FLORHAM PARK, N.J. — The first brawl came when David Bailey barked at Buccaneers offensive lineman Luke Goedeke and patted him on the helmet. There was some shoving — and some punches. A crowd followed them before it was broken up.

The second brawl came just as Geno Smith finally overcame some accuracy issues to complete an impressive touchdown pass — on the other side of the field, Armand Membou got into it with Buccaneers defensive tackle A’Shawn Robinson, diverting attention from the play. A crowd followed them before it was broken up.

The third brawl came at the end of a rep during red-zone drills and it ended with Jets rookie defensive tackle Darrell Jackson throwing hands, taking on multiple Buccaneers offensive players in the process.

That’s Bailey, a rookie edge rusher; that’s Membou, a second-year offensive tackle; and that’s Jackson, a rookie defensive tackle. Call it youthful exuberance.

“I think that has a lot to do with it,” Jets coach Aaron Glenn said after practice. “The vets are not going to do that. It’s a lot of energy wasted doing that. Those guys have to learn.”

Maybe it’s not a bad thing that the Jets have infused their roster with some hard-nosed players in the trenches; it only becomes a problem if that exuberance turns into 15-yard penalties when the real games start. That’s why Membou, after his fight with Robinson, was taken out of Tuesday’s joint practice with the Buccaneers — the first of two, with the second coming on Wednesday.

“He’s definitely a guy that doesn’t go for any BS,” said Jets running back Breece Hall said of Membou. “After the play, if he feels like you’re doing too much he’s going to let you know about it. He’s a guy, he ain’t ever gonna start it but he’ll finish it. That’s the type of guy you want to run behind.”

More often, fights tend to happen on the second day of joint practices. It’s a reason why former Jets coach Robert Saleh often canceled the second day with another team, or didn’t schedule it at all. The Jets could have called Tuesday’s practice early but Glenn and Buccaneers coach Todd Bowles — another former Jets coach — didn’t feel like the fracases reached the level that would require an early ending.

“There’s going to be some dustups, that happens in every joint practice,” Glenn said.

Said linebacker Demario Davis: “Any time you have intense practices, guys are going to the ground, trying to stay up, it’s just playing a physical brand of football. There were some explosive moments but nothing that ran over. We were able to get it under control.”

And defensive tackle Harrison Phillips: “It’s tough, I don’t like seeing fighting. I think that if you do that in a football game you get kicked out. It hurts us tremendously if you do that in a football game. But I’m happy we’re having to pull guys back rather than get guys to go, so I think there’s some positive in the idea that ‘I don’t want to be punked out there.’ … it does kind of get your adrenaline going a little bit.”

Hall, for his part, had no interest in getting involved, saying that: “I got a rule, if you’re over 240 (pounds) I ain’t messing with you”, and “whenever I see a fight happen, that’s my water break. So I’m like y’all can have it at it for however long you want. I’m tired. It’s too hot for me to be fighting outside.”

Overall, it was an intense practice between one rebuilding team (Jets) and one team that looks a bit closer to the postseason. The Jets defense appeared to get the better of the Buccaneers offense. The Buccaneers defense certainly bested the Jets offense.

“Practice had a lot of eventful moments,” Davis said.

Let’s get into them:

Dominant David Bailey

Bailey gets first billing before we get into quarterback performance. The rookie has been one of the best players on the field throughout Jets training camp. There’s an argument to be made that he looked like the best player on the field on Tuesday too.

The dust-up with Goedeke started, it appeared, largely out of frustration because of how decisively Bailey was winning his one-on-one reps. On his first rep against Goedeke, he got around him quickly for an easy win. On the next one, Goedeke jumped early both times before the fight broke out.

Bailey carried that over into team drills too. The draft’s No. 2 pick was winning just about every rep against Goedeke, and also switched to the other side and used his get-off to quickly get around left tackle Ben Chukwuma for an easy sack of Baker Mayfield.

I’ve been covering the Jets for five seasons, and the NFL for nine. In that time I’m not sure I’ve seen a rookie that was appointment viewing quite like Bailey.

“I’ve been around a ton of rookies,” Davis said. “I’ve seen some who were projected high not play up to that level. I’ve seen some projected low who played above that level. He looks like a No. 2 pick. He looks like everything that’s been advertised about him and more.”

Geno’s struggles

Smith had a down day in Saturday’s intrasquad scrimmage — and he was even worse going against Bowles’ blitz-happy defense. He completed four straight short passes in seven-on-seven drills to Garrett Wilson, Braelon Allen, Mason Taylor and Jelani Woods. On his next run he threw a bad pass that was easily picked off by a Bucs defender — the pick was called back due defensive holding away from the play. He followed that up by throwing it behind Adonai Mitchell on a deep ball.

Even worse: Wilson fell on Smith’s first pass of 11-on-11 drills, only Smith didn’t see him fall in time to adjust and threw it anyway, easily picked off by Buccaneers cornerback Damarion Williams and returned for a touchdown. He completed a short pass to Isaiah Williams, and then threw it behind Mitchell again, who was getting open all afternoon.

Smith was sacked on the first play of his next run of team drills, completed a short pass to Williams again, and then threw it right into the arms of linebacker Josiah Trotter for another pick.

Smith finally found a groove on the next run, completing short passes to Woods, Wilson and Taylor. Williams dropped a catchable ball, and Smith connected two more times with Wilson too — though one of them that might have put Wilson in harm’s way in a live game.

On Smith’s last drive starting in the red zone, he threw an impressive touchdown pass to Taylor and hit Wilson, who juked a few defenders to get into the end zone.

On Wilson’s play, Glenn’s reaction: “Smile, that’s what you do. You smile.” And Hall: “I just laugh because he’s so good.”

All told, Smith completed 6 of 7 passes in seven-on-seven and 10 of 15 in 11-on-11 with two touchdowns and two interceptions.

Hall admitted that the offense came out flat. “We definitely could’ve been a little bit better,” he said.

Miscellaneous notes and standouts

• Cornerback Qwan’Tez Stiggers left practice in an ambulance after passing out on the sideline, though Glenn sounded confident that he’s going to be OK.
• Glenn said all the starters are going to play in Friday night’s preseason game.
• Rookie quarterback Cade Klubnik had some moments and made some plays with his feet on scrambles, though most of his efficiency came in the shorter areas of the field. He completed 5 of 5 passes during seven-on-seven and 7 of 12 in 11-on-11 drills.
• Jackson had another standout day outside of the fracas, getting at least one sack of Mayfield in team drills and making his presence felt otherwise. Defensive line coach Karl Dunbar called him a “big, strong human being” before practice and said “he’s adapted to what we’re doing and I think that bodes well for us because we got an extra piece in the puzzle.” Jackson has gotten plenty of valuable reps with T’Vondre Sweat (hamstring) still out.

• Safety Dane Belton continues to stand out and looks like the clear best choice to start next to Minkah Fitzpatrick. He had a tackle for loss and a pass deflection, and always seems to find himself around the ball. Andre Cisco, who opened the summer as the starter, allowed a touchdown in coverage. Of Belton, Glenn said: “He’s a ball magnet.”
• Nickel corner Jarvis Brownlee had a pass deflection against Bucs backup quarterback Jake Browning. Linebacker Jaden Keller had a tackle for loss on a running play.
• Safety Jarius Monroe picked off Mayfield during red-zone drills and returned it for a touchdown.
• Undrafted rookie receiver Malik McClain has had a nice camp and made some plays catching passes from Klubnik and Bailey Zappe.

Amid a lost season and on pace for a franchise-record number of losses, the Los Angeles Angels have fired veteran pitching coach Mike Maddux, bullpen coach Dom Chiti and assistant pitching coach Darryl Scott.

Entering Tuesday, the club’s pitchers have posted a 4.51 ERA this season — 24th in baseball.

Tim Leveque, who had been serving as the Double-A pitching coach, will be the interim pitching coach for the rest of the season. Michael Wuertz, who had been the minor-league assistant pitching coordinator, will be the interim bullpen coach.

“After spending time discussing with (manager Kurt Suzuki) where we are as a coaching staff and where we want to go in the future, we felt it was best to make a change,” John Mozeliak, the club’s baseball operations consultant, said in a news release. “With seven weeks remaining, we plan to use this time to evaluate what additional steps are needed to elevate our entire pitching program and best position us for success moving forward.”

It has been a summer of change in Anaheim. General manager Perry Minasian was fired in June, with Mozeliak — the long-time head of the St. Louis Cardinals — put in charge on an interim basis. At the time, Mozeliak said the coaching staff was safe through the end of the season.

At the trade deadline, the Angels acted more aggressively in selling than they had under Minasian, most notably dealing starter José Soriano to the Toronto Blue Jays for a package of prospects headed by shortstop Arjun Nimmala.

Maddux, 64, had been hired last winter after spending the previous three seasons with the Texas Rangers. This marked his 24th consecutive season employed as a major-league pitching coach, including tenures in Milwaukee, Texas, Washington and St. Louis. In half of those seasons, Maddux’s team qualified for the postseason. He was the pitching coach for all three Rangers teams to win the pennant, including the 2023 championship team.

After a prolonged period of relative stability under Mike Scioscia, the Angels have had seven managers in the last nine years and now seven different pitching coaches.

The Giants have lost consecutive extra-innings games, with the bullpen being a collective villain in both. The easiest way to notice a bullpen is when a team isn’t scoring a lot of runs, and the post-trade deadline Giants are in a bit of an offensive funk, so it takes a village to lose in extras. But the bullpen looked like it was going to be a problem entering last offseason, it looked like it was going to be a problem entering this season and it’s most certainly a problem now. If it was a lousy bullpen before, the trade deadline didn’t help much.

The Giants’ bullpen is a problem. It’s my job (and yours) to suggest solutions. However, before we start down that road, let’s consider another team’s bullpen problems first. This one’s actually fun, though.

The Dodgers have been struggling lately, with a recent seven-game losing streak and rash of injuries. There are a lot of factors, but the bullpen is a quite prominent one, with $60 million man Edwin Díaz currently sporting a 9.82 ERA in 13 games pitched. His most recent outing was a calm, clean save in a one-run game, so maybe he’ll be at full strength by October, which is all the Dodgers really care about. But the bullpen around him has been struggling, too. Evan Phillips and Will Klein both had ERAs over 6.00 in July and then Klein landed on the IL with bone chips in his elbow. The middle innings, in general, have been a bit of a grind. It doesn’t help a bullpen’s workload that a chunk of the rotation is on the IL at any given time, either.

There are a lot of ways you can look at this:

• Good

• Love this for them

• Hope it never changes

However, you can also take a step back and appreciate how the Dodgers got here: By throwing every resource they have at their bullpen. They did exactly what the Giants didn’t: They spent, they spent some more, and they spent even more than that. They also developed their own high-leverage relievers (Edgardo Henriquez) and bamboozled other teams out of them (Klein, Alex Vesia). They were creative and proactive, willing to spend someone else’s money in the efforts to get that most elusive of baseball dreams: the trustworthy bullpen.

Yet here they are, among the great unwashed, scrambling for clean saves. There is no chaos quite like bullpen chaos, and no matter how hard the Dodgers try, every season you’ll have a great chance to watch all of private equity’s horses and all of private equity’s men try to put back their bullpen again. “How to consistently make bullpens reliable and normal” is one of the great unsolved problems in baseball, along with player health.

Back to the Giants, where discussions of bullpen-related failures aren’t nearly as delightful. Consider the season ERAs of many of the recent bullpen stalwarts for the team:

I write Power Rankings every other week, which means that I often parachute into another team’s Baseball-Reference or FanGraphs page and take a quick look at the stats to get a general idea of what the team is doing. And if I looked at the Giants’ bullpen without knowing anything about it, I’d think they had problems at the back end (a dozen different pitchers with an ERA of 5.60 or higher). I’d also think their current core is shakier than their ERAs look, as that’s a poor statistic with which to evaluate relievers, and every single reliever in the above table has a much higher FIP than their ERA, suggesting that they’ve been lucky.

That’s what you’re always thinking when these folks come in, right? Here comes Mr. Horseshoe, ol’ Lucky Pants himself.

However! I would have also assumed that this bullpen was doing mostly good things. Look around at some of the contenders and compare the ERAs from their late-inning crew to the above table. Again, ERA is a horrible predictor of what a reliever is likely to do, and it’s not great even when describing what a reliever’s season has been like, but it still tells a story. ERAs that low mean that the absolute disaster outings have been limited, the complete meltdowns aren’t there. That should be a good thing.

Jason Foley took the loss for the Giants on Monday. He was one of the few free-agent signings the Giants made for their bullpen this offseason, a bet that he could be an effective reliever after rehabbing from shoulder surgery. He’s allowed five runs in eight innings since being activated off the IL. (Bob Kupbens / Imagn Images)

Instead, the entire bullpen has a remarkable capacity to share the mishaps evenly (and consistently). It’s almost inspiring. They’re a true collective. It’s always “next man up,” with a constant rotation of mostly effective relievers biffing at least one outing at the worst possible time, then resuming his business, as another mostly effective reliever steps up and biffs at least one outing at the worst possible time. It’s an egalitarian carousel of late-inning failure. Maybe it’ll get the Giants a higher draft pick next season, always look on the bright side.

So how do the Giants fix this? By hoping the bullpen sequencing gets less cursed by default? By helping the pitchers miss more bats, bringing the FIPs closer to the seemingly helpful ERAs? By spending money just like the Dodgers, which isn’t exactly likely?

No, it’s the same answer as it is for every other team: Figure it out as you go along, and don’t screw it up. The Giants are going to get a great look at Dylan Smith, whose slider shows high-leverage potential, and my prediction is that he’ll do enough to be on their 2027 Opening Day roster. The Giants will need to refine Keaton Winn’s command and help him find a bat-missing pitch other than his splitter, but he’ll be a strong candidate for next year’s bullpen, too.

And along the way, they’ll take chances on minor-league free agents and once-coveted relievers returning from injuries. They’ll make minor trades for minor leaguers, and they’ll make trades for relievers on another team’s active roster. They’ll promote prospects and convert starters to relievers when the rotation’s full, and they’ll check the waiver wire. All of it.

They’ll avoid the pricier closers, of course, and it’s morbidly amusing whenever a Giants fan calls for them to spend on a closer. This is the franchise of Mark Melancon and Armando Benítez, friend. Be careful with your words.

Which means they’re going to do the same thing as last offseason and just hope they’re better at it. While the most obvious answer of “just sign Tyler Rogers, you goobers” would have fixed plenty, they still don’t want to mess with the free-agent market. Tanner Scott, Edwin Díaz and Kirby Yates got $150 million from the Dodgers, and only Scott has worked out thus far, and it took a year of erratic nonsense to get there.

The real answer to how to build a reliable bullpen is this: Get a better lineup and a better rotation. That’s the actual answer to the bullpen riddle that plagues every team from time to time, and it’s why the Dodgers will probably be fine. They’ll cobble together enough outs from the rotation and enough runs from the lineup to win, even if the bullpen doesn’t steady itself. They’ll be fine. On account of the whole “having the best roster in baseball” strategy.

The next helpful Giants bullpen might arrive sooner than you think. Or it might not arrive for several more seasons, and you’ll quit your job and walk barefoot through the Appalachians to get away from baseball. The only way to get to that helpful bullpen, though, is to get better and more creative at finding pitchers who can prevent runs and miss bats. The Giants front office probably would have described itself as “creative at finding pitchers who can prevent runs and miss bats” before this season. They’ll need to figure out what in the heck when so wrong, but the ways they find (or build) these pitchers isn’t likely to change. They’ll just need to get better at it, or the next guys will.

In the meantime, the only guaranteed way to avoid the fate of the 2026 Dodgers is somehow to do exactly what they did: build a baseball team out of the best hitters and starting pitchers available. Anything less, and you’re leaving your fate in the hand of your bullpen every night. Giants fans could probably use a break from that.