We are a month into the 2024 baseball season. I know it’s early, but there already have been a few surprising developments.

The Cleveland Guardians are off to a hot start under first-year manager Stephen Voight. The Guardians finished in third place in the American League Central last season, 10 games under .500. They lost ace starting pitcher Shane Bieber for the season after two starts, but that hasn’t slowed them down, as they closed out the weekend at 19-9 and are in first place in the American League Central.

I read that the Houston Astros are off to their worst start since 1969. They just closed out the weekend with a record of 9-19 under first-year manager Joe Espada. First baseman José Abreu is hitting .099 with three runs batted in, and third baseman Alex Bregman is hitting .216 with seven RBIs; neither has hit a home run. The Astros have won three straight American League West titles and finished first six times in the last seven seasons. Could this be the end of their dominance? Ronel Blanco pitched a no-hitter in his eighth career start, providing one of the few highlights for Astros fans so far.

The Los Angeles Dodgers are in first place in the NL West, which was expected. Shohei Ohtani is hitting .336 with seven home runs, and Mookie Betts is hitting .387 with six homers; catcher Will Smith is hitting a cool .367. After reading all the hyperbole from Bob Nightengale and Gabe Lacques of USA Today, the biggest surprises regarding the Dodgers are that they somehow have managed to lose a game, 12 of them, in fact, and Ohtani is not batting 1.000.

Then there are the Chicago White Sox. They swept the Tampa Bay Rays over the weekend, doubling their win total for the season. How in the world does a big-league team play for a month and not win more than six games? You would think they would win more games than that by accident. They should have gotten enough bloop hits or bad bounces to back into more than six wins. The White Sox are hitting .207 as a team and their team earned run average is 5.10. Maybe the surprise is that they have won as many games as they have.

I’ll end on a positive note. On Saturday night, plate umpire Erich Bacchus called Francisco Lindor of the New York Mets out for running to first base on the infield grass after the third strike got by catcher Willson Contreras. Lindor and Mets manager Carlos Mendoza went nuts protesting the call, but I was glad to see it. During the offseason, MLB changed the rule and widened the running lane for just this situation. Too many times, the umpires were hesitant to call runners out when they interfered with throws; the ball usually had to hit the runner before the umps would call the runner out. I was concerned there would be no change, even with the updated rule since it still left so much up to the umpire’s judgement.

Lindor swung at a pitch in the dirt in the opposite batter’s box. He was batting left-handed, so all he had to do was run straight down the first-base line and stay in the lane that has been on baseball fields for decades. Lindor made at least two egregious mistakes, so new rule or not, he deserved to be out.

A month of the season is already past. But that means we still have six more months of baseball ahead of us. And then the postseason.

(Title is taken from “Two Tramps in Mud Time” by Robert Frost. All statistics are from Baseball Reference.)