WASHINGTON — This happens every year.
Every baseball season, as teams enter April with built-in expectations, some teams defy them wildly in the early going. Fans and journalists alike jump to conclusions, even though doing so with such little information flies in the face of everything we know about baseball being a large sample size game.
We are 10 games into the Major League Baseball season, give or take a game for some teams. That is equivalent to roughly one game in an NFL season.
We somehow forget this, though, every year. We draw wild conclusions from small puddles of data, no matter how often history has told us not to do so. I blame football, and the endless overanalysis of it, both before and after every game.
If anyone says to you, “You know, if the season ended today…” punch them in the mouth before they have the chance to finish their sentence.* If the season ended today, the top-seeded Colorado Rockies would host the winner of a New York Mets-Los Angeles Dodgers Wild Card game in the first round of the playoffs. Ergo, nothing matters.
In that vein, here are 30 things that are on pace to happen right now — one for each team — that will not actually occur when the season ends. Seriously, none of these will happen. Write it down.
*Note: Please don’t actually punch your friends in the face. But, like, don’t listen to that idiocy either.