Three Up, Three Down: The MLB hot/cold report

Welcome to Three Up, Three Down: The MLB hot/cold report. Every week, we'll try our best to break down who's heating up in the baseball world and who's currently stuck in the back of the refrigerator in a state of deep chill.

This week, both new and old stars are lighting up the scoreboard while things are going as badly as expected for one of baseball's most infamous rebuilding teams.

Three Up

Shohei Ohtani 

During the first week of the season, Shohei Ohtani gave us just a small taste of what to expect for the upcoming year. He had a solid-if-unspectacular start at Oakland and only went 1-for-5 in his major league debut as a DH. Then Ohtani arrived in Anaheim and decided that he was going to put on a show for the hometown crowd — and proceeded to give the baseball world one of the most thrilling weeks that you will see from one player.

For starters, he homered in his very first at-bat at Angel Stadium and earned a curtain call from the home faithful and the silent treatment from his teammates. If skeptics were quick to say, "It was just Josh Tomlin!" then Ohtani made sure to silence those doubters by hitting a dinger off of 2017 AL Cy Young Award winner Corey Kluber the very next day. He then capped off his great week at the plate by hitting another homer to make it three straight days with a home run.

However, this past Sunday Ohtani reminded us that hitting is his hobby and that he's here to pitch. He took a perfect game into the seventh inning and left with 12 strikeouts and only one walk while regularly painting the corners with 100 mph heat. He did this against an underrated Oakland A's lineup, and while it's still very early in the season, it's time to get excited about what Ohtani can do in his rookie campaign.

Andrew McCutchen

While Ohtani was giving us spectacular flashes of what the future may hold, Andrew McCutchen was reaching back in time for moments of magic that had fans reminiscing of his days wearing black and gold for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Cutch was busy being clutch in his new shade of black and orange for the San Francisco Giants. It may have taken a while to adjust to him wearing that Giants uniform, but it was very much a vintage performance from the five-time All-Star.

On Tuesday night, McCutchen went 1-for-3 with two walks, and the "1" was a big one as he hit a walk-off single to lead San Francisco to a win over the Diamondbacks. However, his efforts last Friday against the Dodgers put that to shame. He picked up six hits, and once again, the final hit was the biggest of all with another walk-off, this one of the three-run homer variety, to defeat the Giants' hated rival.

Just like you shouldn't expect Ohtani to hit a dinger and threaten to throw a perfect game every time out, you shouldn't expect McCutchen to continue being incredibly clutch for the entire season. But good grief, isn't it fun to watch?

New York Mets 

You should almost never put too much stock into the standings during the first two weeks of any given baseball season, but you have to imagine that for Mets fans, seeing their team currently a few games clear at the top of the NL East with one of the best records in the game has to be a sight for sore eyes. 

After all, their team was busy dealing with nearly every injury you could imagine, which helped derail their 2017 season and turn it into a complete train wreck. While they still aren't completely healthy, they're doing well enough to where they've gotten off to a great start and have already helped boost their playoff chances (according to FanGraphs).

If they can continue to get great performances out of Noah Syndergaard, Michael Conforto, Jay Bruce and Jacob deGrom — and the Nationals continue to bumble out of the gates — we could actually be in for an interesting race in the NL East, which would be far more than what anybody expected going into this season.

Three Down

Umpiring

For the most part, umpiring in Major League Baseball is fine. It's just the bad apples who spoil the whole bunch, and in his case, a few bad examples of umpiring can taint the view of the entire crew in the eyes of fans. From the obvious cases of wacky strike zones and getting calls wrong even with replay, it's clear that while umpiring will never be an exact science, it could use some fixing.

For example, Marty Foster became the center of attention recently when he felt the need to keep his respect among the players in the Mets-Nationals series by throwing Anthony Rendon out of the game for tossing his bat after a dubious called strike three. It was an absurd ejection, and in an ideal world, the umpire would be publicly held accountable. Instead, Joe West spoke for Foster afterward, and that was that. Nothing is going to get fixed immediately, and it doesn't seem like it's a priority for baseball at the moment.

Marlins get rocked

It's safe to say that we all assumed this was going to be a rough season for the Miami Marlins. The very first pitch of the season that was thrown by a Marlins pitcher was sent into the stands for a home run, and things haven't gotten much better for Miami, starting the season where everyone expects the team to finish the year: in the cellar.

The Marlins already hit one valley this season in Philadelphia. With angry Philly fans chomping at the bit to jump all over their team's own manager, Gabe Kapler, the Marlins decided to get everybody's mind off of that by giving up 20 runs in one game. You can't miss the playoffs in the first two weeks of the season — and Miami's Twitter account did a good job of reminding fans of better days — but losing a game by 19 runs already isn't a sign of good things to come over the summer.

For all of you Marlins fans reading this out there, I already feel your pain. You just have to keep a level head and remember that this could be all for the right reasons if the front office and ownership are pulling in the same direction. The Astros and Cubs went through this as well, so hopefully Derek Jeter will be able to oversee a great turnaround for the British Virgin Islands — I mean, Miami Marlins.

Sparse attendance

I'm going to preface this by saying that baseball is in a very good place when it comes to the talent level of the players. We're either entering a Golden Age or already in the midst of a Golden Age in that regard. With that said, it's kind of hard to keep that in mind when you see games where barely 1,000 people show up.

It's understandable why people wouldn't want to show up for a game. It's always fun to go to a big league baseball game, but you're asking a lot of the casual fan to show up to a weekday game between two star-starved teams who are obviously going nowhere in the current season when it's also close to freezing outside. Joe Baseball Fan is not going to take PTO and take Joey Kid Baseball Fan out of school for a day to go see that.

As usual, we'll probably see attendance numbers rise when the weather gets warmer and the kids are out of school, but for now, it's a bit of a bummer to look at the empty seats in various stadiums. Maybe then "The Show" will look more like "The Show" and less like the opening act of the minors.