This, from Mike Petriello of MLB.com, is not really news, though it is a curiosity:
The season started earlier, at least for the Padres and Dodgers, and the All-Star Game hasn't been played this late since the early 1970s. That's how you blow up the myth about the All-Star break being the true midway point of the season. That hasn't happened since 1983.
That covers the pedantry portion of our show. But because Sunday still marks the break in the season everyone has agreed upon, let us survey what we have and figure out if we like any of it.
We mention this because the New York Mets are currently in a playoff spot. Think back to the start of last month and try to reconcile that in your head. Team Roth has been the best team in baseball since June 2 for no comprehensible reason (while the Yankees have been worse than everyone except the Marlins, Rockies, White Sox, and A's), which tells us something about the value of hope and the reality that people like Steve Cohen never get what they truly deserve.
We mention this because former Met and current Royal Seth Lugo might be the best pitcher in baseball, non-Skenes category, while Chicago White Sox victim du jour Mike Soroka is currently 0-10 and on pace to go 0-18. Nobody's ever gone 0-18, and the guy who came closest, Frank Bates in 1899, was sent from the St. Louis Browns to the Cleveland Spiders, the worst team ever, to finish 1-18. The White Sox cannot be the worst team ever, so Soroka, who doesn't deserve this kind of ignominy, will have to work for it.
We mention this because the Oakland A's, who are moving to Sacramento en route to staying there because Las Vegas continues not to see the value in having the A's, are facing extreme difficulties with their 2025 schedule because global warming is helping turn Sacramento into a suburb of hell, only with plastic turf.
We mention this because two perennial All-Star types three years ago, Bo Bichette and Tim Anderson, are listed by The Athletic's indubitable Jayson Stark as the least valuable players in each league, and Anderson currently has no league at all. Bichette, though, is hotly rumored to be a Dodger acquisition, as though you haven't had enough of that already.
We mention this because the aforementioned Stark also claims that Detroit's Tarik Skubal has been the best pitcher in the American League, an obviously cheap and transparent ploy to suck up to Comrade Anantharaman. Cheap, transparent and, we suspect, diabolically effective.
We mention this because Clayton Beeter of the Yankees made his Major League debut on March 29 and got three outs on three pitches. He was sent back down to Scranton the next day and hasn't been back.
We mention this because the San Diego Padres, who built their version of a superteam with Manny Machado, Fernando Tatis Jr. and Juan Soto, have only one of them currently active and employed (Machado), and had to trade for Miami's only real talent, Luis Arraez, just to stay ahead of the Mets, which they were doing until yesterday.
And finally, we mention this because with such an early start to the season and so many games already played, the final 39 percent of the games will fly right by—for Petriello and his weird calendar fetish, and especially for the janitorial crew in Oakland, where win, lose, or lose five more times, postgame cleanup is always a snap.
