Opinion

It's easy to say things like "it's still early" or "there's still a lot of baseball to be played," and just one month into the 2014 MLB season, it's absolutely true.

However, that doesn't make it any less alarming for fans to look up at the scoreboard and see one of their team's key hitters currently hovering below the Mendoza line.

What follows is my best guess at whether or not each of the top-15 players currently battling through an early-season slump will turn things around.

At the conclusion of play on April 11, most major league teams had played at least 10 games or one-sixteenth of a six-month schedule. For baseball fans familiar with week-to-week reactions of NFL fans, the 2014 season is at the same stage a football season is after Week 1.

That, of course, can be taken in different ways. No position player has garnered enough at-bats to derive legitimate meaning, nor does any pitcher have enough innings to tell a full tale. Of course, hot or cold starts could be instructive when projecting the rest of the year.

When the San Diego Padres inserted Andrew Cashner into their starting rotation a few weeks into the 2013 season, it may have been his last chance to prove he could be durable enough to remain there.

We're still in the portion of the season when you have to be careful about taking anything at face value—especially with performances that seem out of character.

On that note, here's me telling caution to take a hike so I can say this: You might want to take the Milwaukee Brewers seriously as NL Central contenders.

When CC Sabathia was in his prime, dominance seemed to follow regardless how sharp his stuff was in a particular outing. Upon arriving to the New York Yankees in 2009, the perfect blend of talent and maturity accompanied the big lefty to the Bronx. 

Yes, it's early on in the 2014 regular season. And, yes, there's still lots of baseball to play—a whole summer, in fact.

But in a big market like New York, team officials are always being looked at through a microscope and every step, every movement, is watched with great intensity. It's just the nature of the beast that is the Big Apple.

It was rough for a while there, but it looks like our long Nationals nightmare may finally be over.

Yes, Bryce Harper looks like he's back.

Starting the season off with a 4-8 record is probably not what Arizona Diamondbacks manager Kirk Gibson had in mind.

The team began 1-7, marking it the worst start in franchise history, with one more loss in the first eight games than the club’s inaugural season in 1998. And after finishing the past two seasons with an 81-81 finish, winning one game in eight tries is going to start raising concerns.

Thursday night during the Yankees vs. Red Sox game, Michael Pineda cheated, plain and simple.

There was enough pine tar, Firm Grip, Valvoline or Jell-O pudding on the palm of his throwing hand, and back of his glove hand, that most of the Internet thought he had just watched the movie Naked Gun before taking the mound (skip to the 2:30 mark).

As a fun way to put each team's early-season records into perspective, I extrapolated their current winning percentage out over a full 162 games in order to see how they would be projected to finish if they kept up their current pace.

From there, I decided if each team's start to the year was fact or fiction, based on whether their projection was plus-or-minus eight wins of where I think they'll finish the year.

Why eight games? Because eight games gave me roughly a five-percent margin of error in either direction, allowing for a clearly defined range with which to work.