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Who in MLB is must-see right now? Introducing the season’s most watchable teams and players

Who in MLB is must-see right now? Introducing the season's most watchable teams and players

We’re a little under two weeks into the MLB season, and there have already been quite a few surprises, from a still-undefeated team to a powerhouse struggling to get going. What has grabbed our attention enough to become must-see TV? Even if you’ve already settled into your routine with your go-to teams and players, get ready to expand your horizons.

We asked MLB experts Bradford Doolittle, Alden Gonzalez, Kiley McDaniel, Jeff Passan, Jesse Rogers and David Schoenfield to give us the rundown on who has our full attention whenever they take the field and what makes them worth your time.

The teams we can’t get enough of right now

The hitters whose at-bats you can’t miss

The pitchers we drop everything to see on the mound

Doolittle: He’s mesmerizing. He attacks, attacks, attacks, with filthy stuff and pinpoint location — always challenging hitters, but with precision and intelligence. This is an elite pitcher who remains on top of his game. His ability to zip into the late innings with a low pitch count is so organic that you wonder why all pitchers don’t do what he does. But if you saw Alcantara whitewash the Minnesota Twins in less than two hours (1 hour and 57 minutes, to be exact) last week, you would be reminded why they can’t. There is only one Sandy Alcantara, and if you aren’t tuning in to watch when he’s on the mound, that is a day you have wasted.


Schoenfield: Maybe I am overthinking this one. Manoah is built like a 500-year-old oak tree, so you would expect him to throw triple-digit blazing fastballs, but he instead works off a rather pedestrian fastball with league-average velocity. So maybe he’s a little less awe-inspiring than some other starters, but I love his old-school approach of trying to outthink batters rather than just overpower them.

What makes Manoah extra entertaining, however, are two things that rub opponents the wrong way: (1) He throws inside — a lot and sometimes with a little purpose, leading the AL in hit batters in both 2021 and 2022; (2) He’s, shall we say, a little demonstrative on the mound and talkative off it, which has led to a few chirping incidents with teams — most notably with the Boston Red Sox last season and when he referred to Gerrit Cole as “the worst cheater in baseball.”

Boston outfielder Alex Verdugo ripped Manoah’s antics last week on a local podcast when he said, “Like I’ll say it right now, I think Alek Manoah goes about it the wrong way, 100 percent I think he does. … So it’s like, s— like that just pisses me off. It’s not the way it should be played.” Manoah’s response: “Coming from him? I don’t give a s—.” So, umm, yeah, Manoah’s starts are worth watching — especially against the Red Sox and Yankees.


Passan: For the second consecutive year, Duran is my choice, and I’m perfectly comfortable with that because we’re seeing a new version of him. The stuff is still the same. He throws the hardest right-handed fastball in the big leagues, sitting at 101.5 mph. His splinker, a hybrid sinker-splitter, is a one-of-a-kind pitch. But Duran’s curveball might be the best of the lot, an 88 mph knee-buckler he’s now throwing nearly 50% of the time, up from 31% last year. This is as close as we’ve been to a fully formed version of Duran, and he has established himself as much more than a radar goof. He’s right there, alongside Emmanuel Clase and Andres Muñoz, as perhaps the premier raw-stuff guy in the big leagues. Even though Duran goes just one inning at a time, that inning is bound to be a show.


Shohei Ohtani

Gonzalez: Lately, I’ve been most intrigued by watching the way Ohtani navigates starts when he doesn’t have his A-plus command. It happened in his most recent outing, on a frigid Wednesday afternoon in Seattle. Ohtani had a hard time landing his breaking balls and used up 68 of his pitches to record the game’s first nine outs. Somehow, though, he completed six innings, gave up only one run and got the win. As the outing prolonged, his stuff got better, more precise.

The fastball-splitter combination used to be Ohtani’s bread and butter, but the slider — often called a sweeper — has developed into arguably his best pitch, top among the six or so he throws. Keep in mind that when Ohtani was finally able to take on a two-way role full time in 2021, he had compiled less than 80 innings over the previous four years. He’s still developing as a pitcher. And it’s so much fun to watch his growth in action.


McDaniel: Maybe your nightmares have Michael Myers or the Predator in them. Mine, however, is that I wake up and I’m in the box facing a wild-eyed Scherzer late in the game and I can’t tell if it’s time for a dastardly slider that I can’t lay off or a brushback heater that will make my life flash before my eyes. Naturally, it’s fun for me to be eating snacks on my couch while I watch a well-paid professional be forced to live my nightmare, often with the same result in the box score as if I were hitting.


Rogers: If strikeouts are your thing, then Cease is your guy. His slider is as sick as they come, leaving hitters shaking their heads as they march back to the dugout after another K. He’s at the top of the leaderboard again this season after finishing second in the AL in strikeouts last year. And he made some history in his 2023 debut when he became just the fourth AL pitcher to ever strikeout at least 10 without issuing a walk on Opening Day. Even when ill — as he was in start No. 2 this season — he was a must-watch, navigating around five walks over five innings. He gave up just a run, and of course, struck out eight. He’s the real deal on the mound.