If there’s one universal truth about being a human being, it’s that the passage of time is uncaring and unrelenting. Take, among less morbid examples, this Major League Baseball season. It may feel like it just got underway, what with Opening Day festivities and the conga line of statistical firsts that accompany the start of each campaign, but the reality is that we’re far enough along in the year for most teams to be at or beyond 40 games played. That’s a quarter of the season down.
Rest assured, there’s plenty of baseball still to be played in 2024. But, for our purposes, this point in the year does make for a convenient opportunity to check in on how each team is doing. As the headline above indicates, that’s precisely what we’ve chosen to do in this article.
Below, you’ll find writeups on each club accompanied by a grade reflecting how the team has performed to date. That grade is mostly descriptive and based on their performance to date, but we’ll freely admit that in some cases we’ve also taken greater circumstances into account — how the team was expected to perform; what their underlying measures indicate; and so on. As always, this is more of an art than a science.
With all that fine-print mumbo jumbo out of the way, let’s get to it.
The defending National League champions have endured some rough breaks this year. Eduardo Rodriguez, who was supposed to be a rotation boon, has yet to make his season or team debut; Paul Sewald and Merrill Kelly either have or will miss a considerable amount of time; plans A and B at shortstop are down hurt at the same time; and it’s more than fair to write no one saw Corbin Carroll performing this poorly out of the gate. In other words, it makes sense that they’ve started the season a little below expectations. We can only grade on what’s happened, though, and as such we have to give the D-backs a D for their performance to date. Better times await, we suspect.
The Braves are one of the few and far between teams who can realistically assert that it’s World Series or bust. That’s why it hurts all the more that ace Spencer Strider will miss the rest of the season following elbow surgery. The Braves have also seen a few key hitters get off to slow starts, Ronald Acuña Jr. and Matt Olson included. That combination, plus the Phillies‘ white-hot start, explains why they’re sitting in second place in the National League East. Even with all…
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