Welcome to The Pregame Lineup, a weekday newsletter that gets you up to speed on everything you need to know for today’s games, while catching you up on fun and interesting stories you might have missed. Thanks for being here.

It’s highly unusual in baseball to see a homegrown star still in his 20s, only two years into a 10-year deal, be shipped off more than a month ahead of the Trade Deadline. (This wasn’t exactly Luka Doncic to the Lakers, for you NBA fans out there, but the shock was pretty similar.) What’s far more unusual, and almost uncanny, is that star having to turn around and play his former team in just his fourth game with his new team.

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but it might take a little more than five days. 

The breakup between the Red Sox and Rafael Devers gets a dramatic second wind starting tonight (10:15 p.m. ET, MLB Network and FREE on MLB.TV), when Boston visits Oracle Park for a bit of an awkward reunion with its former star slugger. And the motivation on both sides probably won’t shock you the way the Father’s Day trade surely did.

“He’s gonna do everything possible to kick our [butts], and we’re gonna do everything possible to do the same,” Boston manager Alex Cora said, as our own Ian Browne detailed yesterday. 

Message received. There won’t be a lot of love lost on either side, personal friendships between players aside, with both parties making it very clear they prefer to move forward into new eras.

For Devers that means adjusting to a new city and a new team, which just got its first win yesterday since bringing him aboard. The hero in that one? Wilmer Flores, the man Devers is essentially replacing as San Francisco’s everyday designated hitter, who came up with a clutch pinch-hit go-ahead knock in the seventh. For Boston, that means figuring out whether their young players can step up in the post-Devers era -- or whether they can use some of the financial flexibility they gained in the trade to bring in some veteran help.

Devers has said he’s willing to play the field in San Francisco, wherever they ask him to, which was decidedly not the case in Boston. That was an obvious point of contention behind the scenes of this trade, and Devers has since reportedly taken grounders at first base. Could the Red Sox come to town this weekend and see their former face of the franchise manning the very position he told them he’d prefer not to play? It’s not out of the realm of possibility, and it’d make this already juicy showdown a bit more freshly squeezed. 

Either way, Devers will have the chance to hit the first homer of his career (he currently has 215 of them) not in a Red Sox uniform … against the Red Sox.

And in case you were wondering if this type of quick reunion between team and traded player has happened before … well, we wondered the same. So we had MLB.com’s research crew dig up just a few notable examples from the past 25 years:

• Remember the Juan Soto trade? (No, not that one. The other one.) It happened on Aug. 2, 2022, just 10 days before the Padres started a series at Nationals Park. Soto, who said he had “cried all morning” after learning of the trade, expressed no hard feelings toward the Nats. That didn’t stop him from cracking two hits and picking up an RBI in his return.

• If you think the Devers-Boston reunion is quick, consider this: When the Mariners sent franchise icon Ichiro Suzuki to the Yankees before the 2012 Trade Deadline, all he had to do was switch clubhouses at the ballpark then known as Safeco Field. Obviously, Ichiro singled in his first plate appearance as a visitor there.

• In a situation with some other parallels to Devers, there was Scott Rolen. Like Devers (until this year, at least) a franchise third baseman, Rolen also wound up in an acrimonious standoff with his team after rejecting the Phillies’ contract extension offer before the 2002 season. Traded to St. Louis that July, he faced Philly for the first time a few weeks later (Aug. 23) and went 4-for-5 with two RBIs in a 14-inning loss.

-- Scott Chiusano

Pick one of the day’s games, open up your board and see if you can get bingo with these baseball occurrences. Play free >>

• Mets @ Phillies (7:15 p.m. ET, Apple TV+): Tied atop the NL East, the Mets and Phillies open a key set in Philly, with the Amazin’s in the midst of a season-long six-game skid. But if the Mets are hoping for a break, they won’t get one against Zack Wheeler, who’s quietly putting together one of the best seasons of his career in search of that elusive Cy Young Award.

• Brewers @ Twins (8:10 p.m. ET, MLB.TV): It was quite an electrifying debut for Jacob Misiorowski last Friday, as the 6-foot-7 flamethrower threw 14 pitches at 100 mph and above. Tonight he’ll face a Twins club that scored a season-high 12 runs against the Reds yesterday, highlighted by Byron Buxton’s two-homer game.

• Nationals @ Dodgers (10:10 p.m. ET, MLB.TV): Clayton Kershaw is 12 strikeouts away from 3,000 for his career, while his opponent on the mound is MacKenzie Gore, who leads the NL in whiffs with 119. Kid K vs. MacKenzie should be a compelling duel of a past Cy Young winner vs. a potential future one.

We are just 23 days away from the start of the 2025 MLB Draft. But if you’ve been paying attention, that date -- July 13 -- has probably been drilled into your head already.

Perhaps you followed this week’s MLB Draft Combine, where hundreds of Draft hopefuls showcased their skills in Arizona. Or maybe you’ve been tracking other top prospects at the College World Series. By the way, Game 1 of the best-of-three finals between LSU and Coastal Carolina is on Saturday at 7 p.m. ET.

All of this is to say that the MLB Draft is top of mind for many right now, especially MLB.com prospect gurus Jim Callis and Jonathan Mayo. They released their latest 2025 first-round mock draft on Thursday. 

Callis and Mayo see high school infielder Ethan Holliday going No. 1 overall to the Nationals, three years after his brother Jackson was chosen with the same pick by the Orioles. At No. 2, they have the Angels selecting someone we’ll be watching this weekend in Omaha: LSU left-hander Kade Anderson.

Make sure you check out the entire first-round mock -- and fast. Two dozen players drafted within the past two years have already debuted in MLB, including five 2024 picks. Among that quintet are two lefty sluggers who had memorable performances on Thursday: the Royals’ Jac Caglianone and the Athletics’ Nick Kurtz.

– Brian Murphy

Could there be any better way to spend Juneteenth than with a full day dedicated to celebrating the legends and history of the Negro Leagues?

The festivities began in Fairfield, Ala., where Willie Mays Park was rededicated in honor of the hometown legend, just one year and one day after he’d passed away at 93. Backed by proceeds from a Winter Meetings charity auction, MLB Together and partners in the community teamed up to give local youth baseball and softball players a beautifully renovated home park.

The celebration moved just a few miles east to Birmingham and historic Rickwood Field, where recently retired big league stars such as CC Sabathia, Ryan Howard and Andruw Jones got together at America’s oldest ballpark to celebrate the Negro Leagues with the second playing of the reborn East-West Classic, originally a showcase for Negro League stars in the early 20th century.

Perhaps the biggest hit of the day -- literally -- came off the bat of two-time Home Run Derby winner Prince Fielder, who put on an awesome power display during a pregame home run contest that also included Howard and Jones. Fielder played target practice with a roof beyond right field and capped his final-round win over Jones with an epic bat flip.

For a much deeper dive into all of the day’s events, check out our coverage by Dan Cichalski, who endured plenty of rain to bring you all of the fun from Fairfield and Birmingham.

-- Ed Eagle

It's funny to say about someone who routinely does unprecedented things at the plate, but Shohei Ohtani The Pitcher feels even more exciting. Ohtani's gala return to a big league mound on Monday was the most watched game in MLB.TV history, and the hype is already building for his encore performance on Sunday vs. the Nationals (4 p.m. ET, MLB.TV).

Ohtani allowed one run in one inning against the Padres on Monday, and he didn’t record a strikeout. But the stats don’t tell the full story -- as David Adler wrote, he was throwing even harder than he had pre-injury, exceeding 100 mph at one point, and his stuff looked as nasty as ever, if not more so. And Ohtani chipped in two hits and two RBIs in a Dodgers victory, because of course he did.

The rigors of pulling double duty are well known. Ohtani has had two major elbow surgeries; his start on Monday was made possible by 21 months of strenuous rehab. That said, the degree of difficulty at play merely adds to the intrigue for fans, his peers and even his manager.

"To see him come into the dugout from the 'pen, all that stuff," Dodgers skipper Dave Roberts said, "I was kind of fanboying for like half an inning."

We know the feeling, and we can't wait to see what comes next.

-- Bryan Horowitz

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