Rich kept pace in the AOA West this week with another pretty close win. His margin was more comfortable than in Week 5 when he beat Sam by just 1.5 points, but just a little bit of pitcher management by Alex could have flipped this result on its head.

Instead, Rich earned his second Manny Ramirez Award of the season, improving to 2-1 in games of the week, largely on the strength of William Contreras and Robert Suarez, who both led their positions in scoring for the week. Kyle Harrison fell just a half point shy of 20 for the week as one of his starting pitchers.

Alex now has the distinction of being 0-10 in his career when playing in the game of the week. It's almost an impressive accomplishment. It's not like Alex has had a stellar career in the AOA. His current status as a .500 team would make this his best season. He's yet to make the playoffs. But his career winning percentage is .379 which would suggest he should have won at least three of those ten games of the week he's appeared in. Ten games isn't a particularly small sample size; they're enough that if you take them away, his career winning percentage rises more than 50 points to .446.

In fact, Alex is 0-3 this season in games of the week but 3-0 in the rest of his games! At this point, he might consider paying off the commissioner to keep him out of those games.

Or maybe he just needs to manage his roster better and make sure he maximized his pitcher starts. This week he only had three of them and so despite besting his own AOA record for single-week WHIP and posting the best ERA ever with more than 15 innings pitched, he still was outscored by 10 points from pitching alone, more than his margin of defeat. 

Sam has dominated Eric throughout the AOA's short history, but this week's butt whooping was pretty historic.

This was the 10th time a matchup has featured both the Rickey Henderson Award winner and the John Gochnaur Award winner. The last time it happened, Evan Ash beat Eric by 78.75 points in Week 18 of the 2013 season, just a few weeks before Eric captured the third Scully Cup in league history.

This time, Sam's 106.75-point victory margin was the third highest in league history, trailing only:

• 2022, Week 13 - Cory Puffett beat Eric Meyer by 108.25 points

• 2022, Week 18 - Cory Puffett beat Cory Frontin by 107.25 points

It was Sam's third time winning in such a situation and Eric's third time losing in one.

Sam joined Cory, Evan, and Eric by reaching double digits and capturing his 10th Henderson Award. Eric took home his 7th Gochnaur Award. He's by far the closest manager to becoming the fifth with 10 or more.

Now, being the third largest victory margin in league history might not seem historic enough to make this big a deal of the matchup, but Eric's pitcher performance this week was astonishingly bad.

With just 16.0 innings pitched, Eric's staff posted the second fewest in AOA history in a matchup lasting at least 7 days. His team ERA of 9.56 was the worst the league has ever seen in a single matchup beating the previous high of 9.10 set by Sean Kennedy in Week 17 of our inaugural 2021 season. His WHIP of 1.750 was the fourth highest in AOA history and just barely better than his 1.752 mark in Week 11 of last season. And as if his pitching wasn't bad enough, Eric's dojo posted the 13th team batting average under the Mendoza Line in league history.

After he captured the first four John Gochnaur Awards of the season, it's unlikely anybody had Andrew winning back-to-back games on their bingo card, much less climbing out of the bottom spot in the power rankings just two weeks later.

Andrew enjoyed a really strong week at the dish. Despite recording a league-low 181 plate appearances in Week 6, his guys his 9 home runs and drove in 38. He also had a league-best .599 differential between his batting average, which was a respectable .288, and OPS.

On the mound, he enjoyed a pretty strong week. He tied his season high in both pitcher starts and relief appearances, posted his best ERA since Week 2, and had a season-high 35.0 innings pitched by his staff. It's still a far cry from where most of the league is, with other managers averaging close to 40 innings pitched per week, but things looked pretty good for him this week.

Evan's squad actually looked better than Andrew's on the mound this week, but he had fewer innings and only one relief appearance compared to six for Andrew, which contributed to a 20-point deficit in pitching points for the week. Considering he finished second to last in plate appearances, he didn't leave himself much room to make that up on the offensive side.

In the only installment of the No "E" Bowl for 2024, Frontin got the better of Puffett for just the second time in league history, snapping a 7-game losing streak in their head-to-head series.

Puffett enjoyed a bit of a bounce-back week on the scoring front after falling below 100 points for the first time this season a week ago. But for the second week in a row he came up less than 10 points shy of victory as Frontin kept his 100-point streak alive.

Frontin and Sean Kennedy are the only two managers who have yet to score fewer than 100 points in a game this season. This week he enjoyed solid production from both disciplines as he led the league in batting average a .299 and in runs scored with 30, even as he had a league-low 4 home runs.

Puffett's pitching continues to be underwhelming at times. He arguably coached himself out of the win by starting Paul Skenes in his Saturday debut instead of Bailey Ober on Sunday. In fact, had he started Ober instead of Dean Kremer on Sunday, it also would have flipped this result.

In any case, Frontin is back to 2 games above .500 and has sole possession of first place in the AOA East for the time being.

In what would have been the lowest scoring matchup of the week if it weren't for Eric failing to even score 50 points, Sean earned 3.50 points from Mets reliever Reed Garrett, who hadn't pitched since Tuesday but pitched scoreless 6th and 7th frames against the Braves on Sunday night.

That performance made the difference in a very tight contest between the AOA's 2023 runner-up and one of two new managers to the league in 2024.

Sean didn't have a particularly impressive week, recording the fewest RBI in the league and both the second lowest batting average and OPS for the week. An impressive FIP across 43.1 innings may have been the difference maker soncidering he his ERA and WHIP were both worse than his opponent's.

Stephen's offense, for its part, did the best it could. His squad had a similarly underwhelming batting average as Sean's, but they led the league with 13 home runs giving him an OPS nearly 100 points higher than Sean's Marauders. Unfortunately for him, that powerful effort left him just short of victory.