MLB: Early Season Trends We Do and Don’t Want to See Continue
By Jim Turvey
We’ll begin with the caveat that is necessary for every article this early in the season: Yes, it is only a week into the 2017 MLB season. Yes, these are all overreactions. Yes, this article may age worse than Mickey Rourke.
That’s half the fun, though. Fans tend to pay more attention to the first week of the MLB season than any other non-postseason time of the year. There’s a reason we remember the name Chris Shelton: His magical start to the 2006 season caught all of our attention. If that same streak had happened in the dog days of August it might have gone relatively unnoticed.
It’s human nature to engage any sort of entertainment more thoroughly after we have missed it for five months than when we have been staring at it each and every day for twenty weeks. It’s also a lot easier to create narratives when literally all we have is a seven-day sample, instead of randomly pulling a seven-day sample out of thin air in the middle of June.
Call to the Pen’s Anthony Sosa looked the other day at early-season trends he is either buying or selling. It was a good article, and one I suggest you read. This article is a bit different. Instead of determining whether or not a certain trend is going to stick around, we’ll be determining whether it would be fun if that trend stuck around. With half of these trends (if not more) are likely to dissipate by the end of April even, we might as well celebrate the storylines we love and denigrate the ones we’re already sick of. On to the slides.