The 5 best things in baseball right now

There’s always something fascinating going on in the world of baseball -- and there’s always something new. Every Friday morning throughout the season, heading into the weekend, inspired by Zach Lowe’s terrific “10 Things I Like” NBA column for ESPN, we present the Five Fascinations, five fun things going on in the baseball world. Submit your personal fascinations to will.leitch@mlb.com.

1. Is this the year Juan Soto wins an MVP Award?

Because Soto is still somehow only 25 years old, there is a sense that he is just getting started, that he somehow just got here. But you know, this is Soto’s seventh year in the big leagues -- he made his debut the same year as Corbin Burnes, John Means, Kyle Tucker, and yes, Shohei Ohtani -- which is already a pretty substantial big league career. Soto's career is only five years shorter so far than, say, Kirby Puckett’s entire career -- and Puckett is in the Hall of Fame. That leads one to ask: Considering how great Soto has been already, since Day 1 isn’t it about time for him to win an MVP Award?

• Wild stats from the first week of the season

The other two transcendent stars to debut in 2018 -- Ohtani and Ronald Acuña Jr. -- already have three MVP Awards between them, but Soto's best finish is NL MVP runner-up in 2021, and he finished a distant sixth in NL MVP voting with the Padres last year. Soto is the sort of transcendent player whose career will be judged not by whether or not he wins an MVP, but how many.

And it’s all lining up for him this year. He has four clear advantages:

A) Soto plays for one of the most famous sports teams in the world. The Yankees tend to show up on your TV a lot, though, to be fair, only two Yankees have won an MVP in the last 40 years: Aaron Judge and Alex Rodriguez (twice).

B) Soto will be seen as the savior if the Yankees recover from last season. New York has more on the line than nearly any other team in the sport, and if the club can make the playoffs -- or even better, win the AL East -- he’ll be seen as the primary difference maker. You’re already seeing this with the Yankees’ hot start: The highlights feature Soto doing something every night.

C) His counting numbers should explode at Yankee Stadium. Soto hit a career-high 35 homers in San Diego last year, but he should be able to best that with relative ease at left-handed-hitting-friendly Yankee Stadium. If he puts 40 or more on the board, no one will be able to claim he just takes walks anymore. (Though, he of course does that, too.)

D) Betts, Acuña and Ohtani all play in the National League. That certainly helps, particularly with Betts’ face-melting start. The primary competition for Soto may well be his own teammate in Judge.

In a few weeks, we’ll do our first MLB.com poll for our favorites to win the MVP Award. Soto will almost certainly be the early leader in the American League. It’s all setting up for him to hold that spot all year. For what it’s worth: Ted Williams didn’t win his first MVP Award until he was 27. (Though that World War II business had a little bit to do with that.)

2. Phillies fans are just getting warmed up

Of all the October memories this sport has given us over the past few years, the first thing I think of when I close my eyes is how absolutely bonkers Phillies fans have been at Citizens Bank Park. It has been a little different than perhaps what we’ve come to expect from Philadelphia fans: I wouldn’t say they’ve been friendly, exactly, but they’ve been more intensely supportive of their team rather than intensely terrifying for opposing fanbases. They just love this team.

The genesis of this was actually during the pandemic, when Phillies fans -- with their team playing (like everybody else) in empty ballparks -- gathered outside the gates of Citizens Bank Park to make a ton of noise. “The Phandemic Krew,” as they were called, drove other teams nuts; Yankees manager Aaron Boone actually complained about them that year, becoming the first manager in baseball history to criticize fans after a game played in an empty stadium. They laid the groundwork for last year’s postseason (in which manager Rob Thomson labeled the crowd "Four Hours of Hell"), and that has continued into this year, with Citizens Bank deafening on a nightly basis.

How deafening? Well, they’re making so much noise that they’re actually missing good news. Last Sunday, after a replay review, umpire Mark Wegner made a two-part announcement in which he said, first, that baserunner Bryson Stott was indeed out at second base. The crowd reacted so loudly that everyone in the park missed the second part -- the call at first was overturned and Johan Rojas was actually safe -- and both teams went into the dugout. assuming it was an inning-ending double play. Wegner had to repeat himself, with less booing this time, to get the Phillies and Braves back on the field.

Now, that’s a hot crowd: One that is so loud that no one can even hear the loudspeakers. And it's worth noting that the Citizens Bank Park crowd did this in March. Imagine what that place is going to be like in October (again).

3. Mike Trout would like you to know that he is just fine, thank you

I made my first trip to the ballpark on Monday night, when I headed to loanDepot park in Miami to watch the Angels play the winless Marlins. Miami leapt out to a 4-0 first-inning lead, and I found myself feeling terrible for Trout. Here he was, a future Hall of Famer and still one of the best players I’ve ever seen, patrolling center field for a depleted Angels team that just waved goodbye to one of the only players (Ohtani) really able to rival Trout over the past half-decade.

Trout spent the spring struggling, and even looking somewhat slow and bulky, then his team got drilled by the Orioles in the first two games of the year. And now, he was spending his Monday night in a mostly empty ballpark down 4-0 to a team that had just been swept in four games at home by the Pirates.

Is this how it was supposed to end up for Trout? Doesn’t a legend of his stature deserve better?

These thoughts vanished from my brain rather quickly when Trout actually came to the plate. In the fourth inning, he launched his second homer of the season to cut the Marlins’ lead to 4-2 -- a vintage Trout moonshot that reminded you that, oh yeah, I’m watching one of the best baseball players of all time. But it really got exciting when Trout came up in the sixth inning and tied the game with one of the longest home run I’ve seen in person since Mark McGwire put a band-aid on the old Busch Stadium with his supposed 545-foot home run.

The Angels went on to win the game -- and ended up sweeping the Marlins. They’re now in first place, having won four in a row, and Trout has a 1.015 OPS, just like he always seems to have. It was a reminder that if you get a chance to see Trout in person, no matter how his team is doing, you really must do so. We won’t see the likes of him again.

4. Pirates fans welcome home their team

As loud as those Phillies fans have been the past couple of years, I still don’t think I’ve ever heard a noise quite as loud -- at any stadium -- in the past decade-plus than when the Pirates hosted the 2013 NL Wild Card Game against the Reds. One of baseball’s best fanbases, famished for any sort of success, brought a hockey-style mentality to PNC Park for the club's first postseason game in more than 20 years. The fans got so loud and rowdy that they literally made a shell-shocked Johnny Cueto drop the ball on the mound.

Yeah, that would rattle me too: That’s downright terrifying.

It won’t be that loud for the Pirates’ home opener Friday afternoon against the Orioles, but there’s plenty of reason for Bucco boosters to be excited so far. The Pirates are 5-1 after a sweep of the Marlins and taking two out of three from the Nationals. Those aren’t exactly juggernauts, but 5-1 is 5-1. You don’t have to squint hard to see the building blocks for the Pirates: Oneil Cruz at last looks healthy, Bryan Reynolds and Ke’Bryan Hayes are regulars that would be the envy of any team and that Michael A. Taylor addition looks particularly smart.

When you consider all the young players on the cusp here, you can see why analysts like The Athletic’s Eno Sarris (who picked them to make the playoffs this year) are so high on them. That strikes me as a year early for the Pirates, but no matter what, this looks like a fun, exciting young team that may once again have that building rocking in one of these upcoming Octobers. And in one of the more charming local traditions, the first pitch for their home opener comes at 4:12 in honor of Pittsburgh’s 412 area code.

Hold on tight to the ball, opposing pitchers.

5. Mookie Betts at WAR

Betts’ incredibly hot start has been breathtaking to behold, an all-time talent at his absolute best from the very beginning of the season. (At a new position, no less.) Now, obviously, the notion of putting together any player’s WAR total a week into the season is a little absurd -- it’s kind of absurd to do it even halfway through the season, all told -- but Betts has been so incredible that I decided to have a little fun with Fangraphs' WAR.

A mere nine games into the season, Betts has notched a whopping 1.4 fWAR, which is obviously the best figure in baseball. Second place is Bobby Witt Jr. at a distant 0.7.

How high of a figure is Betts' mark after only nine games?

Well, here is an incomplete list of players who accounted for 1.4 fWAR all of last season: Kyle Schwarber, Ryan O’Hearn, Christopher Morel, Nick Martinez and Spencer Torkelson. Betts has put up his 1.4 WAR in just 42 plate appearances; Schwarber put up his 1.4 WAR last season in 720 plate appearances. (Schwarber finished 19th in NL MVP voting last year, by the way.)

Fun Series of the Weekend: Astros-Rangers

The Astros might have been still licking their wounds from that opening series sweep at the hands of the Yankees, but there’s nothing quite like a completely out-of-nowhere no-hitter from a guy making his eighth career start to put such unpleasantness comfortably in the rearview mirror. Now, Houston gets to concentrate on catching up with the intrastate rival Rangers, who are already 2 1/2 games up just a week into the season -- all while staring upward, mouths collectively agape, at those shiny new World Series championship pennants. Sunday is a particularly big day for the Astros: At night, Ronel Blanco will be on national TV trying to get his Johnny Vander Meer on, and five hours before that, Justin Verlander will be making his first rehab start for the Sugar Land Space Cowboys, Houston's Triple-A affiliate, on Sunday (watch free here). Verlander has always had a little bit of Space Cowboy vibe, all told.