MLB opening week 2024: Top 8 takeaways - ESPN

The start of a new MLB season is all about what has changed since we've last seen these teams — and wow, what an opening weekend it was for new faces in new places.

In his first game for his new team, Corbin Burnes had 11 strikeouts, the most by a Baltimore Orioles pitcher on Opening Day since 1998. Yoshinobu Yamamoto rebounded from that disastrous first start for the Los Angeles Dodgers in South Korea to toss five scoreless innings against the St. Louis Cardinals (only to have a rare Dodger Stadium rain delay shorten his outing). New San Francisco Giants center fielder Jung Hoo Lee blasted a home run and hit .286 with more walks than strikeouts in his first four games. Rookies Wyatt Langford of the Texas Rangers and Jackson Chourio of the Milwaukee Brewers flashed their potential. Boston Red Sox right fielder Tyler O'Neill set a record by hitting a home run for the fifth consecutive Opening Day.

Maybe the biggest takeaway from the weekend: Juan Soto was absolutely dazzling in his New York Yankees debut. The Yankees went to the Houston Astros and swept them in four games — with all four go-ahead runs coming in the seventh inning or later.

Opening weekend is a blast of baseball action, so let's go through and dig into some initial observations, starting with Soto.

There used to be a running joke about which Yankees players qualified as a «True Yankee.» This peaked a couple of decades ago, during the height of the Yankees' success in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

I hadn't thought of that term in years, but I came across it again a couple of days ago in reference to Soto — before his heroics on Saturday and Sunday. It might have taken Soto just four games to earn his official True Yankee stripes — maybe the quickest in