Yes, it's early. There, we undercut your complaint before you even had a chance to assemble it. But it's not so early that we can't look at the American League standings and have a laugh at the sheer absurdity therein.
Baseball is giving Rob Manfred a moment, in that the four good teams in baseball are the marquee-est of marquee teams—the Yankees, Braves, Dodgers, and Cubs. One on the East, one South, one Midwest, and one West. Couldn't have planned it better, Rob; you can use this to keep you warm when the lockout enters its eighth month.
The American League having only one of those four teams if anything undersells how baffling the rest of that league has been. The Yankees are 25-12, with a run differential of +74—both admirable statistics if ultimately of minimal value given that we're still weeks from Memorial Day. The second-best team is Tampa Bay, at 24-12, and they also have the AL's second-best run differential, at an extremely modest +15. And those are all the teams in the American League with an actual winning record. Nearly a quarter of the season has gone by, now, which is enough time to at least make some assumptions. Let's start with this one: The American League stinks.
This does not mean that the National League teams are excellent by default. The NL East, which was presumed to have a pair of contenders in addition to Atlanta, is wall to wall lousy except for the Braves; spare a thought, here, for Ted Turner, who died on Wednesday and is the biggest reason the Braves are not boatracing everyone from Salt Lake City. The Dodgers have slowed after a ridiculous start, the Padres are only now arresting a tough run of baseball by playing the anti-descript Giants, and the Cardinals, Reds, Pirates, and Brewers have all been good enough to slapfight each other around .500 but not good enough to get all that close to the Cubs. It's not the American League, but it's also not what you want.
This could eventually become a longer and broader discussion about parity along the lines of the structure of the current NBA, but it won't be a rewarding one. We can probably feel secure in the notion that there really are only four good teams in the bigs right now, plus whatever Tampa ends up being. The Rays have been the most fascinating team in baseball for more than a decade, provided you find fascination in the "who does the most with the least" conversation, but the other four alpha teams are very much proof that it's easier to do more with the most, and that you more or less get what you pay for provided you spend that money wisely. That includes scouting, analytics, and big-league salaries, three things that the owners are currently aligned against, and which they seem willing to shut down the game to restrict, because they cost money. By the way, the Yankees, Cubs, Dodgers, and Braves are a combined 99-50; the other four teams in the top eight in payroll, the Phillies, Mets, Astros, and Blue Jays, are a combined 62-86. In other words, money is nice to spend, but it is not a cure-all. Money cannot cure stupid, or even really neutralize sufficiently bad luck. This has always been true, and will always be true.
And as we said, this is a snapshot of things taken in early May; other teams in the American League will find a way to finish over .500 if only because the math insists upon it. But I think we are closing in on the likelihood that none of them will be worth bothering with. The A's will cool and become what they were last year, which is a team with electric but uneven hitting and very evenly mediocre pitching—Wednesday night's late-inning loss to the Phillies writ large, more or less. The White Sox will ride Munetaka Murakami as long as his homers-or-bust hitting style has tread on the tires; there's actually some reason for hope there, but they're not yet good. Cleveland and Detroit are the same team, especially now that Tarik Skubal's arm is in dry dock. Toronto will mix in a hard-hit ball now and then, and presumably will do so with more frequency in the future, but now is seriously unsightly. Seattle's offense cannot be this dismal all year lest the Mets sue for copyright infringement. In all those cases, this should work out to something on the respectable side of mediocre.
But the league's top four now certainly feel likely to be the top four when it matters. And Tampa? Well, ESPN's Brandon Doolittle wrote that their biggest problem is trying to figure out how to get Cedric Mullins (16 OPS+) going, which raises the question of when Cedric Mullins became important enough to the Rays to become a problem. No, this will be the four teams that move the most eyeballs in October, unless the nation's population centers all shift to Wyoming in search of apocalypse shelters. This will precede what will be hailed as a great postseason by everyone who thinks ratings are why we bother with this stuff, and then it will all shut down, because baseball will always be run by the same people who run baseball now, and because the easiest thing to hit with a rifle is one's own foot. Some of this is much easier to predict than others, but when it doubt, assume regression to a dismal mean. It's the one thing these teams seem to agree upon.
