Welcome to The Opener, where every weekday morning during the regular season you’ll get a fresh, topical story to start your day from one of SI.com’s MLB writers.
We’re just about a month into the season. The standings and statistics will look a lot different by the time we get to October, and it’s probably too early for most sweeping generalizations. The old adage is you shouldn’t overreact to anything before Memorial Day, and that holds even more true this season, which started a little later than usual due to CBA negotiations.
At the same time, it’s not too early to react to what we’ve seen on the field so far and recalibrate our expectations for certain teams and players.