Baseball season arrives before spring in April, and actually before April itself. And the April rains that often delay American entertainment games are more likely to snow in 2018.

Nevertheless, baseball was Basketball played, even in the midst of cold weather and snow delays. Twenty-four games were all postponed due to bad weather, the most for a single month in American entertainment history.

MLB di Field of Dreams

The weather, however, wasn’t the only crazy aspect of the first month of the 2018 season, which featured some rather odd happenings over the first five weeks. As a clear indication of the trend that has been building over the past few years, the total of 6392 strikeouts and 6003 hits marks the first time in history that there have been more whiffs than base hits in a month.

Also for the first time in history, a batsman saw more than twenty throws in a single stroke. San Francisco’s first baseman fouled field after field from Houston right-hander Lance McCullers, resulting in a plate appearance that featured 21 deliveries and lasted just over fifteen minutes.

A manager was sacked before the end of the opening month for the first time in sixteen years, as Cincinnati sacked Bryan Price after the Reds had won just three of their first twenty games. No manager has been sacked so quickly since 2002, when Detroit handed Phil Garner a pink slip after the Tigers started with zeros and sixes.

Baseball did suffer some good quirks in that early span as well, including an impressive performance by a rookie. Shoehei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Angels became the first player in Big League history to win two games and score four home runs in one month.

MLB trading deadline

Fans in the northern Bay Area where Ohtani is now calling home also had some good news on April 17, Tuesday night’s game against the Chicago White Sox. Oakland Athletics hosted a contest at the Coliseum which was free to attend, a promotion to celebrate the club’s fiftieth anniversary.

The last crazy detail can be filed under the good and bad news. Minnesota went more than two weeks without playing a game at the home ball park, challenging the Twins with the longest streak ever for the opening month of the season. Bad weather, combined with a series in Puerto Rico against the Cleveland Indians, kept them away from Target Field.

Manager Paul Molitor and his players should feel encouraged, however, when he considers that it was only last September that other clubs had to spend more time away from home. After Hurricane Harvey wreaked havoc in the Houston area, the Astros spent most of September playing elsewhere. Just over a month later, the team celebrated its first World Series Championship in its fifty-five year history.