The second inning at Donkey Kong Jungle did not so much turn the game as detonate it. Birdo's Magik Mushrooms sent a parade to the plate, hung a crooked eight on the board, and by the time Dixie Kong was finally excused from the mound, the afternoon had already been decided. Zeph's club walked out of the Jungle with a 13-6 win, a fourth straight, and a zero in the loss column that refuses to budge. Dixie Kong drew the start for Gareth's Da Plumber Syndicate and lasted all of 1.1 innings, surrendering eleven hits and nine earned runs — a line that pushed her ERA into a neighborhood, 60.75, where no pitcher wants to buy property. Somebody has to eat the innings after a start like that, and Mario did, gamely absorbing seven frames and fourteen hits in relief. That the Mushrooms only scored four more off him tells you how thoroughly the second inning had already done the work. In the JD Jungle, where the walls are close and the ball tends to travel, Birdo's bats simply never stopped ringing. And ring they did. Twenty-five hits for the Mushrooms, a number that reads more like a team's weekly total than a single game. Red Magikoopa went 5-for-6, which flirts with Toadsworth's league record of six knocks in a game — close enough that the muscle-relaxer crowd should be checking its rearview mirror. Birdo took MVP honors with three hits, two RBI, and four big plays, the sort of do-everything afternoon that quietly runs a franchise. Yellow Magikoopa, when he wasn't scattering nine hits over 8.2 innings on the mound, chipped in three hits of his own. Ask him to pitch and hit in the same game and he'll shrug and do both. Gareth's crew did not go quietly, for whatever that's worth against a nine-run deficit. Blue Pianta — the man with the Nike deal and the Air Pianta on his feet — homered and drove in two, Bowser Jr. added a two-run shot, and Yellow Pianta cleared the fence as well. Three home runs in a loss is a strange consolation, the kind you frame and hang in a hallway nobody uses. The standings tell the plainer story. The defending champion Mushrooms sit alone at 4-0 with a run differential of plus-29, while Da Plumber Syndicate slip to 1-3 and back into the crowded lower half. Season 1 ended with Zeph hoisting the trophy 15-0. Four weeks into Season 2, nobody has yet convinced him the sequel plays any differently. — Inky the Blooper