Opinion

1. Boston, Where the Baseballs Are Overly Inflated

The red-faced Red Sox held a players-only meeting in Toronto on Saturday, just a couple of days after the club axed pitching coach Juan Nieves.

Two years ago, Nieves oversaw a pitching staff that produced a 3.79 ERA, the organization's lowest since 2002, and the Red Sox won themselves a World Series.

With five weeks of the 2015 MLB season complete, we've gotten a pretty good look at the post-Derek Jeter New York Yankees. And sappiness be damned, they just don't quite look the same without him.

There's one way, however, that this has been a very, very good thing.

Few players in baseball have been more consistently MVP-worthy over the past handful of seasons than Andrew McCutchen. Yet more than a month into 2015, the Pittsburgh Pirates center fielder, who has three straight top-three NL MVP finishes—including the 2013 trophy—has looked nothing like his usual MVP-caliber self.

Every offseason, the MLB hype machine sputters to life. Fans, pundits and media outlets (including us here at Bleacher Report) throw their support behind potential juggernauts and dark horses, building some clubs up and tearing others down.

Then the games start and, usually, it all goes out the window.

If he's so inclined, Zack Greinke can end his six-year contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers after only three seasons at the end of 2015. He just better make sure he has a really good season first.

Seven starts in, it wouldn't be fair to call his 2015 season "really good." It's been more like "superb."

Last season, the Arizona Diamondbacks finished with the worst record in baseball at 64-98. There were many glaring weaknesses with the team, but it was the 8-22 start that likely buried the D-backs' playoff hopes before the month of May even began.

As if anyone needed further confirmation that no pitcher is safe from Tommy John surgery in today's MLB, another ace has bitten the dust.

This time, it's Tampa Bay Rays right-hander Alex Cobb. And while that's a shame in and of itself, what makes it an even bigger shame is that his career as an ace was just beginning to take off.

Fans of any sport tend to react and overreact to anything and everything surrounding their favorite team, and Major League Baseball is certainly no exception.

That goes double for the small sample sizes we have to work with during the early parts of the year, and it's important to remember it's a long, 162-game season.

With that in mind, what follows is my take on the early-season approval rating of all 30 MLB teams, based on how they have performed to this point and how they look to be positioned for the long haul.

Expectations poured down on Gerrit Cole unlike few Major League Baseball draftees before him. 

That tends to happen when you have a triple-digit fastball, are picked first overall and sign for an $8 million bonus, the highest ever in MLB draft history.

The only job that followed for Cole was living up to the hype. Billing it was the easy part. Fulfilling it, that would take some professional seasoning.

Based on your general disposition, you see the Cincinnati Reds in one of the two following lights: They're a team at or floating around .500 with baseball's worst OBP and worst bullpen ERA, or they're a team at .500 and tied for the remaining wild-card slot.

History suggests Reds owner Bob Castellini will see the latter. He's a competitive soul, so long as the Reds can sniff a playoff spot, don't expect them to sell.