The Milwaukee Brewers had their second-best offensive showing of the season on Tuesday.

The host Detroit Tigers will try to cool them off during the second contest of a three-game series on Wednesday night.

Milwaukee pounded out 16 hits in a 12-4 thumping of the Tigers in the series opener on Tuesday. That output included a seven-run eighth inning. Leadoff hitter Brice Turang led the way by driving in four runs.

The Brewers, who have won five of their past six games, reached double digits in runs for the second time. They scored 14 in their season opener against the Chicago White Sox last month.

Right-hander Casey Mize (1-1, 2.78 ERA) will make his fifth start of the season for Detroit on Wednesday. Mize finished 2025 with a 14-6 record in 28 starts and has been even more impressive this season — although his win-loss record doesn’t reflect that.

Mize allowed five runs in 4 1/3 innings to Minnesota under miserable weather conditions on April 6. Otherwise, he has given up just two runs combined in his three other outings, spanning 18 1/3 innings.

His last effort was his best, as he limited Boston to three hits and one walk over 6 2/3 scoreless innings. He struck out seven but got no offensive support as the Tigers lost in 10 innings, 1-0.

“I feel good,” Mize said. “I feel like I’ve had three good [starts] and one bad one. I feel fine, but we’ve got to translate them to wins. That’s what I care about the most.”

He’ll get his share of victories if he remains this effective.

“We had a good game plan,” Mize said. “I was able to execute at a pretty high clip (Friday). I felt like I was moving well and the ball was coming out well. When you execute, more times than not you are going to have nights like this.”

Mize was the top pick in the 2018 draft and, after some injury issues during his career, is pitching like an ace.

“Casey was incredible,” Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said about his most recent performance. “What I told him afterwards was that’s the best combo of stuff execution, the way his body’s moving, I mean, he was excellent.”

Mize has lost his only career start against Milwaukee, in 2024, giving up five runs in 5 1/3 innings.

Right-hander Chad Patrick (1-0, 0.95 ERA), Mize’s mound opponent on Wednesday, is coming off his best outing of the young season. He held Toronto to one run and three hits over 6 2/3 innings in his team’s 2-1 victory last Wednesday. He struck out only two, but that didn’t faze him.

“I think everything’s coming together,” he said. “I’m not going to do anything sexy out there. It’s here you go, hit it, swing and miss, do what you do. My job is to get weak contact and swings and misses, they come and they go.”

Patrick is more than capable of getting strikeouts. He had 127 in 119 2/3 innings last season as a rookie and recorded 11 in nine postseason innings.

“Anytime I face a lineup, it’s pretty aggressive,” Patrick said. “I feel like I’m a strike thrower. Anytime I’m facing a team, I think that’s the message over there.”

He’ll face the Tigers for the first time in his career.

–Field Level Media

LeBron James proved during Game 2 that he could still unlock the height of his powers when required.

Without Luka Doncic and Austin Reaves, the Lakers are the talk of the NBA Playoffs. Los Angeles has taken a commanding 2-0 lead over the Houston Rockets after a narrow win on Tuesday night.

James has been stellar in this series. But in Game 2, his 28 points in 39 minutes helped power the Lakers over the Rockets, who had returned Kevin Durant from injury.

Durant hasn’t beaten James in an NBA Playoff game without Stephen Curry since 2011. When James takes a 2-0 lead in an NBA Playoff series, his teams are 32-0. This spells real trouble for the Rockets, who will return home for Game 3 on Friday evening.

James was spectacular in Game 2. Even though his son, Bronny, stole some of the attention in Game 1 for throwing his dad a few entry passes in the NBA Playoffs, the 41-year-old has been phenomenal without Doncic and Reaves, the top two scorers on the Lakers.

The Rockets came into this series as heavy favorites, priced at -600 to -750 on most major sportsbooks. Now, the popular prediction market, Kalshi, gives the Rockets just 46% probability of winning this series.

Of course, when this thing flips back to Texas, and Durant gets his legs back under him, the Rockets could still turn this thing around. Without Doncic and Reaves, the Lakers have been leaning almost completely on James to lead them to victory. For two games, it worked. There’s no guarantee that it can hold up.

Regardless of that, what James has done in these first two games is remarkable. He has 80 25/5/5 statlines in the NBA Playoffs since he turned 30. He had 75 of those games before he turned 30. Michael Jordan had 73 of those games in his entire career.

James has completely lapped his peers. Carmelo Anthony was celebrated earlier this year for an induction into the basketball hall of fame. Chris Paul was somewhat abruptly forced into retirement.

Other aging NBA stars, including Curry and Kawhi Leonard, are already enjoying the NBA Playoffs from home. It’s supposed to be a young man’s league dominated by teams like the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder and San Antonio Spurs.

But old man James might have something to say about that. In just two nights, the Lakers have flipped from +10000 to win the Western Conference to +2500.

If James can keep this up for two more victories and eliminate Durant’s Rockets, it’ll be one of the coolest stories that the NBA Playoffs have ever seen. Sure, it’s just the first round. But James handling business without Doncic and Reaves, at his advanced age, is insane.

On Tuesday night, James threw down a reverse windmill dunk. He was moving around like a player in their early 30s – not early 40s. Prior to this series, there was a report that indicated that James doesn’t want a farewell tour and the pressure that comes with it. But this display in the postseason will only make fans want one more season, as it’ll feel like James would be stepping away from the game with plenty of gas in the tank if he decides to retire.

He’s an NBA legend that has nothing to prove. He has all of the records. He has all of the accolades. But enjoy what he’s doing right now. No 41-year-old has ever done this, and it likely will never happen again.

Teams at opposite ends of the American League East standings will meet Wednesday when the visiting New York Yankees take on the Boston Red Sox in the second game of a three-game series.

The Yankees have a five-game lead over the last-place Red Sox following Tuesday night’s 4-0 victory. It was the first time the Red Sox failed to score against the Yankees since 2022, and the first time the Yankees shut out the Red Sox at Fenway Park since 2020.

Boston was limited to four hits in the loss, one of which was an infield single in the ninth inning. It was the fifth time the Red Sox have had four hits or fewer in a game this season.

“Willson (Contreras) in the first inning, Narvy (Carlos Narvaez), the line drive to right-center, but besides that I don’t think we hit the ball hard at all,” Red Sox manager Alex Cora said. “We swung a lot.

“It was fast in the middle innings for him, for Gil (Yankees starting pitcher Luis Gil). That’s it. We didn’t put pressure on him. He threw strikes, probably more than usual, but you still have to play the game and trust the fact that he’s not a strike thrower. We got some pitches to hit.”

Boston is averaging 3.87 runs per game this season.

Giancarlo Stanton was the offensive catalyst for the Yankees on Tuesday. He hit a solo home run, had a two-run double and also hit a ball hard to center field that was caught by Ceddanne Rafaela.

“Some really good at-bats by (Stanton) tonight,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “That last one might have been his hardest one where Rafaela made an unbelievable play on a cold night. … Just some really good at-bats obviously to get us going with kind of a G-esque moonshot and then a big, long at-bat where he gets to 3-2 and is able to get a big extra-base hit for us. Obviously the difference for us tonight.”

The Yankees will enter Wednesday’s matchup having won four in a row and five of their past six.

For his career, Stanton is hitting .318 with eight home runs and 27 RBIs in 40 games at Fenway Park.

“I grew up seeing this place on TV, seeing the rivalry on TV as a kid and you kind of want to be a part of that,” Stanton said. “It’s always a fun rivalry game no matter where each team is in the standings, and so it’s just a good experience. Pure baseball place to play and you gotta raise your game in those situations.”

Wednesday’s probable pitchers are a pair of left-handers:Ranger Suarez (1-1, 3.22 ERA) for Boston and Max Fried (2-1, 2.97) for New York. Suarez is 1-1 with a 2.35 ERA in three career appearances (one start) against the Yankees. Fried is 3-1 with a 2.37 ERA in five career starts against the Red Sox.

New York’s Cody Bellinger extended his hitting streak to nine games with an eighth-inning single Tuesday.

–Field Level Media