Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman all represent the Los Angeles Dodgers while Francisco Lindor and Pete Alonso represent the New York Mets. First and foremost, it's a win for baseball to have so many prominent players on the national stage like this.

That can mean a host of things: fashioning a new pitch, steadying mechanics, out-scheming the opposition, solving for what the opponent is trying to do before they do it, and so on. It ought to go without writing that every player and every team has to make some kind of adjustments throughout the season.

It has been quite an adventure since. The Mets have had three managers and three heads of baseball operations in Lindor’s four seasons. They won 101 games in 2022 but finished second to the Braves in a tiebreaker and promptly lost in the wild-card round.