Sunday afternoon, the Phillies came back from down 2-0 to beat the Reds. That’s not particularly newsworthy on its own — the Phillies aren’t a bad team, and in a game as unpredictable as baseball, comebacks like that are commonplace.

But dive a little deeper into what happened and you’ll start to appreciate exactly how unpredictable baseball was on Sunday afternoon.

And we are BACK, with your all-purpose* guide to the weekend in MLB action.

*Single-purpose, really. It's super limited in function. You can only read it.

10. no. 2 UNC vs. no. 3 Virginia (Friday, 8 p.m. and Saturday, 2 p.m., ESPN3)

Whoa! Super controversial start! Who is this guy? He must think way outside the box to be including a college baseball game in a post specifically dedicated to MLB. What a challenging artistic choice! I imagine people will have split reactions, but it'll definitely get them talking!

OK, this is here because college baseball gets zero attention, and this is a great series. UNC is 46-7 and UVA is 44-8. Both teams have gaudy statistics; the lowest batting average among UNC's top nine hitters is .278, while the Cavs aren't far behind. But the real attraction here is Carolina's pitching staff, which boasts a 2.50 ERA. Benton Moss and Hobbs Johnson are the starters for the weekend, and we could see both in the bigs someday soon. Anyway, if you're ever going to watch a college baseball game before the College World Series, this is a good start. And I swear, the fact that I'll be at one or both games has nothing to do with why I included it here. (Lies.)

With a looping back-post header well into stoppage time, Branislav Ivanovic turned Benfica goalkeeper Artur into a statued spectator and gave Chelsea FC a 2-1 win in the Europa League final. The easy explanation for Americans not well versed in the various continental soccer competitions is to call it Europe's NIT. It's a lesser tournament that nobody really cares about until someone else wins it.

But even that analogy is not really accurate. When Kansas inevitably gets bounced from the NCAA basketball tournament in the Sweet 16, there isn't a consolation spot waiting for them in the NIT. That's effectively how Chelsea won a trophy Wednesday.

After years of seeing poor receivers like Ryan Doumit cost them strikes, the Pittsburgh Pirates signed Russell Martin to the biggest free-agent contract in franchise history over the winter. According to Baseball Prospectus analyst Max Marchi’s pitch-framing statistics, Martin, a converted infielder who worked hard at becoming a better receiver, ranks fourth among major league catchers with more than 105 runs saved because of framing from 2008 to present, or roughly 0.23 runs per 100 pitches. Pittsburgh’s two-year, $17 million commitment is already paying dividends. With Martin behind the plate picking up extra strikes, the Pirates had their best April since 1992, the last season they were a winning team. I caught up with Martin to find out how he does it before a game at Citizens Bank Park.

With PITCHf/x in the past few years, people have tried to put a value on turning a ball into a strike, and what the best catchers are worth. Have you seen those stats? Have you noticed more emphasis on it from teams or coaches?

It’s been talked about more. It never really used to be talked about. I’ve always known that it makes a big difference, just looking at the greats over the years that have been really good receivers, but there’s never been an association with numbers. It’s kind of hard to put a value on it. It’s hard to illustrate.

This is a plot of the called strikes for all the Pirates pitchers. The first image is the last five seasons, and then the second image is this season. The red area is where the called strikes are. This season it’s been a much bigger blotch than the last five seasons, so that seems to suggest that might be you doing something.

Short sample right now, though.

Yeah, definitely.

But yeah, sure.

It seems like the main difference is on the top and bottom there. Is there an area that you feel like you’re most able to get those extra strikes?

Probably bottom-middle of the zone. I’ve always been pretty good at getting that pitch.

The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.

Thursday, May 9: at Colorado Rockies

When I'm in the starting lineup, which has been almost every day of the season since 1996, I think about nothing other than the game I'm playing, or the preparation for the next game. That probably goes without saying, but you have to say it, because otherwise people might form their own, mistaken impressions about how you spend your time. But when you're apart from the team for physical rehab, you have a little bit more time than you otherwise would to think about the big issues affecting the sport. Not much more time, because during the rehab itself you should be dedicating every spare thought to visualization exercises involving your triumphant, way-ahead-of-any-reasonable-schedule return to the field, the ensuing 15-game winning streak it will spark, and the unstoppable three-month march to the World Series made possible by the momentum-inspiring electricity of a Captain's return to a temporarily rudderless organization. That kind of mental focus is crucial to your recovery program.

No, this didn't happen yesterday, and yes, the taker of this clip shot it vertically (a.k.a. YouTube's Kryptonite), but it doesn't matter. Because this is just beautiful.

From the same Dodgers-Giants game this past weekend that included a fan brawl comes this, a clip of L.A. Dodgers outfielder Matt Kemp signing a baseball and then shedding his Dodgers hat, jersey, and cleats for a fan who, according to the YouTube uploader, is "fighting a tough battle."

According to the uploader, the third-base coach is the one who asked Kemp to come over after the game, which he did, and then some.

It's a short, simple clip, but it's always important to remember that occasionally these athletes, often perceived as in-game heroes, can actually mimic that mystique once the games have ended.

(h/t Deadspin & Vin Scully Is My Homeboy)

If Brian Kenny has a tell, it’s his eyebrows. Flip over to MLB Network — where Kenny is a studio host, talking head, and defender of sabermetricians — and you’ll see his eyebrows shoot up until they form twin quotation marks on his forehead. This means Kenny is about to blow his top. Like Fox News's Shep Smith or ex-CNNer Jack Cafferty, Kenny is a guy you can count on to get angry when the world stops making sense. Watching him stew is just about the most wonderful thing on sports TV.

The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.

Wednesday, April 24: at Tampa Bay Rays

I don't want to dwell on the game. It is what it is. Or was what it was. It didn't go our way. I wasn't there. That's not an excuse — I still take full responsibility. It's the Captain's job to be there for his team, and even when he can't be there physically, it's his job to provide leadership and inspiration remotely. All you can do is individually text every guy on the roster with words of encouragement, or words of mysterious depth, or words of subtle intimidation. You have to know what motivates each player and press his particular buttons. There's an art to it you learn over time. Not everybody's a positive reinforcement guy. Some guys like the fist bump, the friendly tap on the top of the helmet. But some guys you've got to reach other ways, like showing them a photo of an empty locker in the Scranton clubhouse with their name on it, or by refusing to talk to them for an entire month because they missed a cutoff man. One time somebody woke up bound and gagged inside an equipment bag on the Grand Concourse sidewalk.

In June 2010, I suggested for the first time that the Phillies should draft South Carolina center fielder Jackie Bradley when he became eligible in 2011. He was rated as a top-15 talent going into the season, coming off a season in which he was named MVP of the College World Series, but after suffering a wrist injury that wiped out much of his junior season, Bradley looked like he might actually fall to the Phillies at No. 39.

And he did, much to my astonishment, but the Phillies passed, choosing instead to pick high school outfielder Larry Greene. The Red Sox took Bradley with the next pick. Being the hyperbolic, evangelical Gamecock baseball homer that I am, I began a two-year-long crusade to make sure everyone knew what a mistake the Phillies had made, building Bradley up into a Homeric hero. Greene, by the way, did exactly what I did at his age: moved out of his parents’ house and put on a ton of weight. Which is more of a problem when you, you know, play sports for a living.

The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.

Wednesday, April 17: vs. Arizona Diamondbacks

I'm not gonna lie. I'm disappointed that the medical staff has decided to scale back my rehab. But you just have to trust that they know best about some things. Not everything, but some things. They have their MRIs and their CAT scans and their X-rays, and as far as you know, the machines are telling the truth, they're not programmed by the Red Sox or Orioles to slow down your recovery. Still, you always think you know yourself better than anybody else. When you're a professional athlete, you have to be in perfect tune with your body, to listen to whatever it's trying to tell you. Sometimes you're going through your warm-up, and your hammies might whisper, "We're a little tight today." Or your ribs say, "That last swing wasn't great, might want to be careful." Or maybe your ankle, the one that cost you and the team the postseason, the one that's keeping you from rejoining the guys as fast as possible, goes Hey, slow it down a little. Things aren't optimal down here. Better safe than sorry.

But you're the Captain of your body.

On Friday, April 12, the Yankees beat the Orioles, 5-2. New York and Baltimore play each other 19 times this year, and that was the first matchup of the season. In what has become a frustrating annual tradition, it was also my first experience in 2013 with the North Carolina baseball blackout. I live in Chapel Hill and could not watch the game on either the MLB Extra Innings package or Time Warner Cable, the provider with a near-monopoly in my area. I was caught in a catch-22 that has become all too familiar for baseball fans.

There are baseball books that normal people buy, and then there are baseball books that obsessive, maniacal baseball lovers buy. Let’s put it this way — if you’re on a date with someone who has Moneyball or Summer of '49 on his or her shelf, you’re probably OK. But if your significant other owns Weaver on Strategy or Dollar Sign on the Muscle, you should excuse yourself, because you’re dealing with a real nerd. (That said, if you don’t think I’m one decent bassist from headlining Glastonbury with an electro-synth power-pop foursome called Dollar Sign on the Muscle, you’ve got another thing coming.)

Weaver on Strategy, as the title might suggest, is a look inside the managerial genius of Earl Weaver, and serves as something of a proto-Moneyball version of Clausewitz’s On War.

In Strategy, Weaver discusses at some length how he was fond of breaking in rookie pitchers in a long reliever/spot starter role before introducing them to the rotation the following year.

The swingman role has all but disappeared from the modern game, where managers are chained to the concept of the one-inning reliever like Prometheus to the rock. But one wonders why there hasn’t been an imaginative, risk-taking team who’s taken to breaking in young pitchers this way.

The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.

Wednesday, April 10: at Cleveland Indians (Rainout)

When you're on the DL, every day feels like a rainout. You try not to dwell on what a depressing thought that is because no one's rehabilitation was ever sped up by negative thinking, but sometimes it's hard not to let the inky storm clouds of despair roll over you and wash away all hope that you'll ever play another big league game. Yeah, I know that was a very dark thought. But my journaling coach tells me that it's OK to embrace the darkness every once in a while, that's it good to get those thoughts on paper. They have to go somewhere. Better into your diary than into your life. Words on a page are so much easier to deal with than emotions in the real world. This is a safe place. No one's going to read them but you. You can say whatever you want here.

The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim made a move Saturday that was much more interesting than it was significant. They put reliever Kevin Jepsen on the disabled list and called up a Double-A pitcher to replace him.

That’s not weird in and of itself, but you start to scratch your head when you consider that, going into Saturday night’s game, Michael Roth had thrown 27 professional innings, only five of which came above rookie ball. It gets a little weirder: Roth has only marginal control and breaking stuff, and his fastball is best described as “pedestrian,” not because it’s mediocre but because it travels from his hand to home plate at a brisk walking pace.

The last time I saw Roth pitch before his major league debut, he was appearing in relief in a WBC qualifier for Great Britain, getting the piss beaten out of him by Canada's B-team in front of a few hundred fans in Germany. There are pitching prospects you rush from college to the majors, but Michael Roth is not one of them.

I’m extremely interested in this move for two reasons: (1) It makes no sense from a baseball perspective, and (2) Michael Roth is my favorite baseball player of all time.