You don’t generally get the opportunity to rewrite your past. Not in real life anyway.

But Guardians rookie Chase DeLauter might be the closest baseball has seen to Marty McFly. The outfielder from West Virginia officially made his major-league debut in the 2025 postseason. Convinced he might be one of the dozen best bats available in their organization, Cleveland called him up and started him in center field in an elimination game, AL Wild Card Series Game 2 against the Tigers.

Two batters into the game, he dropped a can of corn in left-center. (It was sort of like Opening Day’s Oneil Cruz play, just without another botched play moments before.)

“When that ball hit the ground,” DeLauter said at the time, “I was in shambles right away.”

He managed to take a walk that day, and the Guardians pushed it to Game 3, where he singled as they bowed out of the playoffs. He held his own, thrust into a supremely difficult situation. But the memory remained. A fly ball, in his glove and then on the ground.

Until Thursday, when DeLauter got to overwrite the file on his “debut.”

He took Mariners ace Logan Gilbert deep in the first inning of Opening Day. Then the quick-swinging lefty homered again in that same game. Then he homered again the next night. And again the night after that.

DeLauter’s four homers in his first three regular season games matched Trevor Story’s career-opening outburst 10 years ago for the most in baseball history. His 17 total bases in those first three games also tied an MLB record, that number aligning with Jorge Soler’s torrid 2014 debut.

Maybe more impressive: The headline-making homers sent DeLauter’s phone into a frenzy. After the second game, MLB.com reported he had 804 unread text messages. After the third game, The Athletic reported the number had ticked up to about 900. Even acknowledging that 45 or so were probably from that one particularly enthusiastic great aunt who also sends all the same messages on Facebook just to be safe, DeLauter changed the story of his debut for everyone he’s ever known and probably a few people he met once and forgot about.

He’ll remember that moment of panic in October, of course. He just has a brighter alternate timeline for everyone else to live in.

In game No. 4, DeLauter had a hit, but no more dingers as Cleveland lost on Sunday Night Baseball. Maybe he’ll have time to catch up with reality, and respond to some of those messages.

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Altering the past is tricky business, as anyone familiar with “Back to the Future” will remember. It’s a business MLB is wading into with the Automated Ball-Strike system.

A challenge suspends the ballpark’s natural progression. That punchout and the associated crowd deflation gets rewound into a parallel state of anticipation. Heads turn to the scoreboard. The animated pitch comes streaming toward the zone. Everyone watches, with lust or dread, for the ripple of alteration, a partial halo in distinct pink — Powered by T-Mobile.

And then someone presses Play again, continuing or resetting the scene.

The first series of the year won the challenge system positive reviews, with Eugenio Suarez’s back-to-back challenges in a bases loaded situation cited as the most compelling evidence of the entertainment value of the added strategic consideration.

There seems to be crossover potential, social media-wise, in repeatedly countering the umpire. What happened just as often, though, was players tentatively navigating the balance of when to tap their helmet and when to keep their team’s powder dry for later innings.

In that same Reds-Red Sox game, young Boston star Roman Anthony also challenged two pitches in a row. He won the first one, then lost the second on one of the weekend’s closest margins, 0.1 inches per the ABS dashboard at Baseball Savant. You can see how that ball, which was confirmed as a called strike, shows up on the chart.

When the novelty wears off, these types of calls are going to raise some eyebrows. That’s a good example of a reasonable challenge that backs a team into a corner strategically, despite falling within the system’s margin of error. Jayson Stark reported this spring that MLB says “ABS’ median margin of error on any given pitch is about one-sixth of an inch” or 0.166 inches.

The real math is a little more complicated than that, obviously. The more technical answer from Stark’s story on the system’s error bars:

League officials told The Athletic that MLB is 95 percent confident that a pitch would be within 0.39 inches of the location where the ABS system pinpoints it. The league also said it is 99 percent confident that the location would be within 0.48 inches of where ABS said it landed.

Notably, the league took a much more decisive tact with the computerized ball-strike challenges than with human-reviewed replay challenges. A call cannot stand on inconclusive evidence. It’s either in or out, even when the margin is microscopic. The challenging team is either rewarded with a retained challenge or punished with a lost one.

I think that’s the right call — I think a similarly decisive system would be better for replay, too — but the little animated diagrams that lend the air of authority will, at some juncture, become familiar enough to question, to tar and feather just as gleefully as C.B. Bucknor. I give it a week. ⚾️

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The Bullpen

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Free idea for Hinge: One of these sub-6-foot ballplayers, exposed by the precise measurements necessary for the ABS system, winds up having a great season. Put him in an ad. He takes off his spikes, removes his cap and strolls in front of a measuring stick on the wall of the clubhouse.

Cue the supercut of high pitches and slow trots to first base. Fist bumps and little secret celebratory signals to the dugout.

He stares into the camera with the smug smile of a winner, the 5-foot-whatever line hovering behind his head. He says he’s proud of his real height. Then the tagline.

“Honesty takes balls.”

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DeLauter didn’t have the only booming debut. Four rookies playing their first regular season MLB game got on the board with home runs — White Sox slugger Munetaka Murakami, Mets outfielder Carson Benge and Cardinals top prospect JJ Wetherholt being the others.

No other Opening Day on record had more than two debutantes with homers.

Only 17 seasons have seen more debut home runs at any point in the year. The record for debut game homers is 13 in 2022.

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Nationals outfielder Joey Wiemer, a surprise member of the major-league roster, didn’t make a single out against the Cubs. In two starts and eight plate appearances, he whacked two homers, a triple and three singles, walking in the two other trips to the dish.

No other big-leaguer with more than one plate appearance has a 1.000 batting average or on-base percentage.

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The Blue Jays struck out 50 A’s batters in three games, or 45.5% of the guys they faced.

That’s Hall of Fame reliever in a peak season type stuff and it will not continue. But Toronto fans got a dream preview of how Kevin Gausman and Dylan Cease might look as a 1-2 punch.

Of particular note, Cease rolled out a changeup that could mark a significant step toward diversifying what had remained one of MLB’s most narrow, reliever-ish starting pitcher arsenals.

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And down in the minor leagues, Zack Wheeler — coming off thoracic outlet surgery that involves removing a rib — made a rehab start with the Triple-A Lehigh Valley IronPigs. Phillies writer Matt Gelb jokingly (presumably) posted about “Free Spare Rib Night” and one of the minors’ most inventive teams did not miss their pitch. I’ll let The Athletic’s Charlotte Varnes set the scene from there:

The five pork-themed mascots took off, with Ribbie — an anthropomorphic set of barbecue ribs that has participated in the race since 2018 — in the lead. He ran past the dugout, still leading, when a man wielding a giant (fake) knife appeared, pretended to stab Ribbie, then dragged him away.

It was silly. It was theatrical. It was a welcome distraction from the frigid weather. It was minor-league baseball at its best, as the IronPigs celebrated a rehab start the only way they know how: with a quirky promotional deal, which also included an all-you-can-eat ribs buffet at the Tiki Terrace in left field, all developed in the span of a few days.

A+, no notes.