Nine innings is a long time to hold a door shut, but Peach spent Sunday afternoon leaning against it with all her weight, and Da Plumber Syndicate never got a foot inside. She went the distance at Bowser Castle, allowed eight hits, walked no runs across the plate, and struck out six on her way to a 6-0 complete-game shutout for Luigi's Had Enough — the kind of line that ends debates rather than starts them. Chatter's club had been searching for a full game to look like this, and it announced itself early. Luigi's Had Enough put two on the board in the first, two more in the second, and by the time Da Plumber Syndicate found their breath the scoreboard had already made up its mind. Wario did the heavy lifting, going 4-for-5 with two driven in and looking every bit like a man who had a lunch reservation to keep. Luigi added three hits and a run batted in, and Green Magikoopa chipped in another. Eighteen hits in all — a genuine avalanche in a ballpark where the thwomps out in the outfield are famous for swatting down anything that dreams too big. The cruel part of the afternoon belonged to Dixie Kong, who was made to stand in the storm for all eight of the innings her team batted. She surrendered those eighteen hits and six earned runs, and to her stubborn credit she never left the mound — sometimes a starter's reward for durability is simply a longer look at the damage. Gareth's Syndicate weren't hitless, mind you. Mario collected three knocks, Green Paratroopa added two, and the lineup mustered eight hits total. What they could not do was string a single one of them into a run, and against a shutout, hits without runs are just handsome footnotes. The result nudges Luigi's Had Enough to 1-2 and drops Da Plumber Syndicate to the same mark, the two clubs now sharing the muddled middle of the Season 2 board while Birdo's Magik Mushrooms sit unbeaten and unbothered at 3-0. For Chatter, the arithmetic is secondary; the point is that his team finally played a complete one, front to back, and handed the ball to the right arm to finish it. Blooper's Final Ink: they gave Peach the game MVP, and somewhere a lab tech is probably already warming up the testing kit — nine scoreless innings tends to attract that sort of paperwork around here. — Inky the Blooper