Baseball just happens. That’s why our daily recap feature — returning Friday morning! — is called “And That Happened.” You can certainly understand what happened in a baseball game after the fact, but unlike a lot of other sports, you can’t really preview, break down, and analyze the heck out of a baseball game beforehand. You can talk a bit about each starting pitcher I suppose, but if you’re doing some “MasterLock Keys To the Contest” feature before each game, you really don’t understand how baseball works.
That’s OK, though. Hang out here a while and we’ll help you figure it all out. In the meantime, just know that there are over 2,000 baseball games in a year, any single one of them is as random as heck, and talking about any one of them before, say, Game 7 of the World Series as if it’s got themes and dynamics flowing through them sort of misses the point. Baseball washes over you in hundreds and thousands of plays and games over the course of seven months. It’s a glorious, mostly random waterfall.
Seasons as a whole, though, can have broad storylines. Or, at the very least, a handful of things upon which an inordinate amount of attention will be paid due to either hype or novelty or the continuance or interruption of patterns from seasons past. In the event you check out of baseball in the offseason and try to get back up to speed as the games start, here are some of the things that will likely be dominating the baseball conversation as the 2018 season gets underway:
The Era of the Super Teams is Here
We discussed this at length here, but the short version: there are seven teams — the Yankees, Red Sox, Indians, Astros, Nationals, Cubs and Dodgers — who seem to be mortal playoff locks, and twenty-three teams which are really, really far behind. There are many reasons for that — again, see here — but the practical effect of it is that there will not be a lot of drama in the division races this year. Maybe the Yankees or maybe the Red Sox take the AL East, but barring a rash of catastrophic injuries, the other five seem to be one-team races. All of the standings watching in 2018 will be about the Wild Card.
Continue Reading: Opening Day: Everything you need to know to start baseball season
That’s OK, though. Hang out here a while and we’ll help you figure it all out. In the meantime, just know that there are over 2,000 baseball games in a year, any single one of them is as random as heck, and talking about any one of them before, say, Game 7 of the World Series as if it’s got themes and dynamics flowing through them sort of misses the point. Baseball washes over you in hundreds and thousands of plays and games over the course of seven months. It’s a glorious, mostly random waterfall.
Seasons as a whole, though, can have broad storylines. Or, at the very least, a handful of things upon which an inordinate amount of attention will be paid due to either hype or novelty or the continuance or interruption of patterns from seasons past. In the event you check out of baseball in the offseason and try to get back up to speed as the games start, here are some of the things that will likely be dominating the baseball conversation as the 2018 season gets underway:
The Era of the Super Teams is Here
We discussed this at length here, but the short version: there are seven teams — the Yankees, Red Sox, Indians, Astros, Nationals, Cubs and Dodgers — who seem to be mortal playoff locks, and twenty-three teams which are really, really far behind. There are many reasons for that — again, see here — but the practical effect of it is that there will not be a lot of drama in the division races this year. Maybe the Yankees or maybe the Red Sox take the AL East, but barring a rash of catastrophic injuries, the other five seem to be one-team races. All of the standings watching in 2018 will be about the Wild Card.
Continue Reading: Opening Day: Everything you need to know to start baseball season
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