You know Spring Training doesn’t matter. Of course you do. There are the few things you can’t fake, like increased velocity, but for the vast majority of what’s going on out there, Spring Training results don’t translate into the regular season, and there are a thousand reasons why. People play so irregularly that by luck of the draw, the quality of competition any individual player sees varies substantially. Some guys are working on something specific–a new pitch, trying to go the other way, a new stance. And that’s before we even get to the cardinal sin of analysis gone awry: small sample size.
Before getting too excited, let’s remember that the 2024 Cactus League MVP was Mitch Haniger
