Throughout the illustrious history of “Dugout Diaries,” now celebrating its lucky-13th edition, I’ve provided the Daily Trojan readership with an abundance of baseball takes that can only be described as flawless. 

“Aaron Judge deserves MVP”? He won it a few months later. “Shohei Ohtani is worth $700 million”? He led the Los Angeles Dodgers to a World Series title with one of the best playoff performances in recent memory. “USC baseball is back”? The Trojans won 12 games in a row following that column … after already having won seven in a row beforehand.

Yes, dear reader, it seems that whatever I say goes when it comes to baseball — and with the 2026 MLB season underway, it’s as good a time as ever to deliver some more ball knowledge to the world. But how could I pick just one topic when there’s so much to write about?

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Today, I’ll be trying something a little different: Rather than one cohesive column, I’ve decided to give you three mini-columns, all with the same familiar combination of intelligence and lovable wit.

Consider this an anthology of my biggest takeaways from the first three weeks of the MLB season. A real “The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh” (1977), for those of you who had childhoods.

Maybe robots are the future

After years of boos, furious tweets and Kyle Schwarber freakouts directed at MLB umpires, the baseball gods have finally granted us with one of their best inventions yet: automatic balls and strikes. No longer can the sport’s greatest villains decide that a ball three feet out of the zone was actually a strike — looking at you, Ángel Hernández — unless they want to be embarrassed in front of 40,000 people.

While I haven’t yet had the pleasure of attending a game with the ABS rules in place, I’ve watched plenty from home, and the way fans react to a challenge is electric. Just when you think the other team’s star hitter got a walk, your catcher taps his helmet, and a massive replay graphic appears on the Jumbotron. The ball clipped the corner of the zone — strike three. The stadium erupts. 

Unlike your average replay review, which can last several minutes and take you out of a dramatic moment, the ABS challenge is instant. Within seconds of a pitch being challenged, the whole stadium knows whether or not it was a strike. The count gets adjusted; play resumes as normal. It’s a beautiful system.

I’ve been an outspoken advocate for many of MLB’s recent rule changes — thank you, pitch clock — and the “robot umpires” are no different. The new challenge system preserves the integrity of the game without disrupting its pace in any tangible way, creating a few more exciting moments along the way for a sport often derided as being too “boring.” I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

Nobody’s actually that good

Well, except for the Dodgers, but that goes without saying. Aside from the trillion-dollar-budget supervillain superteam, which is off to a 13-4 start, nobody has established themselves as being particularly great. Only five of the league’s 30 teams are more than three games over .500, and two of those teams are the Pittsburgh Pirates and Cincinnati Reds — as a lifelong National League Central fan, I promise you that won’t last.

Now, we’re obviously less than 20 games into the season; the pecking order is far from being set in stone. But even with such a small sample size, is everyone usually this … mediocre? Of the next eight teams after L.A. in ESPN’s preseason power rankings, seven are at or below .500, and the New York Yankees are the exception at a whopping 10-8.

Whatever happened to the 100-win juggernauts? Back in my day, we used to see massive win totals all the time; in fact, every full season from 2017 to 2023 had at least three squads win 100 or more games. Since then, however, we’ve gone back-to-back years without a single one, and it looks like the Dodgers may be the only real contender to accomplish the feat this time around.

For a sport that has seen so much heated debate surrounding parity in recent years, we seem to be in an era where teams are actually closer together in the standings — even the Dodgers only won 93 games last year. I’m certainly not complaining; how else would my beloved St. Louis Cardinals stand a chance?

Mike Trout is so back

Oh, Mike Trout. Aside from being one of two MLB players who chief copy editor Anna Jordan can name, the Los Angeles Angels outfielder is one of the sport’s all-time greats. In his first eight full seasons from 2012 to 2019, he won three MVP awards, finished second four other times and accumulated 71.7 Wins Above Replacement — for reference, that’s more than the average Hall of Famer has for their entire career.

However, in the years since that glorious stretch, a terrible tragedy has struck Trout: the injury bug. From 2021 to 2024, he missed an average of nearly 100 games per season, robbing the baseball world of a substantial portion of his prime. Then, in 2025, he finally played close to a full season … and was just pretty good. Not elite. Not MVP-caliber. Is Trout … washed?

Well, reader, I reject that notion — and it appears Trout does, too. Through his first 18 games, Trout already has six home runs and 15 RBIs, putting him on pace for career highs in both categories; while that pace probably won’t last, it’s exciting to see nonetheless. The underlying metrics back up his hot start as well, as his chase and barrel rates rank near the top of the league, and his 1.1 WAR ranks in the top 10 among position players.

Two of Trout’s homers came in Monday’s game against the Yankees, in which Judge happened to hit two of his own. Like any sport, baseball is more fun to watch when its stars are playing well; that game was certainly fun to watch, and I’m hoping the whole season will be, too.

It’s certainly possible that this is an early-season fluke, and with a larger sample size, Trout’s numbers may return to “washed” territory. It was also possible that USC’s 7-0 start was an early-season fluke, yet now the Trojans are the No. 12 team in the country. In the end, we can only guess and hope we aren’t embarrassed by hindsight.

But wait — this is “Dugout Diaries.” I don’t guess, I know. In that case, I’ll take a 20% commission when your Mike Trout 2026 American League MVP bet hits.

Bennett Christofferson is a junior writing about baseball’s biggest stories and controversies in his column, “Dugout Diaries,” which runs every other Thursday. He is also a Sports editor at the Daily Trojan.