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The AL is mostly what we thought it’d be

With roughly a third of the Majors in rebuilding mode entering the season, it looked far easier than usual to guess both leagues’ postseason clubs before any team played a single game in 2018. And in the American League, what was widely expected has largely played out: The Yanks and Red Sox are neck-and-neck for the lead in the East and the Indians have a comfortable cushion in the otherwise moribund AL Central.

The West is a bit more interesting, as both the Mariners and Angels – reputed as possible but not certain contenders coming into the year – have performed well. But the Astros still appear the obvious favorite to ultimately take the pennant: Run differential suggests Houston is a bit unlucky to be tied with Seattle at this point in the season, and the Astros’ remarkable depth better positions them to patch holes as the year goes on.

But the NL is not

Both the Nationals and Dodgers are playing well now, but their slow starts combined with some surprise early-season successes elsewhere have the National League postseason picture appearing a bit murkier. The upstart Braves have cooled off a bit, but still sit tied with the Nationals atop the NL East. The Central, widely presumed the Cubs’ circuit to lose in March, now has the makings of a thrilling pennant chase between Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Louis.

And until if and when the Dodgers get healthy, the West looks wide open, with the entire division currently within 5 1/2 games of the first-place Diamondbacks. There’s still plenty of time for the superteams to pull away, but the close ranks in all three divisions suggest at least one of them should stay interesting into September.

Mike Trout remains the best

If you’ve paid even cursory attention to Major League Baseball over the past few years, you probably know by now that Mike Trout is the best player on the planet. Trout has only further cemented that title this season, building on the offensive improvement he showed in his injury-curtailed 2017 to lead the Majors in home runs, walks and WAR entering play Tuesday.

The G.O.A.T. Watch remains very much on for Trout at age 26. Trout’s about to make his seventh All-Star team in as many seasons, he’s looking like the favorite to take his third AL MVP Award, and there’s some chance his 2018 will wind up the greatest season of any position player in MLB history by Wins Above Replacement. In that metric, Trout was the best player ever at his age every year until last year, when a wrist injury cost him a chance to keep pace with Ty Cobb. Barring another disabled-list stint, he should surpass Cobb again at some point this year and establish himself as the most valuable player ever through his age-26 season.

There’s lots of hand-wringing

It feels like an overwhelming majority of baseball broadcasts in 2018 feature a former player turned analyst lamenting “the way the game is today” – decrying the infield shifts that rob hitters of slap singles, the frequent strikeouts, and the heavier use of bullpens. It’s a bit baffling, as you’d think the people televising baseball games would prefer their broadcasters hype the product more often than they rip it. But, undoubtedly, the changes are real, there are decidedly fewer balls in play in Major League Baseball in 2018 than ever before, and it’s hard to blame anyone if their aesthetic preference is for more of the randomness that comes with batted balls.

But all these perceived problems reflect the direct products and the byproducts of a recent explosion of talent, knowledge, information and technology throughout the sport. Players and teams are getting better faster than ever before, and the game – in constant flux, always – has been changing just as rapidly. There’s been some talk of rule changes like banning defensive shifts, but until they come, understand that wanting the game to go back to the way it was in the late 20th century essentially means wishing players and teams were not as good at trying to win baseball games.

Bryce Harper is hitting .228 in his contract year…

Harper has hardly been terrible – he leads the National League in walks, so his on-base percentage is a sturdy .360 despite the low batting average, and he has 19 homers. But he has been slumping for more than a month now, and after drawing a ton of free passes in April, he’s demonstrated a worrisome – and atypical – lack of plate discipline since the first week of May.

He’s an excellent player, but the evidence is mounting to suggest Harper is just not quite the guy people hoped he’d be when he came into the league in 2012 or after his MVP campaign in 2015. Harper, for all his charisma, has been for the most part a very good but not transcendently great hitter and a solid defender in an outfield corner. He’s young enough and good enough that he should still command great riches in the offseason, but he’s no longer really the obvious jewel of his free agent class.

And Manny Machado’s playing his way into a bigger deal

Like Harper, Machado has had some great seasons and some merely pretty good ones in the early part of his big-league career. But unlike Harper, Machado is having his best offensive season at exactly the right time. At age 25, the infielder is on track for new career bests in home runs, batting average, on-base percentage and slugging. He’s playing shortstop this season after establishing himself as a superlative defender at third base, and he hasn’t seen the disabled list since 2014. Add that all up and he looks like a safer bet and a more valuable player than Harper, if perhaps not quite as tantalizing a potential offensive force.

The Orioles have the worst record in the Majors, and they’ll almost certainly get more value back by trading Machado than they would by letting him walk in free agency. Which is to say: You’re going to hear the name Manny Machado a lot over the next six months or so. First, he’ll be the most coveted trade target, then he’ll be a key player on a postseason contender, then he’ll be seeking free-agent megabucks.

Pitching staffs are changing

That dude in the photo there is named Josh Hader, and he has been a huge part of the Brewers’ success this season while working exclusively out of their bullpen. A deceptive lefty with unprecedented strikeout rates, Hader typically operates in multi-inning relief stints to preserve close leads – Milwaukee is 21-0 in games he has pitched in 2018 – and is emblematic of an ongoing shift in pitcher usage. For the majority of the last 30 years in baseball, Hader’s dominance in a setup role would compel his club to make him a closer or stretch him out to start games. But by Win Probability Added, Hader has been the most valuable pitcher in the National League this season – edging out workhorses Max Scherzer and Jacob deGrom, both of whom have thrown more than twice as many innings.

Here’s (part of) what’s happening: Teams recognize now that most starting pitchers struggle in their third and fourth times through an opposing batting order, so all but the best see quicker hooks. That leaves more middle and late innings to bullpen arms, and casts into the foreground the dominant type of setup reliever that was, until recently, frequently overlooked and undervalued. Where five years ago, the guy entering the game in the sixth to bail a starter out of a jam might very well be one of the worst pitchers on staff, now, increasingly, it’s an unhittable fireballer hellbent on striking out the planet. Hader’s been on a tier of his own this season, but there are others out there like him, and more likely to come.

Elsewhere, the Rays have looked to optimize matchups by starting games with “openers” to pitch an inning or two before bringing in the guy who’ll shoulder the bulk of the lode. It is this author’s belief that we are only at the beginning of a complete paradigm shift in pitcher usage, and long-held customs like the five-man starting rotation and one-inning closer will seem antiquated within 10 or 15 years. There’s no replacing guys like Scherzer, deGrom, Corey Kluber and Justin Verlander, who might give a team 200 dominant innings a season, so there’s always going to be value in having a true ace. But you’re better off using a variety of arms in two-inning bursts than calling on a middling one for seven. Clubs understand that, and they’re adjusting accordingly.

Shohei Ohtani is awesome, but now he’s hurt

If he weren’t on the disabled list with an elbow injury, Shohei Ohtani would almost have to be the top item on any list like this one. If you missed it: The Angels landed the universally coveted two-way phenomenon this offseason, opened the season with Ohtani as both a starting pitcher and a regular DH, and saw him excel, improbably, in both roles. The 23-year-old hit the disabled list with a stellar .907 OPS in 114 at-bats as a hitter and a 4-1 record with a 3.10 ERA in nine starts as a pitcher. It’s totally nuts. This guy can really do both. He hits massive homers and throws 100. Crazy good athlete, too.

Injuries like Ohtani’s frequently lead to Tommy John surgery, which would likely mean a disappointing lack of full-capacity Ohtani on the big-league landscape until the start of 2020. But Angels teammate Garrett Richards and Japanese countryman Masahiro Tanaka, among others, have successfully rehabbed UCL injuries without going under the knife. The Angels say they will reevaluate Ohtani in a few weeks.

The Astros’ starters have been ridiculous