The Pulse Newsletter 📣 | This is The Athletic’s daily sports newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Pulse directly in your inbox.Good morning! Hope you get to savor the holiday. Coming up:
Checkpoints: Wait, those teams are leading MLB?We’re going with an obvious lead, as today marks the unofficial start of summer and a pretty-much-official milestone in MLB’s season. Here’s Tyler Kepner:In baseball, almost every team will win one-third of its games and lose one-third of its games. It’s the other third that makes the difference. In a 162-game schedule, that one-third number is 54 games, which comes for most teams around Memorial Day.In other words, we’ve reached a scenic milepost on the long drive to October. And when we pull over to admire the standings, the view looks pretty spectacular.That’s because the season is upending conventional wisdom, which is always pretty fun. Several underdog rosters are thriving in the final year of the collective bargaining agreement between the owners and players.In fact, most of the first-place teams rank among MLB’s lowest spenders:
The Brewers lead the National League Central. The Rays lead the American League East. The Guardians lead the AL Central. The Athletics, who play in West Sacramento, lead the AL West.
