What We Learned Through a Quarter of the M.L.B. Season

There is not any query that this season will go down in historical past because the one wherein the pitch clock modified baseball. Whether additionally it is the season that saved baseball is just too quickly to inform, however the pitch clock’s impact is actual: With round 1 / 4 of the season full, the common recreation is 27 minutes shorter than it was final season and the share of video games lasting longer than 3 hours half-hour has fallen off a cliff, to 0.4 %, after having been larger than 10 % in 5 of the earlier six seasons.

But whereas everybody has been specializing in how shortly issues are shifting, there have been another notable developments.

Here is what we’ve discovered:

• The very costly Mets are in a large gap. It is comprehensible for Mets followers to be pissed off. The workforce made headlines within the low season with a Steven A. Cohen-powered spending spree that gave the franchise the very best payroll in main league historical past. Yet the Mets entered Monday’s motion at 20-21, in a tie with the Miami Marlins for third place within the National League East. Injuries have been an element, however you possibly can argue that the workforce performed above its head final yr and didn’t enhance regardless of all that spending — it simply bought dearer.

  The good news? Three wild playing cards in every league imply the Mets have been solely a half-game out of qualifying for postseason play. If Justin Verlander is full velocity forward and Max Scherzer has regained his stride after a suspension and an harm, the Mets may simply get a kind of three spots — placing them in roughly the identical place they have been in final yr when all the pieces went proper.