How Broad Street Ledger Watches Baseball
The early parts of a season often appear in small shifts: a change in pace, a different decision window, a pitcher settling into a clearer plan.
Early in any season, teams reveal themselves in small movements long before the standings do. A hitter adjusts the way he loads on a quiet count. A pitcher settles on a sequence that keeps a fastball alive for later. A catcher shifts the zone by half a baseball and gives a young arm a place to work. These moments do not decide games by themselves, but they begin to shape what a team will become.
The story usually starts with pace. Some players work inside a narrow rhythm that holds steady from spring into summer. Others drift. Their timing stretches, their decisions arrive a beat late, and the strike zone starts to feel larger than it is. You see it in the way they approach deliberate counts, or in how they handle a pitch they used to ignore.
Pitchers show their own version of this. A stable identity has a certain feel: a clear plan for early counts, a way to protect the fastball, a sense for when a hitter is ready for a change in shape. When that pattern weakens, the inning begins to tilt even before the scoreboard notices.
These are the moments worth watching. They are small enough to miss, and they rarely make highlight reels, but they are where a season starts to lean in one direction rather than another. The work here follows those shifts and tries to understand what they tell us about the team as it moves forward.