All three of us were back for this one. We did the weekend recap thing first, then Eric did what Eric does best, which is take the show international and remind you baseball is not just a North American habit. It’s a global disease and we all have it.
The world game is already delivering
Japan first. Nippon-Ham’s Haruki Hosono threw a no-hitter in his first start of the season against Lotte on March 31. That is the 103rd no-hitter in Japanese pro baseball history, which is a ridiculous sentence on its own.
Korea next. The KBO is in a funny spot where popularity is surging, and the league keeps trying to shorten games, but the actual games are getting longer anyway. Korea JoongAng Daily reported that after the first week, nine-inning games were averaging 3 hours 12 minutes, which is 10 minutes longer than last season, and they put a lot of it down to a league-wide spike in walks.
If you want the “baseball is booming” datapoint to match it, KBO exhibition games drew a record 440,247 fans across 60 games, up from the previous record set in 2025.
Taiwan was the best one. The CPBL season opener at the Taipei Dome ended with a walk-off hit by pitch. Bases loaded, bottom of the ninth, and the winning run comes home because the batter wears one off the foot. World Baseball Network noted it was the first CPBL opener ever decided that way.
Also, it happened in front of a sold-out crowd of 40,000 at the Taipei Dome, which tells you everything you need to know about where the sport is at in Taiwan right now.
That whole segment was basically Eric saying, “If you only watch MLB, you’re missing half the fun.”
Early red lights: Giants and Red Sox
Then we came back to the majors and started talking about teams that feel like they have a flashing warning light already.
San Francisco is the headline here. The Giants are off to a 3–7 start, and the underlying stuff looks ugly too. True Blue LA noted they were averaging 2.6 runs per game and had a league-worst -25 run differential at that point.
Spoon called them as a worry before the season, so you can imagine how pleasant he was about this.
Boston has been rough as well. Sitting at 2–8 early, and the results have been messy, including another loss to Milwaukee in a game they absolutely had chances to win.
Again, Spoon was annoyingly early on this too, which is becoming a theme.
The NL Central is fun, and I am watching Pirates games on purpose
Now for the surprise joy of the early season. The NL Central looks like an actual fight.
As of the early standings snapshot, Milwaukee is out front at 8–2, the Reds and Pirates are playing good baseball, and the Cubs are sitting last at 4–6.
That matters because the pre-season market treated the Cubs like the obvious answer, and within a week the division has gone, “Not so fast.”
And yes, the Pirates are fun. This is not a sentence I thought I would say in April, but it is true. They have real energy, they have real young-player vibe, and O’Neil Cruz still hits baseballs like he is trying to dent the moon.
Spoon’s midweek plays
We finished the episode with Spoon’s two plays for the midweek slate. Tuesday in the US, Wednesday morning for us in Australia. The matchups were Reds vs Marlins and Blue Jays vs Dodgers.
The Jays-Dodgers angle is especially juicy right now, because the Dodgers just torched Toronto 14–2 in a World Series rematch, and Max Scherzer exited early with forearm tendinitis. That changes the whole feel of a series.
That’s the episode. World game weirdness, early season warning lights, and a division that nobody was supposed to be scared of suddenly looking like the most annoying division to win.
