly tough. He's got a lot thrown at him — and then: 'Oh yeah, you're expected to hit, too.'" The evening's consequences for the pennant arithmetic stand in the card below; the desk here records only that the youngest catcher in five-and-thirty years spent his history-making night grinning like exactly what he claims to be.

THE CLUBHOUSE DESK: TWO DAYS AFTER THROWING ONE HUNDRED ONE PITCHES, THE ACE OF MIAMI ASKS FOR THE NINTH — ALCANTARA'S FIRST SAVE IN NINE SEASONS SENDS THE LAUNDRY CART ROLLING

The manager knew before the game; the starter Gusto pieced it together when he saw the big man lacing his cleats in full uniform in the sixth inning; the rest of the world found out when Sandy Alcantara — one hundred one pitches in Monday's series opener, a single day of rest behind him — strode out of the Miami bullpen to protect a one-run lead in the ninth at Phoenix. Two flyouts, a walk, and a caught-stealing later, the face of the Marlins franchise owned the first save of his nine-season life. He had asked the pitching coach for the assignment before the game, with the closer Fairbanks and the setup man Bender both lost for the year and the bullpen freshly emptied. "I want to die out there for my team," Alcantara said. "That's why I'm here. Every time they give me this opportunity, I will take it."

The wires supply the genealogy: since the save became an official statistic in 1969, only three other men had recorded one on a day they entered leading — or sharing the lead in — all the major leagues in innings pitched: Hershiser in '87, Niekro in '78, Messersmith in '75. Alcantara makes four. The clubhouse afterward gave its stoic ace the rookie's rite — the laundry-cart ride into the showers, beer and shaving cream attending — and the man permitted it, which those who know him rank among the evening's larger surprises. "The dude is an inspiration," said Gusto. "I can't even explain how fired up we were." Even the beaten manager Lovullo tipped a puzzled cap: "That's an elite arm, an elite starting pitcher. I was a little bit confused — but to each their own. They won the baseball game." Miami sits seven and a half from the National's last chair with nine to play, mathematically distant and temperamentally unbeaten.

THE OCTOBER DESK: THE CONTENDERS BEGIN ARRANGING THEIR PIECES — ATLANTA RESTS SALE FOR A WILD-CARD OPENER NOT YET EARNED, AND CROWNED MILWAUKEE GOES HUNTING ROUND NUMBERS

The month's endgame has begun on the blackboards as well as the field. Atlanta — leading the East by four and a half with a magic number of five, the earliest clinching possible Saturday — will not pitch Chris Sale in this weekend's Houston series at all, carrying him instead on six extra days' rest to a final regular-season turn Wednesday against Cincinnati, which in turn sets him up to open a Wild Card series on a rested arm. The ledger justifies the indulgence: the ancient left-hander has made but two starts on regular rest all year and owns a 1.98 earned-run figure across the three-and-twenty starts since the last of them. "It's a little bit of an extended break," allowed the manager Weiss, "but we feel it sets him up for the postseason." The thinness behind him is the worry — López to the shelf, as this paper recorded Tuesday, and the rookie Ritchie schooled at Wrigley in the manner the card below describes.

Milwaukee, its fourth straight Central crown one day old, celebrated by winning again — the particulars stand in the card — and awoke this morning at five-and-ninety victories, two shy of the club's best figure ever, with plain .500 ball across the last ten making the Central's first hundred-win outfit since the 2016 Cubs. The manager Murphy is husbanding arms rather than chasing numbers: Misiorowski was capped at two-and-eighty pitches Tuesday, Henderson at seven-and-eighty last night — his two-and-twentieth consecutive start of three runs or fewer to open a career — and the slumping Harrison auditions for an October role in this very afternoon's finale at Pittsburgh. "We've got work to do," said Murphy, and his closer Megill translated: "We're not resting people. We're playing tooth and nail. I would probably expect nothing less."

THE ALMANAC DESK: THIRTY YEARS AGO THIS VERY NIGHT, THE TORNADO TOUCHED DOWN AT COORS FIELD — NOMO'S NO-HITTER IN THE ONE PARK WHERE NO-HITTERS DO NOT HAPPEN

The almanac asks the reader to set down the standings a moment and mark an anniversary: on the seventeenth of September, 1996 — thirty years ago to this morning's date — Hideo Nomo of the Dodgers threw a no-hitter at Coors Field, the mile-high batting paradise where the great Scully himself had reckoned the feat "impossible." It remains singular: in the near four thousand eight hundred games played at that address since, no man has matched it. The night itself was all improbability — a two-hour rain delay, a cold drizzle, and the whirling "Tornado" windup abandoned for the stretch, out of which the enigmatic right-hander from Japan spun the forkball his old pitching coach Wallace still calls "really two pitches — he would throw it for a called strike and then he'd get a chase." Bichette, the previous year's runner-up for Most Valuable, struck out against it three times. "Those Rockies never saw a split-finger like he threw," says Candiotti, who watched from the same dugout. "These guys now, there are guys with good splitters. But they're not like Nomo's. Not even close. Unreal."

The wires append the desk's favorite grace note, from the man's very debut the year before: mound conference, bases loaded, hundreds of Japanese pressmen watching, and the pitching coach — out of pure instinct — asking his new charge "¿Cómo está?" ("Hey Dave," the catcher Piazza observed, "he's Japanese, not Spanish.") Nomo nodded, answered "Good," and struck the next man out. Thirty years on, with last night's Coors card entry full of a teenager's thunder as the milestone desk sings, the Herald lifts its cap to the night the impossible park stood silent.

THE PIONEER DESK: THE QUEENS DRAW FIRST BLOOD IN THE WOMEN'S LEAGUE CHAMPIONSHIP — MACKAY THROWS FIVE AND TWO-THIRDS FROM THE BULLPEN, AND MO'NE DAVIS SCORES THE TYING RUN

The reader will recall from yesterday's columns that Mo'ne Davis had come to St. Louis to watch her old Monarchs teammate wear a big-league uniform, her own championship business waiting just up the road; that business has now heard from her. In the first championship game the Women's Professional Baseball League has ever played, Davis' Los Angeles Queens beat the first-place San Francisco Firebells seven runs to six — and did it the hard way, down 6-2 after three innings with their starter gone four outs in. The rescue belonged to Jamie Mackay, a power-hitting catcher by trade who had never thrown more than three and two-thirds innings in an outing: she gave five and two-thirds from the bullpen, struck out five, and retired the final nine batters she faced. "I'll do anything to help our team," she said, which the box score renders redundant.

The rally's hinge was the desk's returning heroine: Davis led off the sixth with a double and came home with the tying run on the captain Lansdell's double inside the third-base bag, before the Australian captain Eynon — three singles in three tries already — lifted the go-ahead sacrifice fly. "Baseball is a big game of momentum," said Eynon, the game's named player. The Queens thus lead the best-of-five a game to none, with the second act on the league's bill for this very night. One sandlot in South Philadelphia, the Herald observes, has now furnished a big-league debut and a championship rally in the same week; the man who drags that infield should charge admission.