Opinion

It's April. No one is out of anything. Panic buttons should be stowed until further notice.

But so far, things aren't going according to plan for the New York Mets.

Kenta Maeda's scoreless streak ended Sunday night.

But the high hopes Los Angeles Dodgers fans have for the Japanese right-hander should be alive and well.

After opening his big league career with 12 shutout frames spread over two starts, Maeda finally coughed up a run in the third inning Sunday against the San Francisco Giants on a solo homer by Joe Panik.

While fans and pundits alike declare winners and losers of trades only seconds after they've been announced and before the players involved take the field for their new teams, it takes years before we can accurately assess which club truly came out ahead in a deal.

That's especially true for trades involving prospects—many still years away from potentially making an impact in the big leagues. We know all too well that minor league success doesn't necessarily translate into big league stardom.

And now for a question that's simultaneously the last thing the St. Louis Cardinals want to ask, and also the first thing they currently can't ignore:

What if Adam Wainwright isn't Adam Wainwright anymore?

Sooner or later, the lights go out on every MLB superstar.

At the height of a player’s peak, fans can’t picture him ever falling from the throne. Yet the likes of Joe Mauer, Josh Hamilton, Tim Lincecum and CC Sabathia offer cruel reminders that the unforgiving Father Time transforms All-Stars into overpaid veterans who are trying to contribute however slightly.

Imagine if the Washington Nationals had started this way last year.

Come to think of it, the Nationals were supposed to start this way last year. Start this way, finish this way, play all year this way.

"The boys are playing as good as you can possibly play," broadcaster F.P. Santangelo said on MASN when the latest Nationals win ended Friday night.

Few things excite Mike Trout like the weather. Give him a good storm, and you can see lightning bolts in his eyes.

During a blizzard last winter, he phoned in a report to the Weather Channel. In appreciation—or, perhaps, out of sheer amusement—the network promised to send him a weather balloon.

You know what they say about $240 million contracts. It's amazing how quickly they can go from looking like money well spent to money wasted and back to money well spent again.

When the Washington Nationals' Bryce Harper does something, he does it all the way.

The latest example of this baseball truism came Thursday in the nation's capital, when Harper launched his 100th career home run off the Atlanta Braves' Julio Teheran. 

Per the early results, the recent trade between the Houston Astros and Philadelphia Phillies should be referred to not as "the Ken Giles trade," but as "the Vince Velasquez trade."

At least on a knee-jerk level, that's just sound logic. While Giles sits there with an ERA over 12.00 through four appearances out of Houston's bullpen, Velasquez looks like a man on a mission in the Phillies rotation.