The two best records in baseball belong to the teams with the 27th- and 28th-ranked payrolls in the game. The six division leaders are the Tampa Bay Rays, Minnesota Twins, Texas Rangers, Atlanta Braves, Pittsburgh Pirates and Arizona Diamondbacks. And the average time of a Major League Baseball game is at its lowest since 1981.
April is always full of questions about what's real and what's not, what's sustainable and what's folly. With the four-week mark of the season arriving tomorrow, here are 10 takeaways from the early going that range from a spate of injuries -- the origin of which is flummoxing people around the game -- to how pitch-clock baseball might not be all that different from what we've seen in recent years.