It would be unwise to overreact to a single month in a baseball season, especially the first one. That said, who do you think is happier right now - fans of the Chicago White Sox, who I covered earlier this week, or the Pittsburgh Pirates, who get the same treatment today?

The White Sox were considered a playoff club by many, and were off to a hideous 8-21 start through Monday’s games. The Pirates were picked to reach the postseason by exactly nobody - they pick first in this summer’s amateur draft, after all - and are sitting pretty in first place in the NL Central with a 20-9 mark. Ain’t randomness great?

Now I’m not going to sit here and state that the Pirates are suddenly a thing, but their superb April cannot be totally ignored. Quite honestly, I’ve being writing at Forbes for a few years now and I can’t remember this club ever being a primary topic of a column. They’ve been bad for a long time, and even worse, they’ve simultaneously been boring. That’s no way to go through life.

For good measure, they’ve been thrifty or cheap, depending on your perspective in putting their club together. The Pirates have never had an Opening Day payroll exceeding $100 million. In fact, you can make the argument that the biggest development in Pittsburgh baseball in the past month isn’t their record - it’s their ability to lock up their best player, OF Bryan Reynolds, to an 8-year, $106.75 million contract. He’s now locked up through 2030, while 3B Ke’Bryan Hayes is on board through 2029. This officially qualifies as progress for this oft-beleaguered franchise.

But back to the hot start - what about it might be real, and what might come crashing down at any moment? Let’s take stock.

The verdict? They’re better, but I still am not sure I’d bet on even a .500 record for the 2023 Pittsburgh Pirates. The Brewers and slow-starting Cardinals have better personnel, and I believe in the staying power of the Cubs’ pitching more than Pittsburgh’s. (Cincinnati’s front-line pitching is great, but that’s all they’ve got.) But that current 10-game advantage over the Cards is real, and could hold up. You know what - an ultimately non-contending season would be ok, as I do believe that the club is now firmly on the right track, more that can be said for many of their fellow small market/payroll brethren.

They have weathered injuries to Cruz, 1B Ji-Man Choi, starter JT Brubaker and reliever Wil Crowe and played an exciting brand of winning baseball. Manager Derek Shelton, who just received a contract extension, deserves quite a bit of credit. Much of the time, teams who go 20-9 do so by winning an unsustainably high percentage of close games - not these Pirates, whose Pythagorean record of 19-10 supports the notion that at least some of this progress is real.

So, good on the Pirates, a feel good story to continue to watch as the 2023 season unfolds.