With May winding down, it's becoming increasingly clear which teams are legitimate World Series contenders in 2024 and what the remaining clubs need to do to improve their futures. The Philadelphia Phillies, Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Yankees and Baltimore Orioles look to be championship contenders. The Atlanta Braves deserve to be mentioned, but quite a bit has gone wrong for them this season.
The Cleveland Guardians, Kansas City Royals and Milwaukee Brewers are off to tremendous starts, but it's fair to wait a bit longer before inserting them into the World Series discussion. After that, there's a lot of mediocre and even more bad. And there's a lot of terrible.
You could realistically watch the Chicago White Sox, Miami Marlins, Los Angeles Angels or Colorado Rockies and feel like you're seeing the worst team in the sport. So, as May concludes, here's one sentence to describe each of the 30 clubs as the second month of the season closes. One Sentence Summary: Underperforming stars need to heat up.
It was a reasonable take coming into the season that the Diamondbacks—last year's National League champions—had a chance to be a significantly better regular-season team than they were in 2023. They had won 84 games and snuck into the playoffs as the senior circuit's last wild-card representative. But that hasn't materialized to this point, and it's largely due to underperforming stars.
NL Rookie of the Year Corbin Carroll has just a .543 OPS, while veterans Eugenio Suáre.
