Unlike the NBA, the MLB landscape is wide open right now. (Although baseball would probably kill to have a Cavs-Warriors III on their hands.) There are certainly teams in each league (Houston Astros, Washington Nationals) who have had outstanding starts to 2017, but there’s a reason no team has better than 4:1 odds to win the title right now; every team has holes.
Now it is still mighty early in the season as we are just around the quarter pole, so these weak spots can be remedied in house with a player who is struggling turning the corner, or the team promoting from within their farm system. We’re also still a ways from the trade deadline when we will inevitably have several of the teams coming up in these slides looking to be buyers come the end of July. There are enough teams slipping in the standings that we could have a busy deadline.
For today, we’ll take four contenders from each league who would be in the playoffs if they started today (sorry Boston and Chicago) and look at one player who has either gotten off to a slow start, could potentially be trouble down the line, or is dealing with an injury that might hamstring the team. A potential trouble spot for each team.
We won’t go position-specific (i.e. the closers in Washington), but rather choose a specific player so we can go a bit into the nitty gritty on the player, deciding whether the best option is to simply give the player time, whether there is an in-house option to fix the problem, or whether there might be a decent trade target out there to solve the issue.