Though MLB’s first weekend of the 2024 proved contentious in New York for Brewers vs. Mets, and in St. Petersburg for Blue Jays vs. Rays, so far the Dodgers and Cardinals haven’t had any extracurricular flare-ups at Dodger Stadium.
Here are a few stories around baseball to start your Easter Sunday.
J.J. Cooper at Baseball America analyzed all 30 opening day active rosters across MLB, and found that the Dodgers drafted the most players of any other team. Twenty-nine former Dodgers draftees were on active rosters on Thursday, among the 583 total former draftees active across the sport.
Six Dodgers draftees were on their own roster on opening day — the recently-extended Will Smith, 2020 draftees in the current rotation Bobby Miller and Gavin Stone, last year’s National League Rookie of the Year third-place finisher James Outman, plus Gavin Lux and Michael Grove.
In a survey of MLB executives, Dodgers pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto got two of 31 votes when asked which player would be the top rookie in MLB in 2024, per Mark Feinsand of MLB.com.
Yamamoto’s total was tied for fourth in a very spread-out collection of names. Rangers designated hitter Wyatt Langford was tops with seven votes. The top National League vote-getter was Jackson Merrill, who is playing center field for the Padres. Merrill got four votes.
MLB-wide five-year rolling averages for OPS+ out of the designated hitter position has never been lower than right now. Hannah Keyser at The Ringer looked into why it’s become so hard for teams to find hitters to fill the position.
One of the main reasons is that many teams use the DH as a rotating spot to give pseudo-rest to their regulars on occasion. From Pirates general manager Ben Cherington:
“But if you don’t, then you can very easily make an argument that the best way to handle it is to use it as a partial recovery day for whatever position player you think needs it,” he says. “And it becomes part of the volume management strategy as opposed to maximizing offense from this one position.”
I greatly enjoyed this incredible detail on the Rangers championship rings.
