Welcome to The Opener, where every weekday morning you’ll get a fresh, topical column to start your day from one of SI.com’s MLB writers.
Congratulations! We’ve made it to the end of April—which means that baseball is a month into the season and therefore can be analyzed (somewhat) concretely. So what have we learned about MLB in 2021? (Other than that offense is down and position players pitching are up.) Here are five takeaways:
Pitching staffs are back to normal-ish
Last year was a horrendous one to manage a pitching staff.