9 Takeaways from MLB's First Month of the 2023 Season

Alright, class, what have we learned from the first month of the 2023 MLB season?

For starters, spending like there's no tomorrow doesn't guarantee you success in April. While the frugal Orioles, Pirates and Rays have stacked up wins, the Mets, Padres, Phillies and Yankees are barely keeping their collective head above water.

Also, this year's crop of rookies could be some kind of special. Much like last year when Houston let Carlos Correa walk and replaced him with an instant star in Jeremy Peña, the Astros have worked that magic again with Hunter Brown as the replacement for Justin Verlander. And he's just one of at least a half-dozen newbies who already look like soon-to-be All-Stars.

The AL East is really good.

The Chicago White Sox are really not.

And is Spencer Strider already making a run at Rollie Fingers for the title of greatest mustachioed pitcher of all time?

If you spent your April focused on the NBA/NHL playoffs and/or the NFL draft and need a quick refresher on what's been happening with America's favorite pastime before the calendar flips to May, we've got your covered.

Statistics current through the start of play Saturday.

In the olden days, Opening Day was an unofficial finish line for contract negotiations. October through March was the time to talk numbers, while April through September was the time to produce them.

But that is clearly no longer the case, as there have been quite a few significant contract extensions signed just this month.

The first one came on April 1, when Jake Cronenworth reupped on a seven-year, $80 million contract with the San Diego Padres—who are evidently going to sign everyone to a long-term deal except for Juan Soto.

Two weeks later, the Cubs finally recommitted to Ian Happ, giving him a three-year, $61 million contract that runs through 2026.

Then came the run on young pitchers, with Logan Webb (five years, $90 million), Pablo López (four years, $73.5 million) and Hunter Greene (six years, $53 million) getting nice paydays with San Francisco, Minnesota and Cincinnati, respectively. (The Reds totally committed highway robbery in that one. What a steal.)

The big one, though, was Bryan Reynolds agreeing to an eight-year, $106.75 million extension with Pittsburgh this past week. (While Reynolds was away from the team on bereavement leave, so, uh, were they negotiating this one at a funeral?)

Reynolds had been a staple in "hypothetical trades" articles and rumor-mill musings dating back to around this time last season, as the entire world assumed the Pirates would do what they do best and turn a dollar into three dimes rather than spending big money on a star. But now that they've locked up Reynolds for the long haul, we'll have to find a new speculative star on the move.

Peruse the standings for teams who entered Saturday with a single-digit number in the wins column and it's mostly usual suspects. Oakland is in tank mode, Kansas City and Washington are working through rebuilds of their own, and goodness only knows what Detroit and Colorado are attempting to accomplish.

And then there's the Chicago White Sox, spending over $180 million for a 7-20 record.

Yes, they've been without several key players. Eloy Jiménez missed some time early on with a hamstring injury. Yoán Moncada (back) and Tim Anderson (knee) are currently on the IL. And Liam Hendriks is still working his way back from kicking non-Hodgkin's lymphoma's ass to hopefully make his season debut soon.

But who isn't short-handed?

The Mets and Yankees have a combined total of more than $200 million on the IL, and they still have winning records.

The White Sox have simply been a massive underachiever for the second consecutive season—which should make things mighty interesting as we approach "Trade SZN."

Lucas Giolito, Reynaldo López, Elvis Andrus and Yasmani Grandal will all be hitting free agency this offseason, and there are club/mutual options for each of Lance Lynn, Hendriks, Anderson, Joe Kelly, Mike Clevinger and Jake Diekman.

Unless things change drastically in the next three months and they climb back into the AL Central mix, that's an awful lot of trade chips to consider parting with if they want to somewhat hit the reset button and start building for the future around a nucleus of Dylan Cease, Michael Kopech, Luis Robert, Jiménez, Andrew Vaughn and Andrew Benintendi.

On March 11, the Arizona Diamondbacks made history by making Corbin Carroll the first player in MLB history to receive a nine-figure contract after less than 100 days of service time, per Spotrac. It was an eight-year, $111 million extension, which could end up being worth $154 million over nine years if Arizona picks up the $28 million option for 2031 and if Carroll wins MVP in each of 2028, 2029 and 2030.

It was a bold investment in a guy who hit .260 with a 27 percent strikeout rate in 32 games played at the MLB level last fall, but early returns suggest that an average salary under $14 million for the next eight years of Carroll is one of the greatest bargains in baseball.

(By comparison, Seattle waited until after Julio Rodríguez won the 2022 Home Run Derby to sign its rookie star to a long-term deal, and now that contract could be worth as much as $470 million for 17 seasons, pending options and escalators.)

Carroll is batting .312 with four home runs and 10 stolen bases—this after hitting .307 with 24 home runs and 31 stolen bases in 93 games played in the minors last year. And he's more than capable of playing any of the three outfield positions, making at least eight appearances at each of left, center and right.

It's all reminiscent of the beginning of Ronald Acuña Jr.'s career, who is currently the only player in the majors with more stolen bases (13) than Carroll.

Atlanta signed that star to an eight-year, $100 million extension the spring after he won NL ROY, and goodness has that ever worked out nicely. If Arizona continues down that path by signing the likes of Gabriel Moreno, Alek Thomas and Drey Jameson to team-friendly long-term deals before it's too late, there could be something special brewing in the desert.

We've already highlighted what Corbin Carroll is doing for the Diamondbacks, but James Outman has been even more impressive.

Outman should maybe change his name to Hitman, as he is feasting on MLB pitching to the tune of a .278 average and seven home runs. He hit .462 in a brief, four-game taste of life in the big leagues last summer, but it's clear he is here to stay this time.

The Mets also have a trio of intriguing candidates in Brett Baty, Kodai Senga and Francisco Álvarez. Neither the third baseman nor the catcher is hitting well thus far, but Senga is slinging filth on the mound and has the potential to be special once he gets the walks under control.

And before we move on from the NL ROY race, don't forget about Cardinals outfielder Jordan Walker. He hasn't been hitting for power yet, he just got demoted back to Memphis, and both FanGraphs and Baseball Reference have been considerably less than impressed with his defense in right field. But he opened his MLB career with a 12-game hitting streak and entered the year as one of the highest-rated prospects in the game.

On the AL side of the equation, Texas' Josh Jung and New York's Anthony Volpe have provided solid value out of the gates, with Boston's Masataka Yoshida starting to live up to the hype with a two-homer performance this past Sunday. Houston's Hunter Brown might run away with the award, though, if he keeps putting together seven-inning outings without allowing any earned runs, as he did in consecutive appearances against Minnesota and Texas and then again against Tampa Bay on Wednesday.

While the Angels, Padres and Phillies are all struggling to win games in spite of payrolls north of $210 million, April has been mighty kind to the teams trying to spend as little money as possible.

Well, not all of the penny pinchers are thriving. Oakland's pitching staff is doing one heck of a slow-pitch softball impression in allowing more than eight runs per game early on in what may be a historically futile season.

But Nos. 27, 28 and 29 in total payroll incredibly have three of the best records in baseball.

That's nothing new coming from Tampa Bay, which is well on its way to a fifth consecutive postseason appearance—despite this being its 13th consecutive season with an Opening Day payroll ranked 25th or lower. With an MLB-best 52 home runs and impressive pitching across the board during their 22-5 start to the season, the Rays have gotten unbelievable ROI for around $75 million.

The other two teams thriving on the cheap are Pittsburgh and Baltimore.

The Pirates did loosen the purse strings on that aforementioned contract extension with Bryan Reynolds, but that doesn't start to really kick in until next year. What they've got for now is a combination of relatively inexpensive veterans and a boatload of pre-arbitration guys each making between $720,000-$750,000 and, remarkably, an 18-8 record to show for it.

(Could this week's Pittsburgh at Tampa Bay three-game tilt be a World Series preview?)

And Baltimore is stealthily right there with Pittsburgh at 17-8, kind of hiding in plain sight a few games back of the Rays in the AL East. The O's have certainly made the most of a schedule in which they are most of the way through a 22-game stretch against the A's, White Sox, Nationals, Tigers, Red Sox and Royals, but they do look the part with quality hitting and a thirst for stolen bases.

It's not breaking news that the AL East is quite good.

In our preseason piece on the one team from each division that would be better than expected, we pointed out that the AL East's combined win total of 428.5 was at least 17 wins greater than any other division.

All five teams finished the 2022 campaign at least six games over .500 outside of the division—a combined winning percentage of .577 (248-182). So with this year's schedule change resulting in every team playing just 52 games within the division instead of 76, the entire division posting a winning record was always on the table.

Still, it was eye-opening to wake up this past Wednesday morning, check the standings and see that every team in the division had a winning record and a positive run differential.

We've already touched on both Baltimore and Tampa Bay in the Penny Pincher's section, but Toronto has been red hot as of late, the Yankees are holding things together despite having the GDP of a small nation's worth of salaries on the IL, and though Boston's pitching has been terrible, the Red Sox have got to be the most potent last-place team of all-time, averaging well over five runs per game.

Boston might fall by the wayside in May, because its upcoming schedule—Toronto, at Philadelphia, at Atlanta, St. Louis, Seattle, at San Diego, at Angels, at Arizona—is the antithesis of a walk in the park. But if the Red Sox can tread water through that grind, brace yourselves for the possibility of a September spent marveling at a division that produces all three of the American League's wild-card teams, as well as a fifth-place finisher that wins at least 83 games.

In each of 2018, 2019 and 2021, Max Muncy was one of the better sluggers in baseball.

Even factoring in a disappointing 2020 campaign, he had an .890 OPS from 2018-21, tied with Shohei Ohtani and Pete Alonso for 16th-best in the majors. And only Eugenio Suárez (129), Nelson Cruz (126) and Nolan Arenado (121) hit more home runs than Muncy's 118 during that window.

But last year was a struggle. The Dodgers led the majors in scoring en route to winning 111 games, doing so in spite of Muncy batting .196 and averaging nearly 27 plate appearances per home run.

Thus far in 2023, he is homering once in every 8.2 trips to the plate, leading the bigs with 11 round-trippers.

Through nine games, he was hitting .121 with only one home run. But in 13 games since then, Muncy is batting .368 with 10 homers and a 1.668 OPS.

Muncy had bounced around between first, second, third and DH over the past half-decade, but with Justin Turner out of the picture, he finally has an everyday home at third base. And while his glove (three errors in 55 chances) hasn't been great, knowing where he'll be taking the field from one night to the next has perhaps enabled him to better focus on simply mashing baseballs into orbit.

He's not going to maintain this pace and finish the year with 80 home runs, but maybe Muncy and Alonso will duke it out 1998 McGwire/Sosa style on the quest for 60-plus.

Mariners ace Luis Castillo is one of the top early candidates for the AL Cy Young, boasting a 1.82 ERA through his first six starts.

Robbie Ray made one dud of a start before landing on the IL with an elbow strain, but Logan Gilbert, George Kirby and Marco Gonzales have each gotten out to respectable starts alongside Castillo.

Jarred Kelenic has been absolutely on fire since the first game after some idiot (me) wrote about Seattle needing to decide if he has a future in the majors. He, Julio Rodríguez and Teoscar Hernández have been quite the outfield trio, already combining for 18 home runs and 42 RBI.

And yet, Seattle is 11-14 and has not woken up to a winning record since starting out 1-0 and subsequently losing four in a row.

Kolten Wong and AJ Pollock have been black holes in the lineup, each sporting an OPS well below .500. And with Ray sidelined, Chris Flexen's turns through the rotation have produced nothing but losses.

Still, there are enough things going well for Seattle that it should be winning more often than not. But that hasn't been the case.

Could the problem be as simple as a regression to the mean as far as "luck" in close games is concerned?

Between 2021-22, the Mariners went 25-12 in extra-inning games and 67-41 in games decided by one run. No one else won more than 21 extra-inning games during that time, and the closest winning percentage in one-run games behind Seattle's MLB-best 62.0 mark was St. Louis at 59.1.

So far in 2023, though, the M's are sitting at 0-4 and 3-8, respectively. And their luck got even worse Wednesday afternoon with the news that Ray will undergo flexor tendon repair surgery and is done for the season, per Ryan Divish of the Seattle Times.

The AL West is still fairly wide open, but Seattle's World Series hopes have plummeted considerably since the season began.

Spencer Strider pitching well isn't exactly a surprising development.

He had a 2.67 ERA last season while finishing as first runner-up to teammate Michael Harris II for NL Rookie of the Year. He didn't make his first start of the season until Memorial Day, but Strider made 10 quality starts and struck out at least 10 batters on six separate occasions. Had he logged enough innings to qualify, his 13.7 K/9 rate would've been the best in the majors by a country mile.

What is surprising, however, is how substantially better than 2022 he has already been.

In each of his first five starts, Strider struck out at least nine batters. He has yet to allow more than four hits in a game, and he didn't allow any runs in three of those five starts. And while not quite as impressive as his 16-strikeout gem against the Rockies from last September, his recent outing against the Marlins (8.0 IP, 2 H, 0 R, 0 BB, 13 K, no-hitter carried into the eighth inning) was arguably the most impressive start by any pitcher thus far this season.

Strider hasn't even been an MLB starter for a full calendar year, yet he has already emerged as the favorite to win the NL Cy Young. (Alongside Arizona's Zac Gallen, who has also been masterful in April.) And between Strider's hot start and that of Ronald Acuña Jr., Atlanta feels like an even better candidate to win the World Series than it did at the beginning of the season.