April will make fools of us all

Every day has felt like April Fools’ Day for a good long while. Anything could be “real” in the sense that it’s not a prank, a lie that vanishes when the jig is up. “Real” as in a thing that’s actually happening, even if it skipped past separation and divorce from reality and went straight for total estrangement.

You can summon your own examples for this without digging past yesterday’s news. For reasons of a few people’s money and power, we now render hallucinations in the same authoritative black and white digital ink as the encyclopedia. The only difference is the hallucinations are much easier to find.

April has always been baseball’s interregnum of unreality. Lacking their usual scale, the numbers that keep this ultra-quantified sport’s bearings get tossed around on nauseating waves in the season’s first month. Maybe it’s just my proximity to Mets fans, but I think the world has worn down our resolve to weather the ups and downs of a new journey.

This could be my destiny. This could be the Titanic. It feels more logical to assume any extreme will continue apace or even escalate, even though they probably won’t, over 162 games.

So today, I’ve got a series of bits and bobs on April’s unbelievable things, from the dreamy to the panic-stricken. We’re all in this together.

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Here are a couple true things about the Minnesota Twins: Byron Buxton hasn’t been lighting it up offensively, Joe Ryan has a ho-hum 3.80 ERA, Royce Lewis is hurt again, and the Twins were atop the American League for much of the week.

Yeah, I don’t think the Twins are prepared to explain it either. After bludgeoning Red Sox ace Garrett Crochet for 11 runs in less than 2 innings, they defaulted to chemistry.

“We chill,” Buxton said in a story about how the Twins like each other. “We come to play baseball. We focus on ourselves. The one big thing I told them in spring training is, ‘The only thing that matters is who is in this clubhouse.’ Once you believe in that and you understand, day in and day out, this is the brotherhood, this is a family, it starts becoming reality for us. Spring training was kind of that feel and touch era. Now, it’s more get after it.”

There are some toeholds of rational optimism, especially in rotation’s post-hype prospects acquired during last summer’s sell-off. Taj Bradley is pitching like a star, and Mick Abel might be figuring some things out, too. Other things are less explicable, like a 30-year-old man named Tristan Gray ripping off 11 RBI in 10 games, doubling his total from earlier MLB playing time scattered across three seasons.

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The Pirates are winning, and hitting a little bit. Offseason trade acquisition Brandon Lowe has been a boon, but the loudest bat has been that of Oneil Cruz.

He’s a center fielder the same way your pampered Labradoodle is a guard dog — you can assign a job to anyone — but he is hitting. His line so far: .316 average, 5 homers, MLB-leading 9 steals, MLB lead in necks strained turning to see that exit velocity reading.

Last year, Cruz ripped off a 142 wRC+ in April. Then he posted a 70 wRC+ the rest of the way, including an ugly .185 batting average. His strikeout and walk rates were better in last year’s hot start than in this year’s.

Pirates fans will be the first to tell you that this movie could take a painful twist. The 2023 club entered May 20-9, then crashed out of contention before the All-Star break, but that team didn’t have Paul Skenes, interesting arms like Braxton Ashcraft, Bubba Chandler and Carmen Mlodzinksi, or the potential upside of Konnor Griffin.

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Precious, precious reason. I declare the glory of evidence sighted in the delayed rise of Jordan Walker. The Cardinals slugger, who is only 23 despite how much his face screams “dad trying his best”, has revived the dreams of his prospect days, and we might already know how.

At Baseball Prospectus, Daniel R. Epstein pointed out a change in Walker’s swing mechanics and connected the dots between that, his offseason work at Driveline and his former propensity to drive the ball into the ground. Walker has already bashed more homers in 2026 (eight) than he did in 396 plate appearances last season (six).

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Dr Pepper and the Johnsonville sausage company are selling a sausage made with the soda’s proprietary flavor blend. This news (and the product) somehow came out in March, avoiding April Fools’ confusion and eluding my notice until earlier this week.

Brand collabs are the Jack Cust of the algorithm age. Every time you think you’ve seen enough whiffs to banish them forever, they hit a home run and stick around for a few more turns. And this one is for me.

Now, Dr Pepper is the best soda — even in attempting to be a responsible adult and drink less soda, I find myself chasing less sugary fascimiles like Liquid Death’s Doctor Death or black cherry seltzers. I can’t totally wrap my head around how Dr Pepper’s combo of slightly biting spice and sweetness reconstitutes itself in sausage form, but Milwaukee Magazine’s taste test of the “Fizzy Glizzy” did not discourage me from wanting to try it.

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Since Mason Miller arrived in San Diego on Aug. 1 last year, the latest prize of a mild-melting A.J. Preller trade, he has a 0.55 ERA, and that’s somehow not the most impressive part. Even in the midst of a 30 2/3-inning scoreless streak, that ERA mark is still second to Raisel Iglesias. And, if we’re being honest, the current historical station of Miller’s streak — Second in Padres history! Next up, Cla Meredith! — doesn’t feel like a noteworthy accomplishment for a guy looking this dominant. He’s touching 103 mph and finishing hitters [read in Mortal Kombat voice] with an 88 mph boomerang of a slider.

Over that post-trade span, Miller is running a 60.2 K%. The next highest strikeout rate for a pitcher with at least 30 innings under his belt is 36.8%, by teammate Jeremiah Estrada. This season, his strikeout percentage is up at 76.7%, and he’s thoroughly in the chase to become the fourth pitcher to sit down more than half the batters he faces by way of the K — joining 2022 Edwin Diaz, 2014 Aroldis Chapman and 2012 Craig Kimbrel.

About that slider, which is Miller’s most-thrown pitch. It looks like this.

He’s generating whiffs on two-thirds of the swings at it since Aug. 1. The next best whiff rate on a pitch thrown at least 200 times is 50%. (In 2026, his slider whiff rate is 79%.)

A close Padres lead in the late innings is now appointment television. Adjust your schedules accordingly.

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The Mariners have a speakeasy window serving creative, flamboyant cocktails in T-Mobile Park.

They’re being suitably cheeky about it, with their VP of fan experience telling the Vinepair reporter who wrote about the drinks, “Folks were talking about this new door somewhere in the building, but nobody had a good sense of what it was, so when Opening Day hit, we were as surprised as the fans were; nobody knew who approved the door or even who installed it.”

I don’t know how long this will last without become a not-secret secret that perpetually inspires a line, but this is extremely my jam.

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Now for the unbelievable things that might drive one to drink.

Jesús Luzardo has allowed 21 runs in 22 2/3 innings. The Phillies starter, a popular Cy Young darkhorse who signed a five-year, $135 million extension that kicks in for 2027, is behind only Miles Mikolas on the dubious “runs allowed” leaderboard.

Yet he’s also near the top of the leaderboards you want to be on. Strikeout rate, strikeout minus walk rate, velocity for a starter. By park-adjusted Fielding Independent Pitching, a metric that strips out results on balls in play to sketch a more focused picture of what the pitcher controls, Luzardo is tied with Braves starter Bryce Elder, 31% better than MLB average. Luzardo’s ERA stands at 7.94. Elder’s is 0.77.

The batted balls do matter, but those aren’t a smoking gun either. Luzardo has one of the lowest hard-hit rates among starters. He’s allowed fewer batted balls with exit velocities over 95 mph than, say, Yoshinobu Yamamoto (ERA: 2.10).

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Allbirds, the once-ubiquitous tennis shoe company that had fallen on hard times, announced it is now a company about AI computing infrastructure. That’s absurd on its face, but here’s Matt Levine, author of Bloomberg’s great Money Stuff newsletter on the underlying reason for that cosmic pivot:

Allbirds is pivoting its stock to being an AI meme stock. That definitely worked out! The stock closed yesterday at $2.49 per share, for a market capitalization of about $22 million. Allbirds previously agreed to sell its sneaker business for $39 million and pay out the net proceeds to shareholders as a dividend; the $22 million market capitalization represented, roughly, the expected value of the dividend. At noon today, the stock was at $18.82, up 655% from yesterday’s close, for a market cap of about $164 million. That represents, uh, I guess it represents the expected value of the future AI-native cloud solutions business? Let’s go with that.

Maybe the Angels or White Sox should try pivoting their brand to “AI athletic testing engines” so they could get convincing sale prices and switch to ownership groups that might not actively kneecap their chances. Then again, I wouldn’t throw my lot in with anyone buying the meme stock either.

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The Astros have a 6.01 team ERA.

Ace Hunter Brown is on the IL with a shoulder injury. So it Cristian Javier. Tatsuya Imai, he of the pitch that isn’t a slider, just hit the injured list with arm fatigue he attributed to a failure to adjust to the American lifestyle, which is a quote someone should have stopped him from offering. Fellow winter addition Mike Burrows is getting shelled. Closer Josh Hader remains on the IL.

It’s cutting down a team boasting some thunderous bats. Yordan Alvarez is the best hitter in baseball so far, which doesn’t count as a surprise. Cam Smith has turned the page on an underwhelming rookie season with an early surge and defensive mastery.

With those polar extremes present in one club, Houston is 8-12, tied with the slow-starting Mariners. Nothing too worrisome in that record, but the pitching injuries are piling up without clear return dates.

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Then there’s the Mets. They have lost eight in a row. They are tied with the Giants and Rockies for the National League’s worst record. People are freaking out.

During the losing streak, the offense has been the problem. The Mets lineup, down an injured Juan Soto, has batted .175/.213/.257. That’s a 35 wRC+, untenable for a backup catcher bad. It’s also a week. So how bad is a truly horrific week, in the context of gauging a team’s prospects?

I made a big spreadsheet of each week of each team’s hitting performance since 2021 (minimum 200 plate appearances). The Mets, admittedly, are in the middle of their worst week, with a .377 OPS and a wRC+ of 9 (as in, 91% worse than the average MLB hitter) heading into Friday. But this week isn’t up yet, so it could change. Last week, they had a .519 OPS and a 49 wRC+, which is bad, but virtually the same as bad weeks the Yankees and the Brewers have already had this year, for instance.

You might imagine that teams posting bottom-of-the-barrel bad weeks like the one the Mets are in are inherently bad. Some are. The 2022 A’s posted the worst week of OPS in this span, and they lost 102 games. The second-worst week came from Cleveland in 2021, a team that finished 80-82. The third-worst came from the 2024 Braves, who won 89 games and made the playoffs.

The 2025 Blue Jays — inches from becoming World Series champions you might remember — ripped off a week in late April with a dire .163 batting average, .472 OPS and 33 wRC+.

April is a common thread in many of these. Across all months, about 6.5% of all MLB team weeks since 2021 have wound up in cringeworthy territory below a 60 wRC+, the same mark Martin Maldonado posted from 2021 to 2025. But 8.4% of team weeks beginning in April have fallen below the Maldonado Threshold.

The gap was even more stark in 2025, for what it’s worth. A whopping 12% of team weeks were sub-Maldonado last year, and no other month had more than 6.7% under the line.

So the offense in Queens is unbelievably bad right now. That’s real, I guess, but it’s real in the way a TikTok is real. It probably won’t last long or make much sense when you try to explain it later.

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