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. Today's edition is brought to you by David Adler.

For all you coaches out there who love to say "The best ability is availability" … boy, do we have the player for you. 

That'd be Matt Olson, who's one of the most available players ever. 

The Braves slugger now has a top-10 Iron Man streak in MLB history. Yesterday, Olson played his 823rd consecutive game, passing Gus Suhr for sole possession of the No. 10 spot on the all-time list. 

Next up is Eddie Yost's ninth-place streak of 829 games, which Olson would tie on Sunday against the Red Sox and pass next Monday against the Marlins.

But if Olson's No. 1 ability is "playing games," his No. 2 ability is "crushing baseballs." And it's a close second. 

See, Olson isn't just a top-10 Iron Man all-time. He's also a top-five player in the Majors right now. 

Olson is having a monster season for MLB's best team. Let's run down some of the highlights:

• He ranks second overall in FanGraphs' Wins Above Replacement, tied with Aaron Judge and Cam Schlittler and just a fraction behind Bobby Witt Jr.
• He leads the National League with a 1.031 OPS and ranks fourth in MLB behind only Ben Rice, Yordan Alvarez and Judge.
• His OPS+ of 187 means he's been 87% better than a league-average hitter, and that's also the best mark in the NL (Jordan Walker is next with a 173 OPS+).
• He's second in the NL behind Kyle Schwarber with 14 homers and fourth in the Majors behind Judge, Schwarber and Munetaka Murakami.
• He leads the Majors in RBIs and runs scored, with 36 of each.
• Add his MLB-best 15 doubles to his 14 home runs, and you get a Major League-leading 29 extra-base hits this season -- five more than anyone else (Schwarber is next with 24).
• He's batting .296, which would be the highest mark of his career.
• He's also one of MLB's most valuable defensive first basemen.

If Olson keeps playing every day, and keeps playing this well every day, maybe we're even looking at an MVP Iron Man by the end of the year. 

They say the triple is the most exciting play in baseball -- but that's just because they've never seen Bobby Witt Jr. hit an inside-the-park home run. 

Witt circled the bases for his second career inside-the-parker on Saturday, and it was a good reminder that, wow, this guy just might be the fastest baseball player on Earth. 

Witt went home-to-home in just 14.13 seconds, the fourth-fastest inside-the-park home run since Statcast started tracking in 2015. He reached an elite sprint speed of 30.4 feet per second. Watch him turn on the jets here.

You just don't see a whole lot of inside-the-parkers like Witt's, which was a simple ground ball down the right-field line. But once Witt's grounder squeaked past Tigers right fielder Kerry Carpenter along the side wall, he was gone. 

Here's a fun frivolity: Witt's inside-the-park home run traveled only 17 feet in the air, the least air distance of any inside-the-parker in the Statcast era (obviously, it ended up much farther away than that in the right-field corner, but still). It also had a negative-six-degree launch angle, the only home run with a negative launch angle in the Statcast era. 

Oh, and Witt thinks he can do it even faster. After all, he's "only" fourth on the fastest inside-the-parker list. For now. 

"I want to be No. 1," he said after the game. 

These are the three guys ahead of him: 

1. Byron Buxton: 13.85 seconds -- Aug. 18, 2017

The Statcast era record belongs to Buxton on this ball that kicked off the wall in center field in Minnesota and got away from the outfielders. Watch it here >>

2. Byron Buxton: 14.05 seconds -- Oct. 2, 2016

Buxton again. He's the man to beat. This one, on the very last day of the season, was actually off Chris Sale when Sale was still with the White Sox. Watch it here >> 

3. Pete Crow-Armstrong: 14.08 seconds -- Aug. 23, 2024

PCA can give Witt and Buxton a run for their money, too. His inside-the-parker, the fastest since Buxton's record-setter, was electric, as he needed every bit of those 14.08 seconds to dive and beat the Marlins' throw home. Watch it here >>

The Brewers' big sweep, Schwarbero home runs and throwback pitching performances highlighted this weekend's slate of games.

• Turang, Miz sweep out the Yanks 

Brice Turang's first career walk-off home run yesterday lifted the Brewers to their first three-plus-game sweep of the Yankees since 1989. Milwaukee's pitchers -- led by the electric Jacob Misiorowski, who on Friday threw the seven fastest pitches by a starter in the pitch-tracking era -- held the Bronx Bombers to six total runs in the series, their fewest all year. It was the opposite of the last time the two clubs faced off, when the Yankees mashed 14 home runs with their torpedo bats and swept the Brew Crew to open 2025.  

• Here comes Schwarber 

Don't look now, but Kyle Schwarber is back at the top of the home run leaderboard. Schwarber has homered in four straight games -- including twice yesterday -- to tie Judge for the MLB lead. He's setting himself up to once again challenge Ryan Howard's single-season Phillies record of 58 homers. Schwarber's 16 in 41 games put him on a 63-homer pace for 2026.

• More vintage deGrom 

Jacob deGrom pitched the Rangers to a series win over the red-hot Cubs with seven scoreless innings and 10 strikeouts in yesterday's finale. If a series is on the line, Texas can just give the ball to deGrom: He's pitched in six rubber games since joining the Rangers, and he's 5-0 with a 1.22 ERA in those games. 

• The return of vintage Strider, too 

Spencer Strider turned in his best start in over two years to beat the Dodgers on Saturday, as the Braves got the better of their fellow National League powerhouse in their series this weekend. Strider threw six innings of one-hit baseball, and his fastball velocity jumped to 96.4 mph after averaging 94.6 mph in his season debut the weekend prior. 

• A tough slump for Raleigh 

Cal Raleigh is 0-for-32 in his last 36 plate appearances, which is the longest active hitless streak for any MLB position player. Since homering in back-to-back games on April 26 and 27, Raleigh's batting average has fallen to .161. He missed three games during that span due to right side soreness, but he's been able to get back behind the plate … now the Mariners just need their star catcher to heat back up at the plate. 

Sometimes, a pitcher just has to go out there and wear it … but not for this long. 

Justin Wrobleski put up one of the strangest stat lines we've seen in years for the Dodgers yesterday: 8 2/3 innings pitched, seven earned runs allowed. 

These days, if a starting pitcher is throwing 8 2/3 innings, it's basically only because he's dominating. Not so with Wrobleski, whose job was to eat as many innings as possible for a taxed Dodgers bullpen. 

So … mission accomplished? The Dodgers lost to the Braves, 7-2, but Wrobleski got an ovation from the fans at Dodger Stadium when he came out of the game with two outs in the ninth. 

No pitcher had thrown at least 8 2/3 innings AND allowed at least seven runs in over 20 years. The last guy to do it was Carlos Silva for the Twins on April 18, 2006, when he allowed eight runs in 8 2/3 innings in an 8-2 loss to the Angels. And before that, it hadn't happened since 1993, when Bobby Witt Sr. threw a nine-inning, seven-run complete game for the A's in a 7-3 loss to the Angels.

Gage Workman just happens to have the perfect middle name for a hitter: Tater.

And last night, he finally got his first one in the big leagues. 

Tater's first tater was a go-ahead, pinch-hit home run that helped the Tigers beat the Royals in their series finale. 

The 26-year-old Workman hit plenty of taters in the Minor Leagues -- 76 of them since his first year in pro ball in 2021 -- but living up to your (middle) name in the Majors has got to feel good. 

Here's to more Tater taters.

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